​Sociology & Nanyang Centre for Public Administration Seminar | New Geographies of Development: Grounding China’s Global Integration

This event is organized by the Sociology Programme at School of Social Sciences, and Nanyang Centre for Public Administration (NCPA). 

This talk aims to contribute to ongoing reconceptualization of research approaches to China’s global integration. I will discuss an evolving framework that emanates from my long-term research on capital and resource flows in and out of China, and a collaborative effort underway with a group of researchers to ground our understanding of China’s global integration. I will discuss three epistemological-methodological moves crucial to researching China’s role in new geographies of development as they actually unfold in far-flung spatial processes: (1) Complexify the actors involved in China’s global integration to focus on those who work in a variety of (un)intentional ways to attract, implement, sustain, and resist specific initiatives that constitute China’s overseas activities; (2) Revise fixed notions of core and periphery, especially with respect to the origins, flows, and destinations of capital, power, and goods emanating from China’s metropolises; (3) Rescale the state, capital, and elite interests to identify the key scalar moments at which big policy ideas are transformed into new development geographies. I will focus specifically on those actions and actors whose work is key to extending the natural resource hinterlands of China, China’s firms, and specific subnational interests in partner states to the Americas, Africa, and Eurasia under the policy banners of the ‘Go Out Strategy,’ the ‘Great Western Development Plan’ and the ‘Belt and Road Initiative.’