Public Lecture: Chinese International Policy – Contextualising the Global Initiatives

As the international community is still trying to conceptualize the geopolitical and geoeconomic implications of the Belt and Road Initiative, put forward by PRC president Xi Jinping over a decade ago, China has been publishing and publicizing more initiatives with global implications. These include the Global Development Initiative (2021), the Global Civilization Initiative (2023), and, most importantly, the Global Security Initiative (2022).

 

The lecture aims to analyse the foreign policy "initiative shift" witnessed in PRC in the last decade, to frame China's interests in its vicinity and globally, and to argue in favour of discourse studies as a legitimate and informative approach in international relations.

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Guest speaker:

Dr Una Aleksandra Bērziņa-Čerenkova is a China scholar and a discourse analyst. She has held research fellowships at Fudan, Stanford, and Oxford Universities, and is affiliated with King's College London and MERICS. She is the author of Perfect Imbalance: China and Russia (World Scientific, 2022) and the editor of Discourse, Rhetoric and Shifting Political Behaviour in China (Routledge, 2023).

 

Una is Head of the China Studies Centre at Riga Stradins University, Head of the Asia Programme at the Latvian Institute of International Affairs, a member of European Think-tank Network on China (ETNC).