China/Europe and the Changing Global Order Seminar Series

China’s emergence and growing footprint across the world has spawned much debate on its implications for the global order. To analyse these debates and illuminate the underlying issues, The Open University’s 'Reorienting development: The dynamics and effects of Chinese infrastructure investments in Europe (REDEFINE)' project; the University of York’s 'The Politics of Chinese Investments in Europe (PoliCIE)'; and the China in Europe Research Network (CHERN) are co-organising this series of events. We envisage these events to offer a platform for learning and sharing for students and early career researchers in the social sciences and allied disciplines.

The series is informed by four themes, as below:

• To what extent does China’s growing presence in and engagement with the global North and global South reshape the liberal international order?

• What does China’s rise do for concepts like the global South and how can we more effectively study the political economies of societies of the so-called global South?

• What does China’s entry into Europe mean for European identity and how can we more effectively study the political economies of European societies?

• What methodological opportunities and challenges does researching China in Europe pose for collaborative knowledge creation?

Each event will typically entail a presentation by a graduate student or early career scholar followed by comments by an established academic.

Audience Q&A will follow

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Come along to our seminar on the 9 March from 12:30 to 14:00 (GMT) and hear Dr Melissa Lefkowitz from New York University speak on: -

'Study Tours, Sustainable Development, and China’s Evolving Educational Market: A Chinese Educational Program Mediates Nairobi, Kenya'

Abstract

In the mid-2010s, transnationally educated Chinese nationals began running educational programming to Nairobi, Kenya for middle and upper-class Chinese nationals born in the 1990s and 2000s, marking a turn from the predominance of international extracurricular trips to Western nation-states. Drawing on fifteen months of ethnographic and archival research conducted in China and Kenya from 2016 through 2019, my talk explores the global conjunctures that galvanized Chinese nationals to identify Kenya as a destination for young people, and the ideologies and goals underpinning this programming.

Using the pseudonymous company Excellent Forward Movement (EFM) as a case study, I show that Chinese educational companies depicted Kenya travel as a “meaningful” destination to enhance academic skillsets useful for entry into Western universities, ultimately framing Kenya as a “safe,” “international” destination for youth self-exploration and expansion, yet in need of development intervention. Ethnographic research that entailed riding along with guides as they toured Nairobi revealed that program guides decontextualized and recontextualized approaches to sustainable development they acquired in American Ivy League university settings in order to present them to Chinese target demographics. Through their appropriation, translation, and remaking of transnational discourses, guides framed sustainable development as both politically appropriate for Chinese clientele and legible in Western university contexts. Rather than present this educational programming as somehow “Chinese,” I emphasize that Chinese educational program founders were largely informed by a Western-rooted projection of Kenya as a site for the production of knowledge and expertise, where individuals can accrue cultural capital useful in a wealthy nation-state’s metropole. My analysis serves as an intervention to compartmentalized approaches to Africa-China relationships and emphasizes the constellational quality of Chinese mobilities to Africa, specifically Chinese nationals’ subjective and substantive entanglements with Western geographies, institutions, and networks.

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Host or Publisher Jacqueline Simester