Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg: Informationen zur Veranstaltung: The Restraining Belt: Physical Infrastructure as China’s Means of Territorial Control

Mittwoch
01
FEB

18.00 Uhr

The Restraining Belt: Physical Infrastructure as China’s Means of Territorial Control

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Konstantinas Andrijauskas, Institute of International Relations and Political Science at Vilnius University, Vilnius (Lithuania)

China’s physical infrastructure has attracted considerable public and scholarly interest due to its key role in the country’s socio-economic development during the reform era, and especially since the proclamation of the Belt and Road Initiative almost a decade ago. Less noted has been the fact that pieces of human-created material environment pertaining to transportation, energy, telecommunications and other types of infrastructure have always been quintessentially political, arguably even more so in China. Based on an inter-disciplinary theoretical approach about space as a social construct mirroring power relations, most famously represented in the works of Michel Foucault and David Harvey, as well as consciously expanded definition of physical infrastructure, this lecture aims to expose how the Chinese leadership has been using it in order to establish and strengthen territorial control and by extension control of the people inhabiting those territories in question, with particular focus on the most telling case studies of Chinese ethnic minority regions and disputed border areas. The ‘belt’ in the name of China’s most ambitious international development project has therefore much to do with its restraining as opposed to facilitating nature, and, therefore, neatly sums up the most ambitious stage in a domestic political strategy that has been employed for decades if not centuries already.

Zur Person:
Konstantinas Andrijauskas is an Associate Professor of Asian Studies and International Politics at Vilnius University. Previously, he was a senior visiting scholar at China's Fudan and Zhejiang universities as well as Columbia University through the Fulbright Scholar Program. He has authored more than a dozen academic publications in several languages, including a Lithuanian-language monograph “The Clash between China, India and Russia in Eurasia’s Civilizational Spaces”. His academic interest revolves around domestic and foreign policies of Asian and post-Soviet countries, civilization and culture studies.

Streaming / Video URL

https://heiconf.uni-heidelberg.de/upyt-pmtv-ujq4-zw79

Adresse

Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies (CATS) / Online (Hybrid)

CATS Auditorium 010.01.05

Voßstraße 2

69115 Heidelberg

Veranstalter

Prof. Dr. Anja Senz, Institut für Sinologie

Homepage Veranstalter

https://ostasien-aktuell.uni-heidelberg.de

Kontakt