Partner or Predator? China and the Global Land Grab

Mainstream portrayals of Chinese overseas land investments tend to treat Chinese capital as monolithic, synonymous with the Chinese state, and as extracting resources from other countries unhindered. These portrayals flatten host country landscapes where investment occurs, obscure the embeddedness and diversity of Chinese investors, and ignore the spatially contingent channels through which Chinese capital, actors and goods flow. In this talk, Juliet Lu will outline parallels between how China has been portrayed as a land grabber with how the Belt and Road Initiative has been received. She argues that simplistic representations of China’s global land investments obscure more important but context-contingent characteristics of Chinese capital and the territorial implications for the places where it invests.

Juliet Lu is an Assistant Professor in the School for Public Policy and Global Affairs and the Department of Forest Resources Management at UBC. She is a political ecologist focused on the implications of China’s growing investments in land and other resources in Southeast Asia and beyond.

With China’s rise as a major player on the global stage, understanding the nature of Chinese power and how it is exercised has become increasingly important. This series of lectures brings together leading experts from a diverse range of fields to illuminate how power operates internally within Chinese society, and externally in its relations with the rest of the world. The series will explore how social relations (or guanxi) operate in Chinese society today, the role of cultural practices in reproducing and contesting state power in authoritarian China, the impact of a rising China on the established global order, and the projection of China’s soft power overseas. In examining the multiple dimensions of Chinese power—political, economic, cultural, social—these speakers will deepen our understanding of power in China as well as how it is exercised by China.