Description
The Center for Asian Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder (UCB) proposes a research project on infrastructural development in the Asian context, to be carried out in collaboration with the Hong Kong Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (HKIHSS) at the University of Hong Kong. Infrastructure studies, a broadly-defined field including disciplines such as science, technology and society studies, anthropology, human geography, and architecture, is emerging as a new research paradigm in the humanities and social sciences. Project director Timothy Oakes, a geographer, writes, “Infrastructures have been referred to as the built forms around which publics thicken; they …offer a way of thinking about how the state materializes as a potent force in people’s everyday lives.” Yet, he and his UCB colleagues contend, this field “has yet to fully engage with arguably the most significant infrastructural force in the world today,” that is, China.
Close to half of China’s state investment goes toward infrastructure, amounting to some $2.3 trillion in 2013, or approximately 14 percent of the country’s GDP (as compared to two percent for the United States). Moreover, China has made infrastructural investment the cornerstone of a newly assertive foreign policy, evidenced by initiatives such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, launched by China in 2013, and China’s Belt and Road development strategy for Eurasia. China’s investments in Africa, in particular, have been a subject of attention among social scientists and have generated the idea of a “China Model” of export investment and development. For some, this model is a pragmatic, non-ideological form of investment in much needed infrastructures such as railways, highways, port facilities and power plants, a “no-strings attached” approach that purposefully counters efforts by Western powers to tie development aid to the promotion of democracy and human rights. For others, it is a recipe for authoritarian capitalism and neo-colonialism.
China Made: Asian Infrastructures and the “China Model” of Development will build a collaborative network of U.S. and Asia-based scholars through a series of workshops and research initiatives to examine the role of China in infrastructural development both domestically and in Southeast Asia. Oakes asserts that China Made will shift attention from larger-scale political-economic analyses of the “China Model” to a finer grained, more ethnographic examination of infrastructures. “Our approach, he writes, “seeks to…challenge the notion of a clean separation between what are commonly thought to be inert nonhuman infrastructures and dynamic, socio-political processes, and to draw our attention to the often-unnoticed political work of infrastructure itself.” The resulting research is intended to advance Asian studies while also forging links to the broader field of infrastructure studies and encouraging scholars to rethink assumptions about the relationship between state and society.
Three workshops will bring experts in infrastructure studies into conversation with specialists of East and Southeast Asia around a range of empirical projects and case studies. Oakes, for example, will lead research on the ways urban village infrastructures in southern Chinese cities such as Shenzhen have become a model for so-called “instant city” urbanization in other parts of the world. His colleague Emily Yeh, also in Geography, will look at Chinese investments in Myanmar, including a railway and an oil/gas pipeline, in an effort to understand how the material nature of these infrastructures shapes socio-cultural formations and politics in unanticipated ways. China Made will be supported by a graduate research assistant and two postdoctoral fellows who will help administer the workshops, serve as editors for resulting publications and develop their own research agendas. An open-access website in English and Chinese will connect participating scholars, feature the research and serve as a resource for others interested in the implications of infrastructure for their work.
China Made will bolster a new initiative of the Center for Asian Studies at UCB, funded by the U.S. Department of Education, to strengthen Southeast Asian studies on campus. The partnership with HKIHSS, which has its own ties to Chinese and Southeast Asian institutions through research in science, technology and society and urban studies, will further expand the network of participating scholars.
That the Directors of the Henry Luce Foundation approve a three-year grant of $390,000 to the University of Colorado Boulder to support the collaborative research project China Made: Asian Infrastructures and the “China Model” of Development .
