Guest lecture by Professor Tim Oakes, University of Colorado Boulder (Human Geography/Asian Studies)
Lecture description
China’s expansive engagements beyond its borders over the past decade have resulted in increased scholarly attention to the idea of a ‘global China.’ While there is a broad range of activities inherent in this term – including construction investments, digital technologies, development finance, and soft-power projects – popular conceptions of global China tend to focus on the signature policy initiative of the Xi administration: the Belt & Road (BRI). Yet there is a significant disconnect between the policy narratives of the BRI and what China actually does as a development actor in specific places around the world.
This talk proposes an alternative framework for analyzing global China, deriving from the concept of infrastructure power, which posits that state power in China is, at least in part, constituted through the construction of dams, highways, railroads, power plants, electricity grids, wireless technologies, ecological environments, and other socio-technical forms known collectively as ‘infrastructure.’ And this is a form of power that China seeks to wield beyond its borders as well. Yet, the techno-political analytic explored in the talk reveals the ways that such power does not itself emerge from “the state”. Instead, state power is co-constituted through infrastructural configurations, meaning that the projects driving China’s expansion beyond its borders often produce outcomes that are unintended, unpredictable, and even counter-productive to Beijing’s strategic interests.
The lecture is hosted by the Department of Culture and Oriental Lanugages and the ERC-funded project Brokering China's Extraversion (Project ID 802070) and organized in collaboration with the Center for Geopolitics.
About the lecturer
Tim Oakes is Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is a Fulbright Fellow visiting the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, UiO. Oakes is the Project Director for China Made, an international research collective exploring the ‘China model’ of infrastructure development. From 2012 to 2022, he served as Faculty Director of the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research has spanned a broad range of topics related to both rural and urban development in China, including ethnic tourism and heritage, cultural governance and development, rural urbanization, and new town development.
Almost all of his research has been conducted in the southwestern province of Guizhou. At Oslo he will be working on a new project on the role of China’s digital infrastructures and platforms in shaping urbanization patterns in Southeast Asia.