Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Kultur-, Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften

Dear students and colleagues,

We cordially invite you to join our BCCN Silk Road Talk #2

Between Big-push (quantity) and Bankability (quality); Geoeconomics of Infrastructure Financing in the Indo-Pacific 

Speaker: Prof. Saori Katada

Abstract

This project examines the infrastructure investment ‘competition’ between Japan and China in the context of privatization of development finance in the post-global financial crisis world. As geoeconomic challenge to China’s infrastructure ‘big push’ through its Belt-and-Road Imitative, Japan and the Quad powers responded by establishing Blue Dot Network to certify bankable infrastructure projects with the hope that such certification will invite institutional investors to infrastructure financing in the Indo-Pacific region.  By examining contrasting financing features and risk consideration of infrastructure financing between China and Japan, the project illustrates the foundation of quantity versus quality competition among the financial suppliers of infrastructure investment.

Saori N. Katada is Professor of International Relations at University of Southern California, and she is currently a Banque de France/Fondation France-Japon Fellow at L’École de Haute Etudes en Sciences Sociales (FFJ/EHESS) in Paris France.  Her book Japan’s New Regional Reality: Geoeconomic Strategy in the Asia-Pacific was published from Columbia University Press in 2020, and its Japanese version in 2022. She has co-authored two recent books: The BRICS and Collective Financial Statecraft (Oxford University Press, 2017), and Taming Japan’s Deflation: The Debate over Unconventional Monetary Policy (Cornell University Press, 2018).  She was the vice president of International Studies Association (ISA) from 2021 to 2022.  She has her Ph.D. is from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Political Science), and her B.A. from Hitotsubashi University (Tokyo).  Before joining USC, she served as a researcher at the World Bank in Washington D.C., and as International Program officer at the UNDP in Mexico City.

For more on this and other BCCN events, visit the BCCN homepage.

Dear students and colleagues,

We cordially invite you to join our BCCN Silk Road Talk #1

Why the West’s Alternative to China’s International Infrastructure Financing is Failing

Speaker: Prof. Shahar Hameiri 

Abstract

As geopolitical rivalry intensifies, Western states have moved to compete with China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) by increasing their own provision of infrastructure financing. However, the actual mobilization of funds remains paltry, suggesting that Western states cannot contest Chinese dominance in this domain. Why? Through a comparative political economy analysis of the United States and China, we show that serious competition cannot be willed into being by state managers thinking in geostrategic terms. States’ strength is ultimately rooted in structural political economy dynamics. Where state managers’ geopolitical ambitions jibe with, or express, the interests of powerful social forces and the capital and productive forces they command, a powerful impact results. This is true of China, whose BRI is a spatio-temporal fix for an overcapacity crisis in industry and infrastructure and the overaccumulation of capital. Conversely, where geopolitical ambitions are divorced from powerful groups’ interests and material realities, the results are likely to be disappointing. This is true of the US, which is characterized by infrastructural decay, industrial hollowing-out, and a dominant but disinterested financial sector. Reflecting its neoliberal underpinnings, the West’s financing model relies heavily on “escorting” private capital into infrastructure investment, but capital steadfastly declines to be escorted. 

Shahar Hameiri is Professor of International Politics and Director of Research in the School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland. His latest book, co-authored with Lee Jones, is Fractured China: How State Transformation is Shaping China’s Rise (Cambridge, 2021). His earlier co-authored books include: Governing Borderless Threats: Non-Traditional Security and the Politics of State Transformation (Cambridge, 2015), and International Intervention and Local Politics (Cambridge, 2017). He is also the co-editor, with Toby Carroll and Lee Jones, of The Political Economy of Southeast Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). He tweets @ShaharHameiri.

For more on this and other BCCN events, visit the BCCN homepage.

We warmly invite you to the kick-off lecture of the BCCN/LMRG's monthly online series “China – The New Science Superpower?”:

China's Rise Challenges Notions of the Science-State Relations  

Caroline Wagner, The Ohio State University
October 19, 2022, 2:00-3:30 pm (CET)

The rapid rise in China’s scientific capacity and strength on the global stage challenges concepts of the science-state relationship. Centuries of close ties between thriving scientific bases and democratic political systems led many to postulate that the two systems are interlinked and interdependent. In the 21st century, China’s science policy has contributed to a robust scientific system in a different type of state model. Theories of the relationships between science and the state, including the roles of science policy, planning, and investment, must be re-examined in light of China’s rapid rise in the world’s science and technology system. This talk will address these challenges and engage alternative hypotheses.

Please spread the word and register for more lectures in this series on the BCCN Website.

The Berlin Contemporary China Network (BCCN) and the Institute for Asian and African Studies at HU Berlin cordially invite you to the BCCN Talk “In the Realm of Comrades?” by Prof. Rebecca E. Karl (New York University).

Monday, 4 July 2022

16:30-18:00 (CEST)

Invalidenstrasse 118, 10115 Berlin

Room 410

Abstract: This talk addresses the ways in which the social relationship named by "comrade" arose and has been transformed over the course of China's revolutionary and post-revolutionary century (1920s-2020s). It presents a radical political analysis of how sociality and relationality can be understood in the concreteness of China's historical passage from semi-colony, to socialist people's republic, to capitalist world power. 

Rebecca E. Karl teaches history at New York University-NY. Her most recent book is China's Revolutions in the Modern World: A Brief Interpretive History (Verso 2020) and she is the author of a number of other books and articles about China's modern and contemporary history. She is a founding co-editor of the positionspolitics.org website, and a member of the Critical China Scholars collective.

This promises to be a really interesting talk and discussion, and we are looking forward to seeing many of you there. 

Sarah Eaton & Daniel Fuchs