David Palmer

Professor, Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Department of Sociology, University of Hong Kong

Dr. David A Palmer (Ph.D, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris) is an Associate Professor in anthropology, leader of the “Asian Religious Connections” research cluster at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong. His award-winning books include The Religious Question in Modern China and Dream Trippers: Global Daoism and the Predicament of Modern Spirituality. He is currently directing research projects on “Daoism, Ethnic Identity and State Socialism: the Lanten Yao on the China-Vietnam-Laos Borderland” and on “Infrastructures of Faith: Religious Mobilities on the Belt and Road.”

Post-colonial Empires in the Era of the Belt and Road

To what extent can the Belt and Road Initiative be seen as a form of Chinese empire building? This talk will situate the BRI within the long history of shifting forms of empire in Eurasia, from ancient polities to European colonization, to forms of hegemony in the Cold War and post-Cold War eras. I will argue that conventional notions of empire, based on the exclusive territorial sovereignty of a single multinational state on the image of the multicoloured World Map of Westphalian European colonial powers, obfuscate the entangled, overlapping and networked sovereignties that have characterised imperial formations before, during and after the era of European colonization in Asia and Africa. I will outline different modalities and dynamics of empire and propose the notion of the “post-colonial empire” as an imperial formation whose legitimacy is based on respecting the sovereignty of independent nation-states. Using this framework, I will consider the role of the BRI in the asymmetrical dynamics between China and the post-colonial American Empire.