Anti-Asian Racism in the Era of Great Power Competition
2021-10-14 10:00 - 11:30 (America/New_York) | Online
The current wave of anti-Asian racism did not arise from a deliberate attack on the United States. Its causes have been much more indirect in nature. As such, those who inflame anti-Asian sentiment can do so in the name of “being accurate” on the supposed Chinese manufacturing of the COVID-19 virus, as President Donald Trump suggested. The political rhetoric that exaggerates China’s threat, including the insistence of the term “China virus,” has driven anti-Asian violence and continues unabated despite changes in the Administration as well as greater coverage by the mainstream media. In this talk, Jessica J. Lee of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft will explore how the current climate reduces space for U.S.-China cooperation on vital issues of mutual concern such as climate crisis and pandemics, as well as endangers Asian Americans by reinforcing centuries-old fears about their influence in society.

Speaker

Jessica J. LeeSenior Research Fellow, East Asia ProgramQuincy Institute For Responsible Statecraft

Jessica J. Lee is a Senior Research Fellow in the East Asia Program at the Quincy Institute. Her research interests include U.S. foreign policy toward the Indo-Pacific region, with an emphasis on alliances and North Korea.

Jessica’s analysis has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The National Interest, USA Today, the Washington Times, The Nation, Arms Control Today, and Quincy Institute’s news platform Responsible Statecraft. She has testified before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission and co-authored the Quincy Institute report, “Toward an Inclusive & Balanced Regional Order: A New U.S. Strategy in East Asia.”

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Discussant

Ying ChenAssistant Professor, Department of EconomicsThe New School for Social Research

Ying Chen is Assistant Professor of Economics at the New School and holds a Ph.D. in Economics from University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her work mainly explores the contradictions within capitalism and how they exhibit themselves. Topics she has studied include economic development, labor, and climate change, with a special focus on the global south. She has published in journals including Environment and Development Economics, Economics and Labor Relations Review, Journal of Labor and Society, Review of Radical Political Economics, International Review of Applied Economics, and so on.

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The Ecological Question in Global Health: A Panel Discussion
2021-11-18 09:00 - 11:00 (America/New_York) | Online
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The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into stark relief the interactions between climate change and global health and revealed the dangers of ‘siloization’ of these issues into different conceptual frameworks and governance regimes. The panel will explore how the understanding of the environment and public health can be bridged, and how these challenges are being addressed especially in India and China.

Panel Speakers

Arunabha GhoshFounder-CEOThe Council on Energy, Environment and Water, New Delhi, India

Dr Arunabha Ghosh is a public policy professional, adviser, author, columnist, and institution builder. As the founder-CEO of the Council on Energy, Environment and Water, since 2010, he has led CEEW to the top ranks as one of Asia’s leading policy research institutions (eight years in a row); and among the world’s 20 best climate think-tanks in 2013, 2014 and 2016. He was actively involved in conceptualising and designing the International Solar Alliance and is a founding board member of the Clean Energy Access Network (CLEAN). With experience in 45 countries, he previously worked at Princeton, Oxford, UNDP (New York), and WTO (Geneva). In 2018, Dr Ghosh was nominated to the UN’s Committee for Development Policy. In 2020, the Government of India appointed him Co-Chair of the energy, environment and climate change track for India’s forthcoming Science, Technology and Innovation Policy. His 2019 TED Talk on air quality (Mission 80-80-80) has over 250,000 views. He is co-Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Clean Air and is a member of the international high-level panel of the Environment of Peace initiative. He also serves on the Board of Directors of ClimateWorks Foundation.

Dr Ghosh advises governments, industry, civil society and international organisations around the world. This has included India’s Prime Minister’s Office, several ministries and state governments. In 2015, he was invited by France, as a Personnalité d’Avenir, to advise on the COP21 climate negotiations; and also advised extensively on HFC negotiations. He is the co-author/editor of four books and his essay “Rethink India’s energy strategy” in Nature was selected as one of 2015’s ten most influential essays. He holds a D.Phil. from Oxford and topped Economics from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi.

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Lyle FearnleyAssistant Professor of AnthropologySingapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD)

Lyle Fearnley is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at SUTD. Trained as an anthropologist of science and medicine, Fearnley received a Joint Ph.D. in Medical Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco. His book, Virulent Zones: Animal Disease and Global Health at China’s Pandemic Epicenter, is published on Duke University Press. Currently, he is conducting two research projects.

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Yifei LiAssistant Professor of Environmental StudiesNew York University Shanghai

Yifei Li is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at NYU Shanghai and Global Network Assistant Professor at NYU. Professor Li’s research concerns both the macro-level implications of Chinese environmental governance for state-society relations, marginalized populations, and global ecological sustainability, as well as the micro-level bureaucratic processes of China’s state interventions into the environmental realm.

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Mridula PaulPostgraduate Researcher at the Department of Geography Policy and DevelopmentUniversity of Northumbria, UK

Mridula Mary Paul is a lawyer and environmental policy specialist. She is a Postgraduate Researcher at the Department of Geography Policy and Development, University of Northumbria, Newcastle, UK. She works on the political ecology of zoonoses, with a focus on One Health and India. Mridula is a member of IUCN’s Sustainable Use and Livelihoods Specialist Group, and is the editor of Courting the Environment, a newsletter that aims to convey environmental and ecological research to lawyers.

Research Award for The New School Students
2021-11-30 09:00 - 10:00 (America/New_York) | Online
Information Session & Past Student Fellows’ Presentations

https://youtu.be/FWvHgG6UycoWatch Here
India China Institute at The New School is pleased to announce the student research award 2022 and is now welcoming applications from full-time undergraduate and graduate students at The New School. This is an exciting opportunity for students to design and implement thorough archival research or secondary research on a topic of their choice within the context of India, China and beyond.
Join the information session and learn more about the opportunity by hearing from the previous cohort of ICI student fellows. The cohort consists of six students who conducted research in 2019 – 2020 and will present brief reflections on their work and experiences.
2019 – 2020 Student Fellows

The Emerging Public Realm of the Greater Bay Area: Approaches to Public Space in a Chinese Megaregion: Book Launch and Author Panel
2021-12-02 09:00 - 10:30 (America/New_York) | Online
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Through illustrated case studies, twenty scholars and practitioners in this edited volume focus on the emerging public realm and the critical transformations of public space in the world’s most populous megaregion —the Greater Bay Area of southeastern China— projected to reach eighty million inhabitants by the year 2025.

Editor and Moderator

Timothy JachnaDean, College of Design, Architecture, Art and PlanningUNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI

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Editor

Miodrag MitrašinovićProfessor of Urbanism and ArchitecturePARSONS SCHOOL OF DESIGN, THE NEW SCHOOL

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Speakers

Juan DuDean, John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and DesignUNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

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Mary Ann O’DonnellIndependent Artist-EthnographerCofounderTHE HANDSHAKE-302 ART SPACE, Shenzhen, China

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Brian McGrathProfessor of Urban DesignPARSONS SCHOOL OF DESIGN, THE NEW SCHOOL

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Paul ChuDepartment HeadCHU HAI COLLEGE OF HIGHER EDUCATION

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Foreign reporting on China from within and outside: An Indian perspective
2022-02-10 09:00 - 10:00 (America/New_York) | Online
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Since 2004, China has been offering undergraduate medical courses in English and has over the years emerged as a destination for foreign students, many of them from the subcontinent. Through a combination of word-of-mouth and an informal network of private educational consultants, thousands of aspiring doctors in India have opted for a Chinese medical degree. Over the years, fierce competition back home and limited medical seats have pushed more students to consider India’s neighbor as an option which has become an emerging player in a market that has traditionally been dominated by Russia and other east European countries.

Drawing on this specific story of the journey of hundreds of Indian students seeking a medical degree in China each year, the talk will look at the broader ways in which India and China interact across different fields. It was an Indian medical student returning from Wuhan to Kerala who was identified as Patient Zero when India began tracking Covid-cases in early 2020. The talk will follow the lives of students over the course of the pandemic as they make sense of online education, strict border control, and vaccine requirements. The talk will also touch upon information gathering and reporting in China, and the difficulties of looking in from outside. It will provide an understanding of the ecosystem in which Indian foreign reporting operates.

Speaker

Sowmiya AshokIndependent JournalistFormer Correspondent, The Hindu and The Indian Express

Sowmiya Ashok is an independent journalist based in Chennai. She has worked as a correspondent for two prominent Indian dailies The Hindu and The Indian Express.

In 2019, she was the Beijing correspondent for The Indian Express where she attempted to tell stories that go beyond the official bilateral frame. She has lived and worked in the US, China, and Australia and her work has been featured in several Indian and international publications. She writes about politics, culture, history, and the ways in which China and India interact away from geopolitics. Currently, she is learning Mandarin at the National Taiwan University in Taipei.

New Urbanisms of China and India: A Panel Discussion
2022-03-03 10:00 - 11:30 (America/New_York) | Online
https://youtu.be/c5DLJsiBIvQWatch Here
A growing body of research on urban India and China shows that the concepts drawn from the histories of urbanization in the West are not adequate for understanding the new forms of power, networks, capital, and infrastructure that constitute the rapidly changing urban ecologies of China and India. The authors of two recent books will discuss the meanings and significance of the “urban” in two of the largest and most populous urban centers in the world: Greater Mumbai and the Municipality of Chongqing. Drawing from their research on transformational processes that span conventional boundaries of rural-urban, formal-informal, state-society, citizen-subject, the panel addresses questions of governance, migration, infrastructure, and public goods provision. Lisa Björkman is the editor of Bombay Brokers (Duke University Press, 2021). Nick R. Smith is the author of The End of the Village: Planning the Urbanization of Rural China (University of Minnesota Press, 2021).
Speakers

Lisa BjörkmanAssociate Professor, Urban and Public AffairsUniversity of Louisville
Senior Research AssociateMax Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany
Lisa Björkman is a political ethnographer and anthropologist interested in the material infrastructures and mediations of political life. She is the editor of Bombay Brokers, published by Duke University Press in 2021. Her research in the Indian city of Mumbai has studied how global-level processes of urbanization and urban transformation are redrawing lines of socio-spatial inclusions and exclusions in that city, animating new arenas of political mobilization, contention, and representation. Her current research builds on themes that emerged out of her doctoral research on everyday politics of infrastructural provisioning and access in Mumbai, to explicitly pursue anthropology of democracy, mediation, and mass-political representation in contemporary India.
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Nick R. SmithAssistant Professor, Architecture and Urban StudiesBarnard College of Columbia University
Nick R. Smith is a scholar of urban transformation and planning. His work explores the city as an institution and planning as a process of institution building. Combining the perspectives of new institutional economics, development anthropology, and urban sociology, Smith investigates how urbanization inscribes the “rules of the game” into the space of the city. Using a combination of ethnography, spatial analysis, and archival research, he primarily pursues these processes through investigations of peri-urban villages—contexts of instability, liminality, and rapid change where new forms of urbanization are produced and contested.
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The Responses of India and China to the War in Ukraine
2022-04-14 09:00 - 11:00 UTC | Online
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The Russian invasion of Ukraine, which prompted immediate censure and sanctions against Russia by Western governments, has been met with a more ambivalent response by China and India. While both governments have issued statements deploring the harm to civilians and loss of life, for different reasons, they have abstained from United Nations’ resolutions condemning Russia and sought ways to avoid having to choose sides with either the US-led coalition or with Russia. To understand the responses to the conflict, please join a panel featuring foreign policy analysts from India and China.

The event is co-sponsored by Global Studies and Julien J. Studley Graduate Programs in International Affairs at The New School.

SPEAKERS

Shyam SaranFORMER FOREIGN SECRETARY OF INDIASenior FellowCENTRE FOR POLICY RESEARCH

Shyam Saran is a Senior Fellow and Member of the Governing Board at the Centre for Policy Research. He is a former Foreign Secretary of India and has served as Prime Minister’s Special Envoy For Nuclear Affairs and Climate Change. After leaving government service in 2010, he has headed the Research and Information System for Developing Countries, a prestigious think tank focusing on economic issues (2011-2017), and was Chairman of the National Security Advisory Board under the National Security Council (2013-15). He is currently a Life Trustee of India International Centre, a Member of the Governing Board of the Institute of Chinese Studies, a Trustee at the World Wildlife Fund (India), and a Member of the Executive Council of the Federation of Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI). He has recently published a book, How India Sees the World.

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LU, YangResearch Fellow Institute of the Belt and Road InitiativeTSINGHUA UNIVERSITY

Dr. LU, Yang is currently a research fellow at the Institute of the Belt and Road Initiative, Tsinghua University. She got her Bachelor’s in Xiamen University and her master’s and a doctorate in political science at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. She was a post-doc at the Department of International Relations, Tsinghua University from 2015 to 2018, was a lecturer at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University, awarded the China India Scholar Leaders Fellowship of India China Institute, The New School in New York, Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-financed Students Abroad, and fellowship of German Academy Exchange Service (DAAD). Her research area is international politics, focusing on India and South Asia, Germany, and Europe. In recent years she has been working on China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and related regional cooperation programs. She has published numerous academic articles and opinion pieces, was invited by CGTN, CCTV-13, Phoenix TV commenting news related to South Asia and BRI.

Nimmi KurianProfessor CENTRE FOR POLICY RESEARCH

Nimmi Kurian is a Professor at the Centre for Policy Research. Her research focuses in particular on the border regions between South Asia and Southeast Asia, India’s neighborhood policy, federalism and foreign policy, transboundary water politics, and comparative regionalism. Nimmi serves on the External Advisory Board of the India China Institute, The New School, New York, and on the Fellowship Committee of the China Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, Centre for China Studies, Ashoka University. She has held Fellowships from the India China Institute, The New School, New York, and the Charles Wallace India Trust. She holds an MA, MPhil, and Ph.D. in International Relations from the Jawaharlal Nehru University.Nimmi has written and published widely on alternative spatial imaginations of South Asia, a theme that is explored in detail in her two books India China Borderlands: Conversations Beyond the Centre (Sage, 2014) and India and China: Rethinking Borders and Security (co-author) (University of Michigan Press, 2016).

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DA, WeiDirector of the Center for International Security and Strategy (CISS)Professor, School of Social SciencesTSINGHUA UNIVERSITY

Dr. Da’s research expertise covers China-US relations and US security & foreign policy. Da Wei has worked in China’s academic and policy community for more than 2 decades. Prior to his current positions, Dr. Da Wei was the assistant president of the University of International Relations (2017-2020), director of the Institute of American Studies, China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (2013-2017). He has written hundreds of policy papers for the Chinese government and published dozens of academic papers in journals in China, the US, and other countries.Da Wei earned his BA and MA from UIR and his Ph.D. from CICIR. He was a visiting senior fellow at the Atlantic Council of the United States from 2006 to 2007, and a visiting senior associate at SAIS, Johns Hopkins University from 2008 to 2009.

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Shifting Geographies of Expertise and Policymaking
2022-09-09 00:00 - 2022-09-10 23:59 (America/New_York) | Centre on Asia and Globalization, 469C Bukit Timah Road, Singapore, 259772, Singapore
The first in-person workshop that ICI hosts since Covid will takes place at CAG, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. The workshop addresses the changing relationships between expertise and policymaking in India, China, and beyond. In both countries, an increasing reliance on technical expertise for governance has been juxtaposed alongside new conceptions of who counts as a relevant expert. The response to the COVID-19 pandemic is perhaps the most vivid of many instances that illuminate the formation of novel epistemic communities and new institutional frameworks and infrastructures for knowledge production for policymaking. This in-person conference will bring SGEP fellows together to further strengthening fellowships among the fellows, and more importantly, review and critique the researches, in preparation for an academic publication of the fellows’ outstanding insightful research works.

SGEP Scholars

India China Day 2022
2022-09-29 15:00 - 16:30 (America/New_York) | Starr Foundation Hall, UL102 63 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, 10011
Information Session for ICI Student Research Award & Past Student Fellows’ Presentations

On Sep. 29 we will celebrate India China Day with our 2022 – 2023 Student Fellows in preparation for the 2022 – 2023 student research award for full-time undergraduate and graduate students at The New School. This is an exciting opportunity for students to design and implement thorough archival research or secondary research on a topic of their choice within the context of India, China and beyond.

Join us in celebration and learn more about the opportunity by hearing from the previous cohort of ICI student fellows. The cohort consists of seven students who conducted research in 2022 – 2023 and will present brief reflections on their work and experiences.

2022 – 2023 Student Fellows

India China Institute's Lunchtime Talks for The New School Community
2022-11-10 12:00 - 13:00 UTC | Wolff Conference Room – Albert and Vera List Academic Center, room D1103, 6 East 16th Street, New York, New York, 10003, United States
India China Institute is pleased to offer bi-weekly lunchtime talks for The New School faculty, students and staff.

Event Series

Politics of Gender in Work and Innovation in India and China
2022-10-13 10:00 - 11:30 UTC | Online
Join us for a discussion of “Politics of Gender in Work and Innovation in India and China.”

Drawing on ethnographic research of design practices in post-liberalization India, Prof. Lilly Irani traces how designers target everyday acts of social reproduction as sites of intervention and valorization through design intervention. She makes the case with stories of water cooling, contrasting devalued water cooling practices characterized as jugaad or workaround with proper, branded products recognizable as innovation. These contrasting categories act as signposts to see how design practices proposed as participatory and inclusive can still reproduce class, caste, and gender hierarchies in contemporary India. She draws from Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India (Princeton University Press, 2019). Prof. Yige Dong draws on a case study of Zhengzhou, a city located in China’s heartland that has transformed from a major textile mill town in the socialist period to the world largest iPhone manufacturing center in the last decade. Extending the analytical focus from the factory shop floor to the space of social reproduction, this talk discusses how dynamics in the realm of gender and care work has constituted the processes of political economy and shaped the outcomes of China’s industrial development.

SPEAKERS

Lilly IraniAssociate ProfessorCommunication, Science Studies, Computer Science, Critical Gender Studies, Design LabUNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO

Lilly Irani is an Associate Professor of Communication & Science Studies at University of California, San Diego. She also serves as faculty in the Design Lab, Institute for Practical Ethics, the program in Critical Gender Studies, and sits on the Academic Advisory Board of AI Now (NYU). She is author of Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India (Princeton University Press, 2019) and Redacted (with Jesse Marx) (Taller California, 2021). Chasing Innovation has been awarded the 2020 International Communication Association Outstanding Book Award and the 2019 Diana Forsythe Prize for feminist anthropological research on work, science, or technology, including biomedicine. Her research examines the cultural politics of high-tech work and the counter-practices they generate, as both an ethnographer, a designer, and a former technology worker. She is a co-founder of the digital worker advocacy organization Turkopticon. Her work has appeared at ACM SIGCHI, New Media & Society, Science, Technology & Human Values, South Atlantic Quarterly, and other venues. She sits on the Editorial Committee of Public Culture and on the Editorial Advisory Boards of New Technology, Work, and Employment and Design and Culture. She has a Ph.D. in Informatics from University of California, Irvine.

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Yige DongAssistant Professor Department of SociologyDepartment of Global Gender & Sexuality StudiesUNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO, THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

Yige Dong, PhD, is an assistant professor in the UB Department of Sociology and in the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies.Prof. Dong’s primary research interest lies at the intersection of political economy, social inequality, and social change. Currently, she is working on a book project, The Fabric of Care: Women’s Work and the Politics of Livelihood in Industrial China, which examines the changing politics of care in China’s industrial sector in the past century. Prof. Dong has been awarded the Luce/ACLS Early Career Fellowship in China Studies (2021-2022).

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DISCUSSANT

Ying ChenAssistant ProfessorEconomics; Director of Undergraduate Studies and Departmental Faculty Advisor, EconomicsTHE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH

Ying Chen is Assistant Professor of Economics at the New School and holds a Ph.D. in Economics from University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her work explores the contradictions within capitalism and how they exhibit themselves. Topics she has studied include economic development, labor, and climate change, with a special focus on the global south. She has published in journals including Environment and Development Economics, Economics and Labor Relations Review, Journal of Labor and Society, Review of Radical Political Economics, International Review of Applied Economics, and so on. She was also consulted for the working of the UNCTAD Trade and Development Report 2021.

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Discussion with Artist Hai Zhang on BEING: A Digital Archive of the Age of Flux in China
2022-11-10 15:00 - 16:15 UTC | Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Auditorium,, 66 5th Ave room N101, New York, NY, 10011, USA
Join Hai Zhang, an Artist and Visiting Artist for the inauguration of his collaborative digital archive project with India China Institute titled – ‘BEING’. Between 2008 and 2019, Zhang frequently visited China, his homeland, to photograph the changing social and physical landscape. He says:“Every time I return to China (whether on specific topics or not), I become increasingly aware of the passage of time between visits and my inability to keep pace with the country. It has been a human impulse to collect images like souvenirs as a reminder of the experience. Yet, the documentary images serve as a perfect metaphor from the fragmentary nature of memory and the desire to take ownership of it.”Zhang’s work with India China Institute establishes the continuity between disjointed experiences by bringing individual lives in China to the forefront of contextual discourse. This digital archive closely examines life in a society that is in a perpetual state of flux. In addition, Zhang will share his thoughts on the process of archiving and what it means to make archival material accessible to the public.As Dr. Roland Benoit, a German neuroscientist once said, “Our memory is not made for the past, but for the future.” So is the project – BEING.

SPEAKERS

Hai ZhangPHOTOGRAPHER, VISITING ARTIST, INDIA CHINA INSTITUTE

ZHANG, Hai was born in Kunming, China in 1976. In 2000, after his graduation of the college in Chongqing, he moved to the US. Since then, he has lived in Alabama, Miami, Washington, DC and New York City. Before he was able to devote himself to photographic work, he worked for the renowned architect, Rafael Vinoly, for several years.

ZHANG is interested in photography as a vital tool to investigate the context whether alien or familiar. While he has dedicated a great deal of energy and time to photograph in China and the Deep South of the US, he has also traveled to Costa Rica, Russia and Southeast Asia for projects.

ZHANG is also interested in making photography books not for a presentation but an integral investigative process to examine the subjects and photography itself. He has been applying the permutation and variation in book making for his short and long term projects as well as subject matters.

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ONLINE | Seminar Series: Flows, Infrastructure, Citizenship in India and China (Feb. 27 - Mar. 10)
2023-03-03 00:00 - 2023-03-10 23:59 (America/New_York)
Opening Dialogue

Flows

Infrastructure

Citizenship

Hosted by: Sarandha Jain

Labor flows in from distant lands for the construction of a dam. The dam obstructs the flow of a river. The dam creates refugees, who flow across borders, in search of new citizenship. Airports are necessitated by the flow of people and things. Alongside passports and digital identities, they also control the flow of people and things. Canals and bridges generate flows. Authorities managing them restrict the same flows, also invoking proof of citizenship. Street hawkers and carts obstruct the flow of road traffic. They also create flows of people, money, and things. Public and private authorities managing circulatory infrastructures and flows such as roads, transportation, water supply, energy provision, and suchlike, demand proof of citizenship and identity by residents/commuters to access them. These disparate images reflect varying interplays between flows, infrastructure, and citizenship.

Several inquiries are possible about this tripartite arrangement between them. This dialogue series explores the many ways in which they encounter each other, and what those co-arrangements mean for the evolving nature of the state. How do flows of people, objects, and natural substances facilitate and/or obstruct the constructions of infrastructure, and vice versa? How do these flows relate similarly with constructions of citizenship? In other words, what is the meaning of flows to both, infrastructure and citizenship, and to their relationship with each other: i.e., how do infrastructures and notions of citizenship coalesce and become useful for each other through flows of people, objects, and natural substances? Further, what infrastructures are created to regulate flows for protecting certain notions and forms of citizenship (documents, digital identities, surveillance, detention centers, dams, etc.)? How and when do flows of people, objects, and substances escape regulation? What forms of state-citizen relations arise from the state’s attempts at regulating flows and infrastructures, and their occasional escape from this? This series studies the collective interface between flows, infrastructures, and citizenship, and the structures and systems emerging from this triad, and created to further cement it.

In the last few years, there has been a renewed investment in policing citizenship in India and China. This has given rise to many new debates, instituted new systems in these countries, and new politics have emerged from them. Owing to advancements in technology, new infrastructural capabilities have been afforded to the governments of these countries for implementing their new designs regarding citizenship and the regulation of flows. Flows, however, continue to evade policing and discipline. What can we learn from the current moment by analyzing the ever-evolving encounter between flows, infrastructures, and citizenship in India and China? Furthermore, what has been the evolution in the nature of the state and in its role as an infrastructural state (as provider and as policer) to monitor flows? As the state’s infrastructural nature takes precedence, through the lens of flows, this series charts the evolution in the nature of the state, in the relationship between the state and citizens in India and China, and between infrastructures and state-citizen relations.

This series consists of four dialogues over Spring 2023, held virtually on zoom. These dialogues are between a scholar of India and another of China, who work on linked thematics; and are moderated by a third scholar who shares their thematic synergies. The opening dialogue lays the ground for the overall intellectual aims of the series by speaking to all three conceptual and empirical aspects: flows, infrastructures, and citizenship, and how they connect. The following three dialogues, while still focused on the interface between flows, infrastructure, and citizenship, highlight one of them more, by inviting scholars of India and China who specialize in flows (for the second dialogue), infrastructure (for the third), and citizenship (for the fourth).

Opening dialogue, Feb 27, 2023, 9.30am – 11.00am EST: Townsend Middleton (India), Ka Ming Wu (China), Sarandha Jain (discussant)Flows, March 3, 2023, 10.00am – 11.30am EST: Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay (India), Yimin Zhao (China), Antina von Schnitzler (discussant)Infrastructure, March 6, 2023, 10.00am – 11.30am EST: Sunalini Kumar (India), Amy Zhang (China), Emma Park (discussant)Citizenship, March 10, 2023, 11.00am – 12.30pm EST: Suraj Gogoi (India), Andrew Grant (China), Alexandra Delano (discussant)

This series is open to the public and audience is not limited to TNS affiliates.

Speakers

Townsend MiddletonAssociate Professor AnthropologyUNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL

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Ka Ming WuAssociate Professor Cultural and Religious StudiesCHINESE UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG

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Ritajyoti BandyopadhyayAssistant ProfessorHumanities and Social SciencesINDIAN INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE EDUCATION AND RESEARCH

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Yimin ZhaoAssistant ProfessorUrban Planning and ManagementRENMIN UNIVERSITY OF CHINA

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Sunalini KumarAssociate Professor School of Global AffairsAMBEDKAR UNIVERSITY

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Amy ZhangAssistant Professor, AnthropologyNEW YORK UNIVERSITY

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Suraj GogoiAssistant ProfessorSchool of Liberal Arts and SciencesRV UNIVERSITY

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Andrew GrantVisiting ScholarInternational Studies ProgramBOSTON COLLEGE

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Discussants

Sarandha JainPostdoctoral FellowINDIA CHINA INSTITUTE

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Antina von SchnitzlerAssociate Professor of International AffairsTHE NEW SCHOOL

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Emma ParkAssistant Professor of HistoryTHE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH

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Alexandra Delano AlonsoAssociate Professor of Global StudiesTHE NEW SCHOOL

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ONLINE | Flows from Event series: Flows, Infrastructure, Citizenship in India and China
2023-03-03 10:00 - 11:00 (America/New_York) | Online
Flows

Hosted by: Sarandha Jain

How do flows of people, things, resources, natural substances encounter infrastructure, and what does that do to arrangements of citizenship? How is the state involved in these encounters and arrangements? Addressing these questions, the second dialogue in the seminar series “Flows, Infrastructure and Citizenship in India and China“, is between Ritajyoti Bandhyopadhyay, Assistant Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, and Yimin Zhao, Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and Management at Renmin University of China, facilitated by Antina von Schnitzler, Associate Professor of International Affairs at The New School. While still emphasizing the triadic interface between flows, infrastructure, and citizenship, the speakers here underscore flows more, and discuss what they mean in relation to infrastructure and citizenship, and how that relationship shapes and is shaped by the state, in India and China. (Please see the full description of this series for a detailed understanding of the dialogues).

Presentation titles:

Ritajyoti Bandhyopadhyay – “Dialectics of the Capitalist Urban Process: Infrastructure and Human Action in Twentieth-Century Calcutta”

Yimin Zhao – “Flows of People, Flows of Water, and Flows of Cars: The Political Infrastructure of (non-)Citizenship”

Ritajyoti BandyopadhyayAssistant ProfessorHumanities and Social SciencesINDIAN INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE EDUCATION AND RESEARCH

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Yimin ZhaoAssistant ProfessorUrban Planning and ManagementRENMIN UNIVERSITY OF CHINA

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ONLINE | Infrastructure from Event series: Flows, Infrastructure, Citizenship in India and China
2023-03-06 10:00 - 11:30 (America/New_York) | Online
Infrastructure

Hosted by: Sarandha Jain

How do infrastructures and notions of citizenship coalesce and become useful for each other through flows of people, objects, and natural substances? What infrastructures are created to regulate flows for protecting certain notions and forms of citizenship (such as documents, digital identities, surveillance, detention centers, dams, etc.)? Addressing these questions, the third dialogue in the seminar series “Flows, Infrastructure and Citizenship in India and China“, is between Sunalini Kumar, Associate Professor at the School of Global Affairs at Ambedkar University, and Amy Zhang, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at New York University, facilitated by Emma Park, Assistant Professor of History at the New School for Social Research. While still emphasizing the triadic interface between flows, infrastructure, and citizenship, the speakers here underscore infrastructure more, and discuss what it means in relation to flows and citizenship, and how that relationship shapes and is shaped by the state, in India and China. (Please see the full description of this series for a detailed understanding of the dialogues).

Presentation titles:

Sunalini Kumar – “Tying the Camel and Goat Together: The Abrogation of Rural Citizenship in Urbanising Delhi”

Amy Zhang – “Re-thinking China’s Infrastructural Turn through Waste”

Sunalini KumarAssociate Professor School of Global AffairsAMBEDKAR UNIVERSITY

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Amy ZhangAssistant Professor, AnthropologyNEW YORK UNIVERSITY

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ONLINE | Citizenship from Event series: Flows, Infrastructure, Citizenship in India and China
2023-03-10 11:00 - 12:30 (America/New_York) | Online
Citizenship

Hosted by: Sarandha Jain

How does the migration and mobility of people, objects, and natural substances facilitate and obstruct the constructions of infrastructure, and vice versa, and of citizenship, and vice versa? What forms of state-citizen relations arise from the state’s attempts at regulating flows and infrastructures, and their occasional escape from this? Addressing these questions, the fourth dialogue in the seminar series “Flows, Infrastructure and Citizenship in India and China“, is between Suraj Gogoi, Assistant Professor at RV University’s School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Andrew Grant, Visiting Assistant Professor at Boston College’s International Studies Program, facilitated by Alexandra Delano Alonso, Associate Professor of Global Studies at The New School. While still emphasizing the triadic interface between flows, infrastructure, and citizenship, the speakers here underscore citizenship more, and discuss what it means in relation to flows and infrastructure, and how that relationship shapes and is shaped by the state, in India and China. (Please see the full description of this series for a detailed understanding of the dialogues).

Presentation titles:

Suraj Gogoi – “Who Comes after the National Register of Citizens (NRC)?”

Andrew Grant – “Citizenship in China’s Contemporary Inner Asian Borderlands: Contradictions between Development and Security”

Suraj GogoiAssistant ProfessorSchool of Liberal Arts and SciencesRV UNIVERSITY

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Andrew GrantVisiting ScholarInternational Studies ProgramBOSTON COLLEGE

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ONLINE | Book Launch: Against NGOs: A critical perspective on Civil Society, Management, and Development
2023-03-30 09:00 - 10:30 (America/New_York) | Online
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What would development look like if its practitioners and scholars were ‘against NGOs,’ challenging common sense about them? This book presents a critical perspective on NGOs, describing how they emerged as key agents of development over time. Through an interpretative history based on Gramscian concepts it shows how civil society organizations were gradually enlisted in development as non-state technocratic actors. The book argues that management studies and development studies emerged as commonsensical explanations for capitalist crises. Each offered complementary solutions to balance the needs of capital and society, in particular historical circumstances. These solutions also situated civil society as agents of development and vectors of management. Against NGOs fills a gap within the literature of management and development studies through its original discussion of their historical interconnections and shared themes. The book raises provocative questions on what forms of knowledge-politics can respond productively to the crises of our contemporary moment.

Speaker/Author

Nidhi Srinivas
Associate Professor of ManagementMilano School of Policy, Management, and Environment THE NEW SCHOOL

Nidhi Srinivas is Associate Professor of Management at Milano School of Policy, Management, and Environment. His research centers on social innovation and postcolonial studies, mobilizing critical theory to study a variety of topics, including management history, international development, mutual aid, ecological politics and civic design. He publishes widely and has received several fellowships, including from Erasmus Mundus, the India China Institute, and the BRICS policy center. He has also served as visiting professor at different institutions, including the ITC-ILO, Turin; Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo; Sao Paulo School of Business Administration; and the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore.

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Discussants

Suchitra VijayanAuthor & ResearcherNEW YORK UNIVERSITY

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Alf Gunvald NilsenProfessor, Department of SociologyUNIVERSITY OF PRETORIA

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Film Screening | Those 4 Years
2023-04-04 12:00 - 13:30 (America/New_York) | Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Auditorium,, 66 5th Ave room N101, New York, NY, 10011, USA
India China Institute is excited to host the screening of the recent research documentary of ICI’s past fellow Joe Thomas K called “Those 4 Years“.

The Nilgiris have gained the distinction of being a geographic indication for tea, today. Somewhere behind the present glory is a remote connection with the Chinese which remains forgotten. “Those 4 Years” is an amazing journey into the lives of those Chinese who came to India around the middle of the 19th century… speaking a language unknown to their neighbors when they first arrived. The film journeys across three countries and reams of colonial office records to retrace the places those people came from, the means and mode of their arrival, and how many of them ended up making India their home. It is a history of people, plants and places – as it catalogues their contributions to plantations, locates places and sites associated with their earliest arrival and stay and, more remarkably, manages to locate some of the descendants of those Chinese who arrived in India over 150 years ago.

Read the reviews below: “Tracing 19th Century Connections in South India” — The Hindu

“Film traces history of little-known Indian-Chinese group” — China Daily

“The Chinese touch behind Indian tea: documentary shows sweeter side of historical ties”– South China Morning Post

In Conversation with Film Director

Joe Thomas KarackattuAssociate ProfessorINDIAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY MADRAS

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IN PERSON | Where does the Silk Road end? - power, recognition, and the aesthetics of prestige
2023-04-06 12:00 - 13:30 (America/New_York) | Wolff Conference Room – Albert and Vera List Academic Center, room D1103, 6 East 16th Street, New York, New York, 10003, United States
IR scholars often define prestige as “reputation for power” and argue for its significance in the context of high-stakes negotiations, the dynamics of power transition, or (bi-polar) competition to attract allies and partners. Famously, Gilpin argued that for international relations prestige is “enormously important” – even more so than power itself. This is because “if your strength is recognized, you can generally achieve your aims without having to use it.” But whereas Gilpin and others correctly conceptualize the power of prestige in driving desired outcomes, there is yet little attention to what exactly it means for strength to be “recognized,” and who is doing the recognizing.

Drawing on the “visual turn” in IR and starting from the original (visual) connotation of prestige as “dazzling influence” and “glamour,” this talk interrogates the links between prestige and recognition from the vantage point of the politics of aesthetics. For the purpose, I turn to select cases linked to China’s bid for international prestige, especially based on the invocation of common (Silk Road) past and shared future. I show how, in different communities, visual representations and public displays disrupt standard formulations of a shared (Silk Road) past and also bring forth alternative understandings of the meaning and work of prestige. These cases, I suggest, can help clarify not only the important links between power and recognition, but can also showcase the need for critical exploration of prestige in relation to empire and ontologies of power, the complexities of post-colonial order, and the evolving spaces for political agency.

Speakers

Marina Jose KanetiAssistant Professor in International AffairsLEE KUAN YEW SCHOOL OF PUBLIC POLICY, NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE

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Discussant

Tansen SenProfessor of HistoryNEW YORK UNIVERSITY SHANGHAI

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HYBRID | Data Engines: The Allure of Automating China’s Soil and Soul
2023-04-17 17:30 - 19:00 (America/New_York) | Starr Foundation Hall UL102, UL102 63 Fifth Ave, New York, New York, 100011, United States
https://youtu.be/83OHkPfdHyQWatch Here

In this talk, Silvia Lindtner will draw from ethnographic research she has conducted over the last 14 months across two sites in China: 1) small-scale businesses that center on alternative food and spiritual practices via life in nature and the countryside and 2) large-scale, data-driven agricultural experiments at the outskirts of major urban centers. Prof. Lindtner will discuss how these two sites interact for the implementation of two recent state policies on “rural revitalization” and “national strengthening.” These policies are aimed at reinvesting into China’s “hinterlands:” from rural farmland to people’s most inner selves. They position data-driven techniques of automation, surveillance technology, and smart systems as key to the state’s ability to manage life that has partially escaped the state’s reach. And they call upon China’s youths who have turned away from the city to live and work in China’s countryside to co-produce what she calls “data engines,” i.e. a participatory form of techno-governance driven by an engineering mindset that aims to cultivate citizens as productive selves who operate on behalf of the party state and its ambition to build a “strong China” by turning inwards—China’s history, soil, and agriculture. Data engines, she shows, simultaneously enable, and slow down the automation of China’s soil and soul.

SPEAKERS

Silvia LindtnerAssociate ProfessorSchool of InformationPenny W Stamps School of Art and DesignUNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

Silvia Margot Lindtner (she/her) is Associate Professor at the University of Michigan in the School of Information and Director of the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing (ESC). Lindtner’s research focuses on the cultures and politics of technology innovation, including the labor necessary to incubate entrepreneurial life and data-driven futures. Drawing from over a decade of multi-sited ethnographic research, she writes about China’s shifting position in the global political economy of computing, supply chains, industrial and agricultural production, and science and technology policy. She is the author of the award-winning book Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation (Princeton University Press, 2020), and co-author of the multigraph Technoprecarious (Goldsmiths/MIT Press 2020). Lindtner is also a Visiting Associate Professor at NYU Shanghai, a CUSP (China-US Scholars Program) Fellow, and a fellow in the National Committee on United States-China Relations’ Public Intellectuals Program. Her research has been awarded support from the US National Science Foundation (NSF), IIE (the Institute of International Education), IMLS (Institute of Museum and Library Services), Intel Labs, Google Anita Borg, and the Chinese National Natural Science Foundation. Her work has appeared at ST&HV (Science, Technology, and Human Values), ESTS (Engaging Science, Technology and Society), SocialText, Women’s Studies Quarterly, China Information, ToCHI, ACM SIGCHI (Human-Computer Interaction), and has been covered by the Economist, New York Magazine, NPR, The Atlantic, Wired, the MIT Technology Review, and more.

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HYBRID | Fluvial Government: Tracking Petroleum as Liquid Infrastructure in India
2023-04-26 16:30 - 18:00 (America/New_York) | Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Auditorium,, 66 5th Ave room N101, New York, NY, 10011, USA
In this talk, India China Institute’s Postdoctoral Fellow Sarandha Jain will discuss her PhD dissertation, which studies the oil-mediated relationship between the Indian state and citizens. Focusing on both oil production and consumption, presenting ethnography of oil refineries, research institutes, state offices, a peri-urban working-class-neighborhood near Delhi, and ‘black markets’, her talk examines oil as an infrastructure for the state and for society. She argues that the Indian state distributes itself into citizens’ lives via petroleum products, which obtain their sociopolitical agencies while being produced in certain ways, and play out those agencies while being consumed in certain ways. Her ethnography of refineries details out the microprocesses of oil refining and the complex relationship that human and nonhuman actors share. It elaborates on how politics get programmed into petroleum products, designed to discipline consumer-citizens into particular lifestyles, and how varying actors encumber this. Research on oil consumption with ‘black-marketeers’ and ordinary consumers of petroleum products, probes “distorted discipline”, where governmental plans get mangled by the informal practices of state actors as well as citizens. How does the politics programmed into petroleum products in refineries actually play out once other actors intervene, and snatch control over oil away from the state? Investigating this tussle between legalized and illegalized groups, she describes how it structures citizens’ lives, and the constellations of power and forms of sociality it gives rise to. This talk highlights the constant churning between the state and citizens through ever-evolving devices of government, as well as through escape from them. Specific modes of subjectification, engineered through flows of oil, lie at the heart of this churning, over which state-citizen formations are negotiated.

Sarandha JainPostdoctoral FellowINDIA CHINA INSTITUTE

Sarandha Jain is a socio-cultural and political anthropologist, who recently completed her Ph.D. at Columbia University. Studying the multi-nodal network of petroleum manufacturing, circulation, and use in India, her research examines petroleum as an infrastructure for the Indian state and society. To understand the politics of petroleum in the everyday, she studies the modes of government, forms of sociality, and constellations of power petroleum produces and is produced by, both in its manufacturing and its use.

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Discussant

Rohan D’SouzaProfessorGraduate School of Asian and African Area StudiesKYOTO UNIVERSITY

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ONLINE | Changing Regimes, Changing World Order? Transregional Perspectives from Africa and Asia
2023-09-21 09:00 - 10:30 (America/New_York)
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The geopolitics of the twenty-first century is increasingly characterized by a transformation of world order. In recent decades, the liberal international order, underpinned since the end of the Cold War by unipolar American hegemony, has been fundamentally destabilized by the rise of emerging powers across the global South – a process spearheaded by China and by organizational formations such as the BRICS. Economically, this process is fuelled by the ascent of dynamic growth centres beyond the Euro-American core of the world-system, and manifest in apparent departures from the policy orthodoxies of market liberalism. In the realm of global governance, southern emerging powers have unsettled the workings of the extant multilateral system and begun crafting an alternative architecture for multilateralism through institutions such as the New Development Bank.

How do we understand the nature of the political regimes driving this transformation of world order? This is an urgent question, especially considering deepening trajectories of autocratization across states in the global South. In India, for example, Narendra Modi and the increasingly authoritarian right-wing Hindu nationalist BJP government preside over an unprecedented trajectory of attack on democratic institutions and freedoms. Moreover, under Xi Jinping, China’s intensification of authoritarianism in its one-party state has been concomitant with the rollout of ambitious challenges to the liberal global order, through initiatives on “Global Development” and “Global Security.” And in South Africa, the erosion of the ANC’s post-apartheid hegemony has opened up space for the crystallization of a new right-wing populism grounded in xenophobic conceptions of nationhood and belonging. In this panel, we interrogate the significance and implications of the entangled unfolding of illiberal politics and transformation of world order for understanding the nature of our current turbulent conjuncture.

Speakers

Suhas PalshikarChief EditorSTUDIES IN INDIAN POLITICS

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William ShokiDeputy EditorAFRICA IS A COUNTRY

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Kellee S. TsaiProfessor of Political ScienceDean of Humanities and Social SciencesTHE HONG KONG UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

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Moderator

Alf Gunvald NilsenProfessor of SociologyDirector, the Centre for Asian Studies in AfricaUNIVERSITY OF PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA

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India China Day 2023
2023-09-28 15:00 - 16:30 (America/New_York) | Dorothy Hirshon Suite, 55 West 13th Street Room I203, New York, NY, 10011, USA
Student Fellows’ Presentations & Information Session for ICI Starr Student Award

Join India China Day on September 28, 2023 at Hirshon Suite with tasty food of India and China, and listen to the presentations by the ICI student fellows. All on campus are welcome – TNS students, faculty and staff!

India China Day is an annual celebration of our student fellows’ works. It is an occasion to meet new and old ICI friends, learn about ICI fellowships, programs and opportunities for the new academic year.

Six student fellows of the current cohort will present their research findings. Some tried to uncover contemporary discourses by delving into historical narratives for comparative purposes, some utilized digital technologies to reflect cultural phenomenon. Their keen observations and insights hopefully serve as windows to expand awareness of India-China related topics and foster dialogues in this rapidly changing world.

Here are their research topics:Varshini Balaji – Social Networks of Care and Transnational Politics of Migrant Workers In and Across Dubai and Tamil Nadu.Udeepta Chakravarty – Contesting the ‘People’: The Bihar Movement against Indira Gandhi’s Populism.Belen Fadde – Analyzing Food Access in Cities of the Global South. Learning from Indian Research.Tianran Qian – Diasporic-Chinese Founded Alternative Spaces in NYC: A Case Study on SLEEPCENTER.Lavannya Suressh – Kolam in Code.Ruilong Zhang – The Supervisory System in Imperial China’s Governance.

This is going to be an in-person event. One must register to attend. More details on the 2024 Starr Student Award application can be found here.

2022 – 2023 Student Fellows

ONLINE | New Frameworks for Food Security: India, China, and Shifting Global Orders
2023-10-05 09:00 - 10:30 (America/New_York) | Online
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The age-old challenge of food security used to be dominated by concisely-defined national and international policies for agriculture, hunger eradication, food distribution, and safety nets for emergencies. The older field is being reshaped in the 21st century with the convergence of climate change, biotechnology, geopolitics, and a political economy that contends with a dominance of multinational corporations. The new landscape demands more capacious frameworks for understanding food security—frameworks that simultaneously contend with local, national, and international measures; integrate environmental, animal, and human health; and bring into conversation the political economy of poverty eradication with climate change. Indeed, the Ukraine-Russia war vividly illustrates the need for more capacious frameworks for conceptualizing food security. The war has had a direct impact on food supplies and prices but also subsequently on debt and inflation worldwide, especially in the poorest countries. Panelists will take on the challenge of deliberating on frameworks for food security by discussing the state of global food security; China’s and India’s domestic food security policies; and the influence of China and India on global institutions such as the Food and Agricultural Organization.

Speakers

Sophia KalantzakosGlobal Distinguished Professor, Environmental Studies and Public PolicyNEW YORK UNIVERSITY ABU DHABI

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Aromar ReviDirectorINDIAN INSTITUTE FOR HUMAN SETTLEMENTS

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Daojiong ZhaProfessor, School of International StudiesInstitute of South-South Cooperation and DevelopmentPEKING UNIVERSITY

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ONLINE | Transforming Global Governance Institutions in a Shifting World Order
2023-11-02 09:00 - 11:00 (America/New_York) | Online
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For the last seven decades, world politics has been dominated by American leadership, the institutions it has designed, and putatively liberal norms. This international order is facing severe challenges due to the rise of new powers, breakdown of old economic arrangements, and a redistribution of technological and infrastructural activity. This academic year, we are planning a series of panels that seek to examine emerging political, technological, and economic arrangements that are replacing an older international order.

The November 2nd panel will be a panel that discusses how global governance institutions reflect changing geopolitics and international political economy. We hope to deliberate on the impact of new powers like China, India, and other countries in the global South, and how they are leading to new distributions of power, norms, and expertise.

Speakers

Oumar BaAssistant Professor of International Relations Department of GovernmentCORNELL UNIVERSITY

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Xiao RENProfessor of International Politics Institute of International StudiesFUDAN UNIVERSITY, CHINA

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Tansen SenProfessor of HistoryDirector of the Center for Global AsiaNEW YORK UNIVERSITY SHANGHAI

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Arlene B. TicknerAmbassador and Deputy Permanent Representative of Colombia to the United NationsProfessor, School of International, Political and Urban StudiesUNIVERSIDAD DEL ROSARIO, COLOMBIA

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IN PERSON | The Rise and Fall of Economic-Centered Coalitions in China’s Belt and Road Initiative
2024-02-08 16:00 - 17:30 (America/New_York) | Starr Foundation Hall UL102, UL102 63 Fifth Ave, New York, New York, 100011, United States
The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), ten years since it began, has become China’s guiding foreign engagement and economic governance principle in the Xi Jinping era. However, questions remain — with regards to their implementation, why do megaprojects encounter such divergent responses — with some gaining local support while others causing local grievances? This paper addresses these questions by conducting sub-national level analysis and by applying the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) in tracing the rise and fall of economic-centered coalitions in the Kenyan Standard Gauge Railway project, one of the most controversial and influential China-financed megaprojects of the BRI. The paper is part of a book project on the impact of Chinese-led infrastructure megaprojects in the Global South. Our research is based on fieldwork in China and Kenya between 2015 and 2023, and we conducted over 300 surveys and interviews with stakeholders involved with BRI project development and community-based project impact assessment. Our findings suggest that the BRI developed its current form from China’s domestic experience driven by economic interests, which laid the foundation for economic-centered coalitions that contributed to progress during project construction. Yet. such coalitions fluctuated with interest redistribution, which changed project outcomes, and led to future uncertainties in project development and Initiative success. The research project fills the gap in existing literature by providing a sub-national perspective on the impact of Chinese overseas engagement and provides a new pathway for assessing China’s growing sphere of influence.

Speaker

Keren Zhu

Postdoctoral FellowPublic PolicyINDIA CHINA INSTITUTE AT THE NEW SCHOOL

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Commentator

Emma Park

Assistant Professor of HistoryTHE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH

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US-China Technology Rivalry and Its Global Implications
2024-02-22 09:00 - 10:30 (America/New_York) | Online
Much of the US-China strategic rivalry in the last few years has played out as a struggle for technological supremacy. The Trump years were characterized by an unabashed abandonment of the discourse of free trade and international cooperation in favour of the language of “decoupling” and nationalism. This was accompanied by tariffs, import bans, and export controls, including pressure on non-US companies to adhere to US law, and was met with retaliatory measures from China. While the strident discourse between the two countries has seen ebbs and flows, the ongoing friction around technology access has had far reaching consequences. This panel aims to understand the direct and also indirect effects of the ongoing technology battles between the US and China. It is part of an ongoing series of panels organized by the India China Institute on emerging political, technological, and economic arrangements that are replacing an older international order that used to be dominated by US leadership. Some of the issues that this panel will explore include: the impacts on companies which have had to “China-proof” or “US-proof” their operations; the redirecting of investments and shifting away of manufacturing away from China to other parts of the world; new geographies of technological innovation that include battles for supremacy in AI, biotech, smart cities, and climate change technologies; the impact on academic networks and flows of students and experts; and finally geopolitical consequences as governments have had to take sides in new infrastructural, technological and military alliances.

Speakers

Yu Zhou

ProfessorDepartment of GeographyVASSAR COLLEGE

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Pranay Kotasthane

Deputy DirectorChair of the High-Tech Geopolitics ProgramTAKSHASHILA INSTITUTION

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Yujia He

Assistant ProfessorPatterson School of Diplomacy and International CommerceUNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY

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Climate Change: Views from the Global South
2024-03-21 09:00 - 10:30 (America/New_York) | Online
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International negotiations about climate change have long been anchored in frameworks of carbon emissions and net-zero targets. However, this framing has not necessarily captured the most meaningful goals for many parts of the world that are coping with some of the most intense effects of climate change. Their concerns have centered around other issues such as the availability of water, the rise in extreme heat, air pollution, and shifts in patterns of biodiversity and agriculture. These issues are undoubtedly connected to emissions, and yet the dominant framework has often determined the production of knowledge, the determination of targets, and the design of interventions, in ways that have elided the concerns of different parts of the world. This panel will bring together scholars and practitioners from the Global South who will discuss the perspectives of climate change that are most trenchant in their parts of the world.

The panel is part of an ongoing series organized by the India China institute on emerging political, technological, and economic arrangements that are replacing an older putatively liberal international order dominated by US leadership. By focusing on alternative frameworks, it seeks to broaden and make more representative differing ways of understanding and addressing climate change.

Speakers

Nagraj Adve

MemberTEACHERS AGAINST THE CLIMATE CRISIS, INDIA

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Hamza Hamouchene

Activist and Co-founderENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE NORTH AFRICA

North Africa Programme CoordinatorTRANSNATIONAL INSTITUTE

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Bo LI

Senior Consultant on China’s Environment, Regenerative Agriculture and ClimateShan Shui Conservation CentePEKING UNIVERSITY

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Jimena Leiva Roesch

INTERNATIONAL PEACE INSTITUTE

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Online Seminar Series: The Diversification of China's International Development Instruments
2024-04-25 09:00 - 10:30 (America/New_York)
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In the first part, we explore the evolution and diversification of instruments in China’s international development practices, including its deployment of foreign aid and development finance, as well as its evolving role in international security arrangements and global economic governance institutions. Prof. Xiaoyang Tang will draw from his decades of research to offer an overview of Chinese development finance and its changing characteristics. Prof. Min Ye will discuss the motivations behind China’s Belt and Road Initiative from the perspective of Chinese domestic politics and trace its evolution over time. Prof. Jennifer Bouey will review China’s health cooperation with the Global South and focus on specific case studies to understand its emerging features. Prof. Courtney Fung will explore China’s growing role in international security cooperation, comparing it with India’s role.

Jennifer Bouey

Chair and Associate Professor, Department of International Health

Georgetown University

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Courtney Fung

Associate Professor

Macquarie University

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Xiaoyang Tang

Chair and Professor, Department of International Relations

Tsinghua University

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Min YE

Professor

Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies Boston University

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ONLINE SEMINAR SERIES | China in International Development: Instruments, Finance, and Infrastructures
2024-04-25 09:00 - 2024-05-02 10:30 (America/New_York) | Online
China’s global engagement with countries in the developing world is rapidly evolving in an era where traditional aid discourses and the practices of emerging powers in international development are undergoing significant changes. As the largest South-South cooperation provider and the world’s second-largest economy, China’s development activities overseas have sparked debates regarding its role as a rising power in international development and its implications for the post-liberal global order. Over the past few decades, China has substantially diversified its instruments and infrastructure in development practices. While some view China as a catalyst for new models of development and growth, others accuse China of being responsible for the debt crises faced by many recipient economies. China’s involvement in international development has led to wide-ranging impacts.

This seminar series invites experts from five continents to engage in a three-part discussion on the instruments, finance, and infrastructures of China’s international development. In the first part, we explore the evolution and diversification of instruments in China’s international development practices, including its deployment of foreign aid and development finance, as well as its evolving role in international security arrangements and global economic governance institutions. In part two, we delve into the composition of Chinese development finance, comparing it to the World Bank, and examine how the Global South perceives its local impact. In part three, we take China’s global infrastructure engagement as an example to illustrate the different actors and approaches involved in China’s international development practices, as well as the role of state-led development. Using the three panel discussions, we illustrate the wide-ranging impacts of Chinese international development engagement at the local, national, and global levels.

Seminar Series Schedule

Day 1 — April 259:00 AM — 10:30 AMThe Diversification of China’s International Development InstrumentsREGISTER HEREIn the first part, we explore the evolution and diversification of instruments in China’s international development practices, including its deployment of foreign aid and development finance, as well as its evolving role in international security arrangements and global economic governance institutions. Prof. Xiaoyang Tang will draw from her decades of research to offer an overview of Chinese development finance and its changing characteristics. Prof. Min Ye will discuss the motivations behind China’s Belt and Road Initiative from the perspective of Chinese domestic politics and trace its evolution over time. Prof. Jennifer Bouey will review China’s health cooperation with the Global South and focus on specific case studies to understand its emerging features. Prof. Courtney Fung will explore China’s growing role in international security cooperation, comparing it with India’s role.

Day 2 — April 269:00 AM — 10:30 AMChina’s Role in the Global Debt LandscapeREGISTER HEREIn part two, we delve into the composition of Chinese development finance, comparing it to the World Bank, and examine how the Global South perceives its local impact. Prof. Yan Wang will situate Chinese development finance in the global debt landscape by comparing it with World Bank loans. Dr. Ammar Malik will draw on large datasets to discuss the impact of China’s overseas development finance on the Global South at large. Mr. Mustafa Sayed will offer a local interpretation of the nature of Chinese loans to Pakistan and their role in the development of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, the first and flagship economic corridor in China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Day 3 — May 29:00 AM — 10:30 AMDiversification of Chinese Global InfrastructureREGISTER HEREThis panel discusses China’s diversifying role in global infrastructure development. Prof. Austin Strange will provide an overview of the scale and scope of China’s overseas infrastructure using large datasets he developed. Prof. Wendy Leutert and Dr Isaac Kardon will discuss China’s global port development involvement and its economic and security implications. Prof. Oscar Otele will introduce China’s involvement in railway development. He will delve into local elite collusion and contestation in the largest infrastructure investment in Kenya since its independence, financed by China. Dr. Andrea Pollio will use years of fieldwork in Kenya and South Africa to outline China’s growing involvement in digital infrastructure in Africa and its implications for urban growth and entrepreneurship development in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Jennifer Bouey

Chair and Associate Professor, Department of International Health

Georgetown University

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Courtney Fung

Associate Professor

Macquarie University

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Xiaoyang Tang

Chair and Professor, Department of International Relations

Tsinghua University

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Min YE

Professor

Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies Boston University

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Ammar Malik

Senior Research Scientist

AidData College of William and Mary

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Mustafa Sayed

Executive Director

Pakistan-China Institute

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Yan WANG

Senior Academic Researcher

Boston University Global Development Policy Center

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Wendy Leutert

Assistant Professor

Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies Indiana University

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Isaac Kardon

Senior Fellow, Asia Program

Carnegie Endowment For International Peace

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Oscar Otele

Senior Lecturer, Department of Political Science

University of Nairobi

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Andrea Pollio

Marie Skłodowska-Curie FellowAfrica Center for Cities

University of Cape Town

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Austin Strange

Assistant Professor of International Relations Department of Politics and Public Administration

University of Hong Kong

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