Seeing China's Belt and Road: In Conversation with Edward Schatz and Rachel Silvey
Congratulations to Centre for European and Eurasian Studies Director, Edward Schatz and, Richard Charles Lee Director of the Asian Institute, Rachel Silvey on the launch of Seeing China's Belt and Road, a collaborative project that brought together scholars from across the globe.
Courtesy of the Oxford University Press, learn more about the book:
About the Book
Launched in 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is China's signature trillion-dollar global policy. Based on infrastructure development assistance and financing, the BRI quickly set in motion a possible restructuring of the global economy and indeed the world order. In Seeing China's Belt and Road, Edward Schatz and Rachel Silvey assemble leading field researchers to consider the BRI from different "downstream" contexts, ranging from Central and Southeast Asia to Europe and Africa. By uncovering perspectives on the BRI from Chinese authorities, local businesses, state bureaucrats, expatriated migrants, ordinary citizens, and environmental activists, Seeing China's Belt and Road shows the BRI's dynamic, multidimensional character as it manifests in specific sites. A timely analysis of the BRI, this book moves beyond polarized debates about China's rise and offers a grounded assessment of the dynamic complexity of changes to the world order.
Reviews
"Seeing China's Belt and Road is a highly original take on China's elusive global infrastructure project. Through the visions of BRI participants, from Chinese workers in Ethiopia to recipients of Chinese technology in Central Asia, this book illuminates the dynamism and unevenness of this grand initiative, as it continues to shape the world, often in invisible ways." - Maria Repnikova, Associate Professor in Global Communication, Georgia State University
"Moving beyond seeing BRI as 'infrastructure' and 'development,' this volume provides fresh perspectives on how BRI generates its own underside, showing us how subject positions and social meanings proliferate in rhizomatic fashion the further downstream we go from the locus of power." - Brenda Yeoh, National University of Singapore
"A timely and highly recommended collection—while many studies of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative emphasize Beijing's geopolitical and global ambitions, these essays are steeped in bottom-up observations and textured local analysis. They reveal critically important variations in how the publics of BRI host countries experience Chinese digital technologies, view overseas Chinese workers, and understand how China's infrastructure projects are transforming their own local communities." - Alexander Cooley, Barnard College, Columbia University
Author Information
Edited by Edward Schatz, Professor of Political Science and the Director of the Centre for European and Eurasian Studies, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto, and Edited by Rachel Silvey, Professor of Geography & Planning and Richard Charles Lee Director of the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto
Edward Schatz is Professor of Political Science and the Director of the Centre for European and Eurasian Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto. He is the author of Slow Anti-Americanism: Social Movements and Symbolic Politics in Central Asia (2021), Modern Clan Politics (2004), as well as the editor of Paradox of Power: The Logics of State Weakness in Eurasia (2017) and Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power (2009).
Rachel Silvey is Professor of Geography and Planning and the Richard Charles Lee Director of the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto. Her work has been published in the fields of migration studies, cultural and political geography, gender studies, and critical development studies. Her research has focused on migration, gender, and development in Indonesia, as well as Southeast Asian migration to the Gulf States and North America. She is currently researching labor migration associated with BRI projects in South East Asia, as well as the migration regimes associated with the expansion of plantations in South East Asia.
