Assembling China’s Belt and Road Initiative in Latin America
Dr. Gustavo de L. T. Oliveira
Assistant Professor, Department of Global and International Studies, UCI
October 21, 2019
3:00p.m. – 4:30p.m.
Humanities Gateway, Room 1010
China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) evolved from promotion of Eurasian connectivity into a catchall for Chinese foreign policy and infrastructure investments worldwide. Although usually portrayed as a top-down geopolitical project of the Chinese central government, I argue the BRI is actually shaped by converging and diverging interests of a wide variety of actors within and outside China. In order to conceptualize the relational, contingent, and unstable emergence of the BRI in Latin America, I draw upon methods of global ethnography and theories of assemblage. I springboard from my research on Chinese investments in Brazilian agribusiness and related infrastructure and examine how the BRI incorporated Latin America through policy and discourse analysis. Then I demonstrate the multi-scalar and multi-sited production of Chinese-funded port and railroad infrastructures in Brazil. Ultimately, I argue these theories and methods of global studies enable us to ask more useful and critical questions about the BRI and China’s relations with Latin America.
Faculty work-in-progress lecture for the UCI Long US-China Institute
Contact: Dr. Emily Baum, emily.baum@uci.edu