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

This lecture is part of this spring term's BCCN Lecture Series: China in the Global Political Economy.

‘Security first’ has increasingly come to define Chinese economic governance, seemingly reversing decades of economic policy that placed ‘development first’ through export trade promotion, negotiated openness to foreign direct investment and socialization within a US-led liberal economic order that has been developmentally successful and a cornerstone of regime legitimacy. In this talk, Liu problematizes the great power security competition thinking that has been much attributed to these developments, adopting instead a Gramscian political economy that takes seriously the domestic and transnational sources of state authority to make sense of the national security turn in China and indeed of the broader security turn sweeping across national capitals. 

Driven by crisis-prone conditions of escalating US-China rivalry, intra-state factional stalemates over China’s industrial overcapacity, and deepening societal inequality, Liu argues that a Xi Jinping-led national security faction has sought to recalibrate the Chinese hegemonic project not wholly in response to inter-state security competition but as a means to further extract the latent growth potential from China’s development model and consolidate the position of Chinese state actors and of China between a US-led Global North and China-led Global South.

Bio:

Imogen Liu is an an Assistant Professor of International Political Economy at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her current research is animated by questions surrounding the politics and governance of finance, production and energy systems under conditions of heightened geopolitical competition. A consistent theme in her work is the role of transnational firms in shaping divergent trajectories of industrial development between Global North and South. Her research has been featured in journals including New Political Economy, Geopolitics, Journal of Economic Geography, Dialogues in Human Geography and Development and Change. She is co-organiser of SASE Network Q: Asian Capitalisms and co-lead of the Finance and Money working group of the China in Europe Research Network.

Online via Zoom. Please register here.
 

This lecture is part of this spring term's BCCN Lecture Series: China in the Global Political Economy.

Abstract

China’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are evolving from contractors into operators, investors, and owners of infrastructure worldwide. Since the 1990s, Chinese SOEs have become well-known as commercial contractors responsible for the engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) of large-scale projects—from ports to railways to stadiums. China’s policy banks supported their international expansion with instruments including export buyers’ credits and concessional loans, and they worked primarily with government clients. How has Chinese SOEs’ role in overseas infrastructure development evolved, and what are the implications for both SOEs and international stakeholders? Three trends are evident today: Chinese SOEs are increasingly diversifying their project types to include public-private-partnerships (PPP) and investments, pursuing more small- and medium-scale infrastructure deals, and partnering with new international actors like international non-governmental organizations (INGOs). National governments, foreign firms, Chinese policy banks and Chinese SOEs themselves are driving this shift. These trends highlight the changing nature of Chinese SOE business overseas and its real-world implications.
 

Bio

Wendy Leutert (Ph.D. Cornell, 2017) is Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. Her research examines China’s politics and economy, with a specific focus on the reform and global expansion of Chinese state-owned enterprises. Her book, Chinese State-Owned Enterprises: Leadership, Reform, and Internationalization, was published in November 2024 by Cambridge University Press. 

For participation, please register here.