Reinventing the Belt and Road

Abstract

In the years after its launch in 2013, China's Belt and Road Initiative was pitched as the geopolitical "project of the century," a multi-trillion dollar globe-spanning program of infrastructure investment. This framing is clearly out of date. Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and China's domestic economic slowdown, China's outbound foreign investment has come to a rather sudden stop and many BRI debtor countries face potential debt crises. In this talk, Eyck Freymann, author of One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World, discusses how the initiative is being reinvented politically and institutionally for a new era of slower growth. 

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About the speaker

Eyck is Postdoctoral Research Fellow with joint appointments at the Columbia–Harvard China & the World Program and the Harvard Belfer Center's Arctic Initiative. He is also a Non-Resident Research Fellow of the China Maritime Studies Institute at the U.S. Naval War College. Eyck's first book, One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World (Harvard University Press 2020), is assigned as required reading in undergraduate courses at Harvard, Columbia, Cambridge, and elsewhere. His essays on China matters and the COVID-19 pandemic have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, The Economist, and The Atlantic. Most recently, he is the author of “The Warming War,” a series of investigative reports for The Wire China about the emerging geopolitics of climate change. A historian by training, Eyck holds a doctorate in China Studies from Oxford; masters degrees from Harvard and Cambridge, and a bachelors from Harvard.

Registration

This event will take place on Zoom and is open to the public, however registration is required. Click here to register.

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Chair: Professor Steve Tsang, Director, SOAS China Institute

Organiser: SOAS China Institute

Contact email: sci@soas.ac.uk