Tuesday, September 3rd, 2024
3:30 PM – 5:00 PM ET
Lindner Family Commons
Elliott School of International Affairs
1957 E Street NW Washington, D.C. 20052
China’s growing ambitions in the so-called Global South center on Beijing’s Belt and Road and related policy initiatives. A team of four European experts on these matters is visiting Washington led by Professor Dominik Mierzejewski of the University of Lodz, a widely published scholar well known for on-the-ground assessments of China’s Belt and Road efforts throughout the Global South and Europe. He and his team will offer their findings on recent in-person investigations in eight countries: Brazil, Cambodia, Chile, Kenya, Poland, South Africa, Serbia, and Thailand.
Sigur Center Director and Professor Eric Schluessel will serve as discussant.
Speakers
Dominik Mierzejewski is the head of the Centre for Asian Affairs (a university-based think-tank) and Professor in the Department of Asian Studies at the Faculty of International and Political Studies at the University of Lodz. His research focuses on the rhetoric of Chinese diplomacy, the PRC’s political transformation, and the provinces’ role in Chinese foreign policy. He is the author of China’s Provinces and the Belt and Road Initiative (Routledge 2021).
Jarosław Jura is an Assistant Professor at Lazarski University (Warsaw, Poland). His research interests focus primarily on Chinese expansion in Africa and social sciences methodology. He has conducted field research in Angola, Zambia, Kenya, Sudan, and China.
Bartosz Kowalski is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Asian Studies at the Faculty of International and Political Studies, Poland, and a researcher at its Centre for Asian Affairs at the University of Lodz. His research focuses on China’s foreign policy, relations between China and Central Europe, and the modern political history of Xinjiang.
Mario Esteban Rodriguez is a Senior Analyst at the Elcano Royal Institute and Senior Lecturer at the Centre for East Asian Studies of the Autonomous University of Madrid. His research focuses on China’s foreign aid in the Global South and China’s relations with the European Union.
Moderator
Eric Schluessel is a social historian of China and Central Asia, and his work focuses on Xinjiang (East Turkestan) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is the Director of the Sigur Center for Asian Studies, Co-Director of the East Asia National Resource Center, and an Associate Professor of History and International Affairs. Land of Strangers, his first monograph, uses local archival and manuscript sources in Chinese and Chaghatay Turkic to explore the ramifications of a project undertaken in the last decades of the Qing empire to transform Xinjiang’s Turkic-speaking Muslims into Chinese-speaking Confucians. Schluessel previously taught at the University of Montana in Missoula and spent the 2018–2019 academic year as a Mellon Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Schluessel has also completed a translation and critical edition of the Tārīkh-i Ḥamīdī of Mullah Mūsa Sayrāmī, which is an important Chaghatay-language chronicle of nineteenth-century Xinjiang.
