Asian Knowledge Spaces and Student Mobility Corridors: A Closer Look at Sino-Thai Cooperation

Authors: Samantha Lim and Cheng Yi’En (Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore)

In September of 2021, participants gathered in Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou in south-western China, for China-ASEAN Education Cooperation Week. During the opening ceremony on the 24^th of September, Education Minister Huai Jinpeng pronounced the Chinese central government would continue to increase international exchanges in education with countries along the Belt and Road. He underlined the importance of enhancing cooperation between China and ASEAN countries to facilitate the integration of education and industry, and in the process contribute towards the visionary unfolding of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which promises common prosperity for all its participants (Ministry of Education, 2021). (more…)

July 15, 2022

Skilled Migration to China and the BRI

Author: Eva Lena Richter (University of Cologne)

Since the Belt and Road Initiative’s (BRI) launch, strengthening people-to-people ties has been one of its cooperation priorities. This is implemented through a wide array of student and academic exchanges, research cooperation, joint vocational training, as well as tourism.[1] With the PRC government being the driving force of the BRI, China guides the way these exchanges – or forms of migration – develop between China and other BRI countries. To date, the majority of research on migration along the BRI focusses on Chinese nationals who emigrate to engage in economic activities, studies, or research in other BRI countries. But, as Pál Nyiri observed in his recent contribution to the Transformations blog, diverse factors influence these patterns of emigration. (more…)

April 13, 2022

Gendering the Multiple Imaginaries of the Belt and Road

Author: Yang Yang (National University of Singapore)

When the ancient Silk Road is presented as the precursor of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in the Chinese government’s official narratives, images such as a caravan of turbaned travelers riding camels across a desert landscape are often deployed to evoke a romanticized transcontinental history of commerce and exchange. In most of these images, these unfamiliar travelers from exotic lands are obscured as outlines and blended into the contours of the desert backdrop. Alongside the land-based imaginaries of visitors from afar, other figures associated with sea-based imaginaries include Zheng He and his fleets that ventured from China to Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and the coast of East Africa over seven voyages between 1405-1433 CE. Both types of characters are represented as mobile Muslim men navigating vast stretches of land and sea to facilitate exchanges of commodities and knowledge. (more…)

February 25, 2022

BRI as a Set of Technological Platforms

Authors: Hallam Stevens (Nanyang Technological University in Singapore) and Ignacio Polo (University of Amsterdam)

Infrastructural turns

Declared in 2013, the People’s Republic of China’s One Belt, One Road (OBOR), was initially characterized as a development-cooperation programme emphasizing the construction and financing of traditional infrastructure for transportation and industry connecting Asia to Europe. Since then, the initiative has continued to expand in both scale and diversity, having been rebranded as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). BRI projects now include funding for education, urban real estate and city development, digital technologies and “smart city” expertise, and even space exploration. The shifting and expanding character of the BRI — its “useful fuzziness” —  has led to a flurry of scholarly interest in infrastructure as a category of analysis. An “infrastructural turn” in the literature — partly attributable to the PRC’s increasing drive towards large infrastructural projects — now extends over and across territorial and disciplinary borders. (more…)

November 23, 2021

Prefiguring China’s Digital Silk Road to Europe: Connecting Switzerland

Author: Lena Kaufmann (University of Zurich)

Since about 2015, the Digital Silk Road (DSR) has become an important component of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), making its way into major Chinese policy documents. In practice, however, the DSR, just like the overarching BRI, is not easy to define. On the one hand, the DSR has a tangible material base, which mostly remains invisible. This includes the fiber-optic networks, data centers, and smart cities built together with BRI’s energy and transport projects.[1] Fiber-optic networks enable digitalization, whilst supporting the financial services and communication which are fundamental to other BRI infrastructure projects. Yet, most people are unaware of the materiality of these digital infrastructures, assuming that our emails, text messages, online orders, financial transactions and social media posts are stored somewhere in “the cloud”.[2] This is not surprising, as most digital infrastructures are buried underground, in the ocean, or hidden in remote data centers. (more…)

October 19, 2021