In this In Conversation seminar, Associate Professors Amy King and Maria Repnikova (Georgia State University) will discuss their respective approaches to studying Chinese foreign policy ideas, visions, narratives, and forms of strategic communication. The seminar will draw on Repnikova’s forthcoming book, Competing for Soft Power: China’s Image-Making in Africa, which theorizes a new approach to China’s practice of soft power through extensive fieldwork in Ethiopia. The book identifies China’s core soft-power mechanisms as tangible enticement through material and experiential offerings, ideational promotion of values, visions, and governance practices, and censorial power over the production and dissemination of China narratives. Contrary to popular claims that China is replacing the West in the Global South, this innovative research reveals the successes, inconsistencies, and limitations of Chinese influence, as well as the ever-present shadow of the West in mediating soft-power encounters. ANU event webpage.

Associate Professor Maria Repnikova is an expert on Chinese political communication, an Associate Professor in Global Communication, and the inaugural William C. Pate Chair in Strategic Communication at Georgia State University. Associate Professor Repnikova is the author of the award-winning book, Media Politics in China: Improvising Power Under Authoritarianism (Cambridge 2017), as well as the recent, Chinese Soft Power (Cambridge Global China Element Series) and the forthcoming, Competing for Soft Power: China’s Image-Making in Africa (CUP). Her public writings have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Atlantic, as well as in many academic journals. Other than working on China, Associate Professor Repnikova does comparative work on information politics in China and Russia. She holds a doctorate in politics from Oxford University where she was a Rhodes Scholar. In the past, she was a Wilson Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center (2020-2021), a visiting fellow at the African Studies Center at Beijing University (2019), and a post-doctoral fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication (2014-2016).

Established in 2015 under Chinese leadership, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank has rapidly emerged as the second-largest multilateral development bank, bringing together a diverse membership spanning Asia, Europe, the Americas, and Oceania. Its rapid growth and institutional consolidation have raised important questions about how financing decisions and strategic priorities are shaped by the political interests and alignments of its member states.

Drawing on an analysis of the AIIB’s project portfolio and negotiations surrounding its energy strategies, this seminar examines how state alignment, governance characteristics, and geopolitical positioning influence both project approval patterns and broader strategic initiatives within the Bank. European countries and other Western allies have actively mobilised informal and discursive influence within the AIIB’s governance structures, contributing to key milestones in the energy sector, most notably the Bank’s alignment with the Paris Agreement and the commitment to a minimum share of green investments embedded in its Corporate Strategy. At the same time, the AIIB’s financing operations remain disproportionately concentrated in countries that are less aligned with the US-led liberal order, exhibit lower levels of democracy, and are closely linked to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. ANU event webpage.

Matteo Cianforlini is a PhD candidate in Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna. He holds a BA in International and Diplomatic Sciences and an MA in International Politics and Economics, both from the University of Bologna. He is also a member of the European International Studies Association (EISA) Early Career Development (ECD) Group, where he contributes to organising events and seminars to support the professional development of early-career researchers. His research focuses on the international development finance regime, with particular attention to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the New Development Bank, and examines how these institutions shape and contest existing norms of global financial governance. His work has been featured in the academic journal Global Policy.

Do emerging powers reinforce or reshape the existing international order? Are international institutions socialising emerging powers or being used to promote alternative norms? Are we converging or diverging on values? Dr Xiaoyu Lu addresses these questions in his 2021 book, Norms, Storytelling and International Institutions in China: The Imperative to Narrate. The book provides a political ethnography of norm diffusion and storytelling through the United Nations Development Programme in China, the first international development agency to enter post-reform China in 1979. Through three years of ethnographic research at the UNDP in China, Dr Lu explores the everyday practices of norm diffusion in emerging powers, and highlights the central role of storytelling in translating and contesting normative scripts. In this seminar, Dr Lu will discuss how this crucial case contributes to our understanding of the ways in which China is shaping, and is shaped by, international development norms, and will present new research findings based on recent fieldwork. ANU event webpage.

Dr Xiaoyu Lu is an Assistant Professor in the School of International Studies at Peking University. His monographs include Norms, Storytelling and International Institutions in China: The Imperative to Narrate (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021) and a non-fiction account of the Peruvian presidential election (Lima Dream: When a Chinese Wanders into an Election, Shanghai Literature Press, 2021). His work has also appeared in The Guardian, The Diplomat, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He gained MSc and DPhil degrees in Politics at the University of Oxford.

The idea of ‘self-reliance’ (zili gengsheng) has endured in Chinese political discourse for nearly a century, transcending profound changes in China’s political, economic, and strategic circumstances. While ‘self-reliance’ is frequently misinterpreted as economic isolation or autarky, we instead show that ‘self-reliance’ has always been comprised of three interlocking pillars: autonomy, interdependence, and order-shaping. These three pillars sit in tension with one another, and yet have accommodated and co-existed with one another since the earliest articulations of the idea. Drawing on discursive institutionalism and its understanding of ‘ideational resilience’, we argue that this tripartite structure, replete with internal contradictions, has enabled Chinese leaders since the Republican era to reinterpret and usefully deploy the idea of ‘self-reliance’. Our findings underscore the resilience of key Chinese foreign economic policy ideas; and the ideational logic driving Xi Jinping’s apparently contradictory pursuit of ‘technological self-reliance’, open global markets, and greater connectivity with the developing world. ANU event webpage.

A/Prof Amy King is Associate Professor and Head of the Strategic & Defence Studies Centre in the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs. She is the author of China-Japan Relations after World War Two: Empire, Industry and War, 1949-1971 (Cambridge University Press, 2016). The holder of an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellowship and a Westpac Research Fellowship, she leads a team researching China’s role in shaping the international economic order. 

Wenting He is a PhD candidate in International Relations at The Australian National University. Her PhD project investigates how China’s ambiguous understanding of market-state relations has shaped its interpretations of economic crises and subsequent engagement with international economic order. Her recent publications unpack the constructive ambiguity of national interest in the context of U.S.-China relations.

Seminar Recording: ‘The Resilience of Self-reliance in China: Autonomy, Interdependence, and Order-Shaping’

China and Western powers are competing for influence in the Global South. Little known, however, are the perceptions these developing countries have of China. Using the Pacific region as a case study, this seminar will discuss China’s influence overseas. It is based on Denghua Zhang’s extensive research across the region, especially his recent surveys of different groups such as Pacific scholars, university students, recipients of Chinese government scholarships, civil societies and ordinary people in Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Solomon Islands and Tonga. The seminar will reveal the nuances in local perceptions of China, the opportunities and challenges faced by China, and the implications for traditional powers and Pacific states in the context of growing geostrategic competition. ANU event webpage.

Dr Denghua Zhang is a research fellow in the Department of Pacific Affairs at The Australian National University. His research focuses on Chinese foreign policy, foreign aid and China in the Pacific. Recently, he has published with journals such as Third World Quarterly, Australian Journal of International Affairs, The Pacific Review, Pacific Affairs, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, The Round Table, Asian Journal of Political Science, Security Challenges and Journal of Pacific History. His research article ‘China’s Influence and Local Perceptions: the Case of Pacific Island Countries’ won the Boyer prize for the best article in the Australian Journal of International Affairs in 2022. His book A Cautious New Approach: China’s Growing Trilateral Aid Cooperation was among the ANU Press’ top ten new releases for 2020.

Seminar recording: ‘Testing China's Influence Overseas - the Case of Pacific Island Countries’

This seminar examines the Soviet occupation of Northeast China (Manchuria) and Nationalist China’s industrial reconstruction efforts in the years following Japan's defeat in World War II. During the Second Sino–Japanese War (1937–1945), China’s Nationalist government cultivated heavy industry SOEs in the inland region. Following Japan’s surrender, the Soviets initially occupied Manchuria, extracting copious industrial equipment from Angang and other Japanese enterprises. Despite this, Manchuria retained superior industrial facilities compared to other parts of China. After the Soviet retreat in the spring of 1946, the Nationalist government consolidated and restructured formerly Japanese enterprises into large-scale Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs), including Anshan Iron and Steel Works (Angang). The Nationalists partly reconstructed these SOEs by employing resident Japanese engineers while building on their experience running SOEs in the inland region and sending for Chinese managers and engineers from inland. The Japanese and Nationalists thus unintentionally provided the foundations for the Chinese Communist Party’s socialist industrialization after 1948. In this seminar, Koji Hirata will reflect on how this moment of post-war industrialisation shapes our understanding of development, international order, and developmental states in world history. ANU event webpage

Dr. Koji Hirata is a research fellow in School of Philosophical, Historical, and International Studies at Monash University. Koji’s research touches on modern China, Japan, and Russia/Soviet Union with broader implications for the global history of capitalism and socialism. He is currently finishing a book that draws on archival documents and interviews in Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and English to chronicle the rise and fall of one gigantic steel-making company, Angang, located in the city of Anshan in Manchuria (Northeast China).

How has China’s engagement with development-related processes at the United Nations (UN) evolved over the last two decades? And what are the implications of China’s take on multilateral development cooperation? This seminar proceeds in three steps. First, and building on insights from a recent Special Issue on China-related power shifts at the UN, it provides an overview of China’s evolving engagement with the UN development pillar. Second, it unpacks the dynamics leading to the rise and fall of UN support for China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Third, it examines China-led policy transfer partnerships with the UN as a central element of China’s broader South-South cooperation agenda. Overall, Dr Sebastian Haug will identify key features of what multilateral development cooperation “with Chinese characteristics” currently looks like, and what this means for development-related processes across the UN system. ANU event webpage

Dr. Sebastian Haug a Senior Researcher at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS). He is interested in the politics of international organisations, North-South relations and global power shifts. Sebastian has published in outlets such as International Affairs, Global Governance and the Journal of International Development, and he is the lead editor of Power shifts in international organisations: China at the United Nations (Global Policy, 2024) and The ‘Global South’ in the study of world politics(Third World Quarterly, 2021). Sebastian previously worked for the United Nations in China and Mexico and was a visiting scholar at the Istanbul Policy Centre, the College of Mexico and New York University. He holds a Master’s degree from the University of Oxford and a PhD from the University of Cambridge.

Seminar recording: ‘Multilateral Development Cooperation with Chinese Characteristics? Insights from the United Nations’

In this seminar, Muyang Chen reveals the nature and impact of a rapidly growing form of international lending: Chinese development finance. Over the past few decades, China has become the world's largest provider of bilateral development finance. Through its two national policy banks, the China Development Bank (CDB) and the Export-Import Bank of China (China Exim), it has funded infrastructure and industrial projects in numerous emerging markets and developing countries. Yet this very surge and magnitude of capital has raised questions about the characteristics of Chinese bilateral lending and its repercussions on the international order. Drawing on a variety of novel Chinese primary sources, including interviews and official bank documents, Chen’s book The Latecomer's Rise pinpoints the distinctiveness of Chinese bilateral development finance, explains its origins, and analyses its effects. Chen suggests that Chinese overseas lending is not merely a tool of economic statecraft that challenges Western-led economic regimes. Instead, China's responses to extant rules, norms, and practices across given issue areas have varied between contestation and convergence. Overall, this seminar will explore the little-known workings of Chinese development finance to revise our conceptions of China's role in the international financial system. ANU event webpage.

Muyang Chen is an assistant professor at Peking University's School of International Studies. Her research lies at the intersection of political economy, international development, and international relations, focusing on the role of the state in development and addressing the question of how China’s overseas development finance affects global order. She also studies the role of public financial agencies in facilitating development assistance, export finance, industrialization, and sovereign debt restructuring. Her work has appeared in International Affairs, European Journal of International Relations, World Development, Development Policy Review, Studies in Comparative International Development, New Political Economy, Review of International Political Economy, and The Oxford Handbook of Industrial Policy. She is the author of The Latecomer’s Rise: Policy Banks and the Globalization of China’s Development Finance (Cornell University Press, 2024). Muyang holds a Ph.D. from the University of Washington, an M.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and dual bachelor’s degrees from Peking University and Waseda University. Prior to joining Peking University, she was a research fellow at the Global Development Policy Center of Boston University and a visiting scholar at Japan's National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies.

In this seminar, Shahar Hameiri examines China’s approach to the global governance of sovereign debt distress, an area that is widely understood to be under threat from China, which has risen to become the world’s largest official bilateral creditor. In response to the Global South’s post-2020 debt crisis, China has undermined established approaches led by the International Monetary Fund and the Paris Club, with many seeing this as further evidence of Beijing’s challenge to the US-led liberal international order. Yet, China has proposed no meaningful alternative to the existing regime, and its behaviour has arguably undermined Beijing’s global standing, rather than advancing its strategic interests. Moreover, China has actively participated in Group of 20 frameworks drawing heavily on Paris Club rules, and insists more resolutely on ‘comparable treatment’ with other creditors than Paris Club member-states. Its behaviour therefore seems contradictory and incoherent, rather than reflecting a strategic choice. This article explains this using the State Transformation Approach, which sees the Chinese party-state not as a strategic, unitary actor but as a loosely coordinated, highly contested array of agents pursuing potentially contradictory interests. This seminar will explore why China’s commercial lenders have successfully safeguarded their interests during the debt crisis, at the expense of other creditors and Beijing’s wider geopolitical interests. ANU event webpage.

Shahar Hameiri is Professor of International Politics and Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland. He is a Research Associate of the Second Cold War Observatory. Hameiri’s work mainly examines security and development issues in East Asia and the Pacific. He is currently working on a project examining the contours of the emerging geopolitical rivalry between China and the US, and how other countries are responding. His recent books include The Locked-Up Country: Learning the Lessons from Australia’s COVID-19 Response (UQP, 2023), co-authored with Tom Chodor, as well as Fractured China: How State Transformation Is Shaping China’s Rise (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and Governing Borderless Threats (Cambridge University Press, 2015), both co-authored with Lee Jones. He is also co-editor, with Toby Carroll and Lee Jones, of The Political Economy of Southeast Asia: Politics and Uneven Development under Hyperglobalisation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

How do state actors employ ideas to contest and reshape global norms? Why is the global governance of sovereign debt constantly contested, particularly from the perspective of China, a country that has transitioned from a peripheral debtor to a rising creditor power? Bo’s research delves into these questions by analyzing China's normative engagement with global sovereign debt management since 1949. Drawing on insights from norm contestation theory, this study argues that China’s stance and behaviour toward global norms can be characterized as part of a constant cycle of norm contestation. The research identifies how evolving normative and cognitive ideas have been developed and employed by China as mechanisms for legitimation, framing, constraint, and policy guidance, leading to different modes of contestation. This seminar will contribute to the existing literature by shedding light on the ideational foundations of China's engagement with global debt norms and will explore how China’s evolving ideas have enabled or constrained its ability to reshape the global sovereign debt order. ANU event webpage.

Bo Li is a PhD candidate at the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, specializing in global development finance and sovereign debt. His PhD thesis examines Chinese ideas of sovereign debt management and how these ideas have shaped China's contestation of global debt norms. This thesis is supervised by Associate Prof. Amy King, Prof. Wesley Widmaier, and Prof. Will Bateman. Bo holds an MSc in International Political Economy (Research) from the London School of Economics and an MSc in Economics with Distinction from the University of London. He has worked as a research assistant at the Institute of World Economics and Politics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). Bo currently serves as a research assistant for the project: How China Shapes the International Economic Order.

This seminar examines China’s growing role within the rapid global transition to renewable energy (RE), a shift that is leading states to compete to secure raw materials and renewable technology including solar PV. The transition also evidences significant socio-ecological impacts throughout global solar PV supply chain, which raises questions of sustainability and justice. In this seminar, Susan Park will explain the ‘embodied political ecology’ of solar PV as a commodity that contributes to a range of socio-ecological harms along its life cycle, from toxic waste to forced labour. In doing so, she will map the socio-ecological impacts of the global solar PV supply chain according to both life-cycle analysis (LCA) and non-LCA studies and provide a more comprehensive means of understanding the full impacts of producing solar PV as a commodity for a global market. Situating the embodied political ecology of solar PV within the global supply chain and recognising the increasing market concentration by China and Chinese companies, this seminar will reveal the need for greater transparency in Chinese sustainability of the global solar PV supply chain to mitigate harms of the technology, with implications for sustainable governance. ANU event webpage.

Susan Park is Professor of Global Governance in Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney. She focuses on how international organisations and global governance can become greener and more accountable, particularly in the transition to renewable energy. Her most recent books are: The Good Hegemon (2022, OUP) and Environmental Recourse at the Multilateral Development Banks (2020, CUP). She is co-lead Editor of the journal Global Environmental Politics. She was a Senior Hans Fischer Fellow at the Technical University of Munich (2019-2023) and is a Research Lead of the Earth Systems Governance project.