In the spring of 2019, while working in administration for a Czech university, I attended a conference titled ‘First Belt and Road Physical Education Forum’ in Croatia. Organised jointly by local and Chinese universities, its objective was to explore opportunities in sport science alongside the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), including between China and Central […]
Tracing the origins of the core principles of China’s foreign aid—political non-interference and aid for independent development—to the early days of the People’s Republic of China, this essay shows how historical memory continues to play a significant role in China’s interactions with developing countries today. It also argues that China’s foreign aid from the past to the present has to be understood as an externalisation of China’s quest for development, modernisation, and independence.
At the height of the Cultural Revolution, Maoist China became a symbol for anti-imperialist movements throughout an imagined ‘Third World’. While scholarly attention has been paid to Third-World Maoism in countries of the Global South, fewer scholars have considered how Maoism was received by organisations within the ‘First World’ that considered themselves part of the global Third-World struggle against oppression. This essay helps to address this gap by examining how the Black Panther Party in the United States was inspired by Mao Zedong’s writings and formed connections with the Chinese Communist Party.
Much scholarly attention to China’s positions toward international law in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) suggests a ‘big bang’ approach, given the amount of activity generated by Chinese legal organs in relation to the BRI. While this attention is warranted, it may elide some of the deeper histories between China and the Global South. In such a context, this essay takes the legal relations between Pakistan and China as a window into exploring the question of how small states hedge different yet overlapping international legal orders.
Since the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013, Chinese official discourse has emphasised the Initiative’s continuity with the past. The reinvention of Eurasian history and heritage have become key aspects of both the promotion of the BRI and China’s chronopolitics. This essay examines China’s political use of history and heritage in the context of the BRI, along with the related risks and geopolitical implications
The Beijing Yirenping Centre was one of the most remarkable grassroots nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) to emerge in China during the Hu and Wen era. Through an innovative mix of strategies, including legal litigation, public advocacy, and performative arts, the centre was able to promote significant policy changes in its field of operation—that is, anti-discrimination—before being […]
When China hosted the 1995 United Nations Fourth World Summit on Women, who would have thought it would be a catalytic event in the growth of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) in China? This meeting of UN representatives from all over the world and activists attending the shadow NGO conference held in Huairou County, Beijing, unleashed a […]
While the ongoing human rights violations in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and the dramatic constitutional collapse of Hong Kong rightly demand most of the attention that the news media, international civil society, and democratic governments can pay to China today, systematic violations of human rights continue throughout the country, and Chinese rights defenders are […]
In the past three decades, China’s civil society has gone through a series of ups and downs in the context of shifting national policies and geopolitics. The Fourth World Conference on Women that was held in Beijing in 1995 was a watershed moment for transnational feminism and LGBT activism.[1] It not only introduced the nongovernmental […]
Zhou Jian kindly agreed to write for us about his experience of almost 15 years of working in poverty alleviation, rural development, and community development in different regions of China. Zhou began this work full-time following the Wenchuan earthquake in 2008. In 2012, he co-founded the Beijing Gan’en Philanthropic Foundation (北京感恩公益基金会) with prominent figures such […]
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