This event is open, and pre-registration is not required. It can be accessed here.

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In response to the recent rising number of academic papers that empirically examine local variances of China’s Belt and Initiative (BRI) projects in different foreign lands, in this presentation, Julie Yu-Wen Chen wishes to point out the tension between different attempts to theorize the Sino-localization or glocalization of BRI projects. Two main attempts, namely the Sino-localized approach and the assemblage theory, were proposed by scholars from different academic disciplines to conceptualize local agency and to understand how local conditionalities, practices, and norms can affect the outcome of BRI projects. These scholars view national and spatial boundaries differently, resulting in different treatment of the local-global relations in BRI studies. Chen seeks to ask if there is a way to reconcile these different approaches and prompts dialogues between scholars coming from different academic disciplines. Besides the conceptual and theoretical nature of this talk, Chen will show empirical examples from two infrastructure projects in Finland that have the potential to be part of the Polar Silk Road: the Arctic Railway and the Helsinki-Tallinn tunnel.

Professor Chen serves as one of the Editors of the Journal of Chinese Political Science (Springer, SSCI). Formerly, she was chair of the Nordic Association of China Studies (NACS) and Editor-in-Chief of Asian Ethnicity (Taylor & Francis).

She has formerly held academic positions at Nazarbayev University (Kazakhstan), University College Cork (Ireland) and Academia Sinica (Taiwan). In addition, Professor Chen was visiting scholar at La Trobe University (Australia), University of Virginia (USA), University of Tokyo (Japan), University of Tübingen (Germany), University of Nottingham (UK), University of Macau (China), and St. Petersburg State University (Russia). In 2011, she provided testimony in the public hearing of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission on "China's Foreign Policy: Challenges and Players" in Washington D.C