
"Seeing China's Belt and Road" Book Launch
February 11, 2025 | 4:00PM - 7:00PM
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In-person
Location | 315 Bloor Street West, Toronto, ON, M5S 0A7
Formal remarks and discussion will run from 4:00PM to 5:30PM, reception to follow.
About the Book:
Description is courtesy of the Oxford University Press
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.
About the Authors:
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 at the 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.
About the Speakers:
Christoph Emmrich (Event Chair) is an Associate Professor for South and Southeast Asian Buddhism at the Department for the Study of Religion and the Department for Historical Studies and is Chair of the UofT/McMaster Numata Buddhist Studies Program. His research bridges Southeast and South Asia as it engages with fields as diverse as Burmese and Nepalese Buddhism, and Tamil Jainism. He works with girl children, young women, and ritual specialists in Yangon, Mawlamyine, Mandalay (Burma), in the Kathmandu Valley (Nepal) and in North and South Arcot (Tamil Nadu, India), studying their involvement in practices related to marriage, education, monastic ordination and the consecration of images and, more recently, their poetic and narrative literary production. He confronts the personal and ethnographic remembrance of singular religious events with the history of their local and academic exegesis and contrasts both with the prescriptive/descriptive literary history of ritual manuals in Burmese, Newar, Pali, Sanskrit and Tamil ranging from the 17th century to the present. In his writings and his teaching Christoph Emmrich addresses questions of gender and childhood, mimesis and memory, translation and travel.
Diana Fu (Discussant) is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto and a fellow at Brookings Institution, the Wilson Center, and the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. Her research examines popular contention, repression, civil society, and authoritarian citizenship in contemporary China. She is currently co-authoring a second book examining how the Chinese state governs the global diaspora (under contract, Cambridge). She is the author of “Mobilizing Without the Masses: Control and Contention in China” (Cambridge, 2018), which won best book awards from the American Political Science Association, the American Sociological Association, and the International Studies Association. Her research and commentary have appeared BBC, Bloomberg, CBC, CNN, NPR, the Economist, and The New York Times, among others. She was host of the TVO documentary series “China Here and Now” and of POLITICO China Watcher. Prof. Fu received her doctorate in Politics from Oxford University, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar and has been elected to the Royal Society of Canada’s College. She regularly gives public lectures and participates in track 1.5 dialogues on Canada-China and U.S.-China relations.
Katharine Rankin (Discussant) is a Professor of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto. Her broad research interests include gender and development, comparative market regulation, financial restructuring, planning history and theory, South Asia (Nepal). She is currently conducting comparative research on the gender politics of development institutions in Nepal and Vietnam. She is currently undertaking research in the areas of commercial gentrification, neighborhood-based economic development, and post-conflict transition/Nepal. She is the author of The Cultural Politics of Markets: Economic Liberalization and Social Change in Nepal (2004, Pluto Press and University of Toronto Press), as well as journal articles in Economy and Society, International Planning Studies, Journal of Feminist Economics, Gender, Place and Culture, and Progress in Human Geography.
This event is co-sponsored by the Centre for European and Eurasian Studies and the Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy