Date: Tuesday, September 26, 3-4.30 PM BJT

Venue: LIB 1113

Guest Speaker: Keren Zhu, Incoming Postdoctoral Fellow at the India China Institute, The New School and a former Global China Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Boston University Global Development Policy Center.

Abstract:

This year marks the 10th year anniversary of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The metaphor of blind men touching different parts of an elephant characterizes the fragmented and incomplete understanding of the BRI globally. Despite China signing agreements with over 150 countries, the existing policy research offers two dominant versions of the BRI story…The second version, which may be called “new pathways,” suggests that the BRI has departed from development pathways taken in the past and has created new paradigms, like South-South cooperation and need-based development.

What are the real impacts of the BRI on the ground and how is reshaping the Global South? Building on her policy advisory and research experience related to BRI in US and China, Dr Keren Zhu offers an overview of the history and evolution of the Initiative, and introduces to audience a “framework of influence” that she developed in assessing the Initiative’s multidimensional influences, and contextualizes the Initiative in China-Africa cooperation. She then delves into BRI global infrastructure development and uses the Kenyan Standard Gauge Railway as an example to illustrate the convergence, divergence, and evolution of stakeholder dynamics in BRI development, based on fieldwork in China and Kenya (2017-2023), and survey and interviews with over 200 government, sectoral, and community actors.

She finds that the project’s early success results from an economic-centered informal coalition between the China and host country that facilitates top-down resource mobilization. Yet contrary to a “transformative development” vision offered by the state, actual project impacts translate to a scene of “transplanted development” that generates winners and losers, redistributing developmental benefits between sectors, cities, and regions. Concerns over one single infrastructure megaproject evolve to reservations over government infrastructure investment at large, adding uncertainties to the stability of economic-centered coalitions and future project and Initiative prospects.

The seminar situates the BRI within China’s internationalization trajectory, and reveals infrastructure’s multi-dimensional influence in shaping an alternative world order.

Speaker’s Bio:

Keren Zhu is an incoming postdoctoral fellow at the India China Institute, The New School and a former Global China Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Boston University Global Development Policy Center. Before working as a researcher at the RAND Corporation in the United States, she worked on BRI international cooperation and policy advisory in China from 2015-2017 and on public-private partnership at the International Labor Organization from 2014-2015.

Keren holds a Ph.D. in Policy Analysis from the Pardee RAND Graduate School. Her research focuses on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), global infrastructure, international development and program evaluation. She holds an M.Sc. in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford and a B.A. in English from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

This event is organized by CSCC China and the Global South Cluster and co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Contemporary China.