Dr. Oliveira contributes to webinar on China’s Capitalism and the World

China’s Capitalism and the World

The past decades have witnessed a dramatic increase in the pace and scale of global capitalist expansion; the rapidity of consequent social transformations is in part due to China’s increasing participation in these processes. The Belt and Road Initiative and its associated infrastructure projects have received a huge amount of attention, but this webinar expands the focus to less understood and less often seen aspects of the reorganization of global capital. Based on extensive research and innovative approaches, the speakers will make visible the ways in which Chinese investment in South America, Southeast Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa is reshaping local and global life, resource extraction, and relations of political domination and resistance.

Thur, Nov. 19, 5-6:30 EST

Organized by Critical China Scholars

Co-sponsors: GongchaoMade in China JournalThe Nation

Moderator: Eli Friedman, Cornell University

Panelists:

  • Patrick Bond, School of Government, University of the Western Cape
  • Juliet Lu, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Atkinson Center for Sustainability & Department of Global Development, Cornell University
  • Farai Maguwu, Executive Director, Centre for Natural Resource Governance, Harare, Zimbabwe
  • Omar Manky, Department of Social and Political Sciences, Universidad del Pacífico
  • Gustavo Oliveira, Global & International Studies, University of California, Irvine

Dr. Oliveira published in the Journal of Contemporary China

The Tenuous Co-Production of China’s Belt and Road Initiative in Brazil and Latin America

 

Dr. Oliveira’s article “The Tenuous Co-Production of China’s Belt and Road Initiative in Brazil and Latin America“, co-authored with Margaret Myers, has just been published in the Journal of Contemporary China.

 

Abstract

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, this article argues 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, the article emphasizes the process of co-production as a theoretical framework. It first analyzes how the BRI incorporated Latin America through policy and discourse analysis, then examines the multi-scalar and multi-sited co-production of Chinese-funded port and railroad infrastructures through interviews and public documents in Brazil.

Keywords: China; Brazil; Latin America; Belt and Road Initiative; Co-production; Infrastructure; Ports; Railroads; International Relations

The Journal of Contemporary China was established in 1992. It has become one of the most prominent interdisciplinary journals of Chinese studies, and since 2011 it has featured in the top quartertile of journals in political science, international relations, geography, planning, and development. It is one of the preeminent forums for research and debate about China’s Belt and Road Initiative, having published over fifty articles on this topic in the past five years.

For the full length article, see: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10670564.2020.1827358

Dr. Oliveira publishes a special issue of Political Geography

China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Views from the Ground

Dr. Oliveira’s article “China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Views from the Ground” has just been published as the guest editor’s introduction to a special issue Political Geography.

The article is co-authored with Galen Murton, Alessandro Rippa, Tyler Harlan, and Yang Yang, who also co-edited the special issue.

 

ABSTRACT: The Chinese government promotes the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a global strategy for regional integration and infrastructure investment. With a projected US$1 trillion commitment from Chinese financial institutions, and at least 138 countries participating, the BRI is attracting intense debate. Yet most analysis to date focuses on broad drivers, risks, and opportunities, largely considered to be emanating from a coherent policy imposed by Beijing. In this special issue, we instead examine the BRI as a relational, contested process – a bundle of intertwined discourses, policies, and projects that sometimes align but are sometimes contradictory. We move beyond policy-level, macro-economic, and classic geopolitical analysis to study China’s global investments “from the ground”. Our case studies reveal the BRI to be dynamic and unstable, rhetorically appropriated for different purposes that sometimes but do not always coalesce as a coherent geopolitical and geoeconomic strategy. The papers in this special issue provide one of the first collections of deep empirical work on the BRI and a useful approach for grounding China’s role in globalization in the critical contexts of complex local realities.

KEYWORDS: China, Belt and Road Initiative, political geography, globalization, theory and methods, global ethnography.

 

Political Geography is the flagship journal of political geography and advances knowledge in all aspects of the geographical and spatial dimensions of politics and the political. It was established in 1982, consistently ranks among the most high impact and well regarded journals across the disciplines of geography, history, political science, sociology, and interdisciplinary social sciences.

For the full-length article, see: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2020.102225

Dr. Oliveira discusses China-Latin America relations at the Foreign Policy Association: Great Decisions Program in Newport Beach

The Foreign Policy Association has been running the Great Decisions Program since 1954, as the country’s largest discussion of world affairs.

Dr. Gustavo Oliveira was invited to present his research and lead discussion on “The co-production of China’s Belt and Road Initiative in Latin America” at the Newport Beach meeting of the Foreign Policy Association: Great Decisions Program.

The event was held at the community center of the St. Mark Presbyterian Church, Newport Beach, CA. March 2, 2020.

Dr. Oliveira interviewed by Sputnik News (Beijing)

Brazilian expert: The “Belt and Road Initiative” is good for Brazil but the country should defend its own interests

Dr. Oliveira interviewed by Sputnik News (Beijing), the Russian Satellite News Agency, Beijing office.

Evgenii Aferin, Sputnik News Agency Beijing, November 20, 2019

Excerpts from original English statements provided by Gustavo Oliveira

Gustavo Oliveira, an assistant professor in the Department of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Irvine, said: “Some Brazilian sectors welcome the BRI, especially agribusiness, mining, and logistics (especially ports), since they already have strong market access to China and seek improved infrastructure to facilitate exports.”

Oliveira pointed out that “the Brazilian government wants to attract Chinese capital and partners while retaining control over the projects and priorities in the initiative.”

Oliveira also said that “other industries are skeptical about the ‘Belt and Road’ because Brazilian industrial enterprises and production infrastructure companies regard Chinese companies as their main competitors. The current Brazilian government is trying to coordinate these conflicting interests, arguing they ‘welcome the synergies’ between China’s BRI and Brazil’s own national projects for infrastructure construction.”

For the full length interview (in Chinese), see:

http://sputniknews.cn/politics/201911201030085496/

Dr. Oliveira presents new research at the UCI Long US-China Institute

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

Dr. Oliveira interviewed on the Belt and Road Podcast

Soy and Sinophobia: China’s Place in Brazilian Agribusiness

Dr. Gustavo Oliveira talks about Chinese agribusiness investments in Brazil, the rising importance of the soy trade between the two countries, and the ways domestic and international business interests have fanned the flames of Sinophobia for strategic gains. Dr. Oliveira is a Brazilian scholar and activist and an Assistant Professor of Global & International Studies at University of California, Irvine.

The Belt and Road Podcast covers the latest news, research and analysis of China’s growing presence in the developing world. It is produced by Erik Myxter-Iino (Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions) and Juliet Lu (University of California, Berkeley).

For the full 71 minute interview, see:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/196316/1904978

Belt and Road Podcast, Episode 19

October 21, 2019