Скачать или смотреть Infrastructure and Politics: Belt and Road Initiative in Southeast Asia

The seminar will explore and elaborate those questions: why BRI infrastructure projects proceeded differently in Southeast Asia? some suffer from political risk: Malaysia under Mahathir; some suffer from societal risk: Indonesia under Jokowi; some suffer from both: the Philippines from Duterte to Marcos; some go well (at least for now): Singapore. Does domestic politics of hosting countries matter? And how?
Foreign policy making is insulated (Singapore and Malaysia) from or responsive (Indonesia and the Philippines) to political oppositions and societal influences. Foreign policy making is a personalized (Malaysia and the Philippines) or institutionalized process (Singapore and Indonesia). A brief summary is that there is relatively low level of risks on Singapore-China BRI cooperation; Malaysia has medium level of political risks on BRI projects; Indonesia has medium level of societal risks on BRI projects; there is relatively high level of socio-political risks on BRI projects in the Philippines.
Implication of this study is the success (or failure) of the BRI projects to a large extent depends upon the engagement with and response from Southeast Asian countries. Specifically, it includes: more emphasis is needed on the agency role of the host country; rule-based governance is more effective in reducing political risks than relational governance; both hard and soft infrastructure are combined to reduce societal risk.


Date: 29 January 2024
Time: 3:00 pm to 4:30 pm
Venue Room: G5-314, 5/F, Yeung Kin Man Academic Building, City University of Hong Kong