Overseas Development, Foreign Areas and Chinese "World-Writing"

This project advances understandings of "Global China" not only as an economic and geopolitical force, but as a critical intellectual project. Specifically, it examines the coeval (re)emergence of China’s international development studies and foreign area studies in light of its global "rise." As the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) orchestrates the sociospatial reconfiguration of China’s overseas connectivity, Chinese political and intellectual elites become increasingly interested in constructing a globally oriented knowledge base. Drawing on textual analysis, in-depth interviews and participant observation, the project focuses on this nascent phenomenon of "world-writing" and develops a critical geography of individuals, institutions, and ideologies that have shaped the spatially and politically situated processes of knowledge production. By tracing the genealogy of the consolidating state-disciplinary apparatus, this project aims to make visible the unfolding of a division of social scientific labour at a complicated moment of geopolitical flux, as well as the attendant changing spatial matrix of knowledge, power, and imagination.