Infrastructure is at the heart of China’s growing, controversial presence in global development. In addition to economic considerations, observers see infrastructure projects as important cogs in China’s pursuit of international influence. However, debates on Chinese global infrastructure are remarkably devoid of historical and comparative context, and China’s infrastructure-influence nexus remains conceptually and empirically unclear. Dr. Austin Strange provides a comprehensive account of Chinese global infrastructure since 1949, showing that high-profile infrastructure has been a tenacious feature of China’s development cooperation. It then discusses how high-profile infrastructure creates both intended and incidental sources of influence by serving as a unique form of political capital as well as a distinct source of political risk for China’s government and host country governments. Contemporary Chinese global infrastructure, both traditional and digital, has important historical and comparative contexts that help illuminate how China’s global infrastructure drive has injected major risk into its pursuit of international influence.

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About the speaker

Austin Strange is an Assistant Professor of International Relations in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong. His research examines China’s contemporary and historical roles in the world economy and global development. He is co-author of Banking on Beijing: The Aims and Impacts of China’s Overseas Development Program (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Austin earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University, M.A. from Zhejiang University, and a B.A. from William & Mary.

Presented by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. Co-sponsored by the East Asia Program and the Gender and Security Sector Lab.

Talk by Jyoti Balachandran (History, Pennsylvania State University)

This talk centers around the life and works of Qutb al-Din Muhammad al-Nahrawali (d. 1582), a Muslim intellectual from northern Gujarat who achieved tremendous professional success in Mecca. Over the course of his life, al-Nahrawali served the Gujarat Sultans, the Meccan Sharifs, and the Ottoman Sultans in several capacities – as a diplomat, legal scholar, and jurist. Apart from highlighting the intellectual and socio-political connections that tied Gujarat to the Red Sea region and beyond in the sixteenth century, al-Nahrawali’s life offers a window into the ways in which piety and politics intersected within a shifting political context in the Hejaz. Furthermore, al-Nahrawali’s success as a transregional scholar raises the question of how we grasp the particularities of place, of rootedness in a world on the move, of attachment to the local within the global interconnectedness of the western Indian Ocean.

Jyoti Gulati Balachandran is Edward J. and Eleanor Black Nichols University Endowed Fellow in History and Associate Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University. Her research focuses on the social and cultural histories of Muslim communities in Gujarat and the western Indian Ocean in the medieval and early modern period. She is the author of Narrative Pasts: The Making of a Muslim Community in Gujarat, c. 1400-1650 (OUP, 2020), a finalist for the British Association for South Asian Studies Book Prize 2022 and the Karwaan Book Prize 2022. Balachandran's current research focuses on the history of Muslim scholarly networks in the sixteenth-century western Indian Ocean using a variety of Arabic narrative texts produced in Gujarat and the Hejaz. She serves on the editorial board of the Indian Economic and Social History Review.

Cornell University and the Cornell China Center invite you to the Cornell-China 2022 Online Forum featuring 30 speakers highlighting collaboration, research, and innovation!

Wednesday, Dec. 14, 2022, 7:00 p.m.–2:00 a.m. EST (Thursday, Dec. 15, 2022, 8:00 a.m.–2:00 p.m. in Beijing)

Welcome by Cornell China Center Director Ying HuaOpening remarks by Vice Provost for International Affairs Wendy WolfordPanel 1: Cross-cultural understanding and communicationPanel 2: Energy transition for a sustainable futurePanel 3: Alumni panel on innovation and entrepreneurshipPanel 4: Select legal topics from 2022 (co-organized with Cornell Law School alumni)Thursday, Dec. 15, 2022, 7:00–11:35 p.m. EST (Friday, Dec. 16, 2022, 8:00–11:35 a.m. in Beijing)

Panel 5: Aging society: from research to adaptive design and service innovationPanel 6: Cornell Chinese faculty panel: Research frontiers, collaboration, and education of young talentPanel 7: Narratives and special experience creation in multi-media settingsSinging Cornell University's alma materThe forum will be conducted in English and Chinese, with simultaneous interpretation available for the first two panels each day and later panels in Chinese.