How to make friends and influence people: Xi Jinping and the Belt and Road Initiative

How to make friends and influence people:

Xi Jinping and the Belt and Road Initiative

Speaker Assoc. Prof. Jane Golley

Abstract

This seminar will explore the centerpiece of President Xi Jinping’s foreign economic policy, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), through the lens of geoeconomics, defined as “the use of economic instruments to promote and defend national interests and to produce geopolitical results; and the effects of another nation’s economic actions on a country’s geopolitical goals”. Touted by Xi as “a plan that China offers the world for seeking common prosperity and development”, the BRI is depicted as a “grand transnational development strategy with Chinese characteristics”, which has the potential to stimulate trade, investment and infrastructure development in BRI partner countries across the globe. However, it also has the potential to shift the international economic order in China’s favour, in ways that are the cause of concern across the Asia-Pacific region. Of even greater concern are the other geoeconomic tools used by China to punish countries that don’t behave in accordance with its national interests, which will not win Xi Jinping any friends in the region, and which will offset the BRI’s potential to be a positive source of global economic growth in the decades ahead.

Biography

Associate Professor Jane Golley is Deputy Director of the Australian Centre on China in the World (CIW), in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University (ANU). After her Bachelor’s degree in Economics at the ANU, she spent eight years at the University of Oxford, completing her Mphil and Dphil and teaching undergraduate economics. She returned to the ANU’s School of Economics in 2003, moving to the Crawford School of Public Policy in 2008, and to CIW in 2011. Her research on the Chinese economy has spanned two decades, covering a wide range of transition and development issues, including regional development; demographic change and economic growth; household consumption and carbon dioxide emissions; educational and income inequalities; and ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’. She teaches two Masters-level courses, The Chinese Economy and China: Wealth and Power, and is actively engaged with Australian policymakers and politicians, attempting to inject rational, objective thought into Australia’s China policy debates. 

Please register your attendance to arc.int@cbs.dk by 6 October