Bureaucracy & performance in China’s “eco-civilisation”

NB: The event take place at
HF-biblioteket and is onsite only (no streaming).

China has signaled a commitment to environmental sustainability and bio-diversity under the rubric of “ecological civilisation”. In this talk, Julia C. Strauss will discuss what this commitment means in practice, both domestically and internationally. She will focus on the countries in the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s
long-term policy and investment program
me
, aim
ed at economic development and
improving the physical infrastructure through land corridors that roughly equate to the old Silk Road.

Following the presentation there will be a panel discussion with Julia Christine Marinaccio (UiB) and Hans Jørgen Gåsemyr (UiB & NUPI) moderated by Hang (Ayo) Zhou (CMI).

Panel:

Julia C. Strauss

is Professor of Chinese Politics at SOAS, University of London, where she served as Editor of
The China Quarterly from 2002-2011. She works on 20
^th century state building and institution building in China and Taiwan, with her monograph
State Formation in China and Taiwan: Bureaucracy, Campaign and Performance (Cambridge 2020) her most recent publication on this topic. She also publishes on performance in politics, BRI (particularly China-Africa) and Chinese forestry.

Julia Christine Marinaccio
is a postdoc fellow at the Department of Foreign Languages at the University of Bergen, where she researches Chinese domestic policies and China-Taiwan relations.

Hans Jørgen Gåsemyr
is a senior researcher at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI) and a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Comparative Politics, University of Bergen. His research focus is on Chinese politics, including social and economic reforms and state-society relations, and Chinese actors and interests in relation to other countries and international institutions.

Hang (Ayo) Zhou
is a postdoc fellow in the ERC-funded TransOcean Project at Chr. Michelsen Institute. His research focus in on everyday states in Africa, South-South cooperation, Africa-China relations, and maritime anthropology.

Photo: Hang (Ayo) Zhou