Min Ye - Boston University - ECONOMY IN COMMAND: DOMESTIC POLITICS OF CHINA’S BELT AND ROAD INITIATIVE

Min Ye Professor Photo
Date & Time Dec 05 2016 4:30 PM - 6:30 PM
Speaker(s)
Min Ye
Audience Open to the Public

Description:

Domestic politics has strong bearings on foreign policy. Yet due to its different and convoluted policy regime, it is difficult to grasp domestic determinants of foreign policy in China. The country launched the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in late 2013 and has since promoted it as a major foreign policy initiative inside and outside China. How did the policy come about? How is it being implemented? Drawing on field interviews and primary archives, the talk presents, first, there were multiple forces that shape BRI’s birthing, second, BRI’s implementation is mainly under economic command in Beijing, and third, outside the central command, substantive deviation and subnational defiance from the BRI strategy are widespread and provide market rationality to the ambitious statist initiative.

Bio:

Min Ye is the author of Diasporas and Foreign Direct Investment in China and India (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and The Making of Northeast Asia (with Kent Calder, Stanford University Press, 2010). Her articles, “China’s Outbound Direct Investment: Regulation and Representation,” “Competing Cooperation in Asia Pacific: TPP, RCEP, and the New Silk Road,” and “Conditions and Utility of Diffusion by Diasporas” have appeared in Modern China Studies (2013), Journal of Asian Security (2015), and Journal of East Asian Studies (2016).

Ye was the director of East Asian Studies program from 2010 to 2014 and launched the new major in Asian Studies at Boston University. She also served as a visiting scholar at Fudan University, Zhejiang University, and Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in China, as well as Rajiv Gandhi Foundation in India, Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the National University of Singapore. In addition, she has consulted Chinese state-owned companies and private companies on outbound investment.

Ye has received grants and fellowships in the U.S and Asia, including a Smith Richardson Foundation grant (2016-2018), East Asia Peace, Prosperity, and Governance fellowship (2013), Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program postdoctoral fellowship (2009-2010), and Millennium Education Scholarship in Japan (2006). In 2014-2016, the National Committee on the U.S-China Relations selects Min Ye as a Public Intellectual Program fellow.