Rivers of Iron Railroads and Chinese Power in Southeast Asia

good evening i'd like to welcome everybody to this evening's panel uh rivers of iron railroads and chinese power in southeast asia my name is andrew murtha and i'm vice dean for faculty affairs at johns hopkins sice i'm the george and sadie hyman professor of china studies and director of the china studies program at sice before we begin i'd like to thank sonia holmes pedro matias and madeline ross for their patience and guidance in setting up this webinar i would also like to thank the sis china studies program and the size foreign policy institute for co-sponsoring this event it is my genuine pleasure to introduce this evening's panelists david m lampton is senior research scholar at the seis foreign policy institute and professor emeritus of sice china studies for more than two decades prior to 2018 he was hyman professor and director of china studies at sice professor lampton is former chairman of the asia foundation and former president of the national committee on u.s china relations his previous publications include same-bed different dreams managing u.s china relations 1989-2000 three faces of chinese power might money and minds and following the leader ruling china from deng xiaoping to xi jinping selena ho is assistant professor and chair of the master in international affairs program at the lee kuan yew school of public policy at the national university of singapore she's the author of thirsty cities social contracts and public goods provision in china and india she earned both her mipp and phd degrees at seis in 2005 and 2013 respectively she joins us from singapore chung tui is associate professor and head of the center for asian studies at the institute of malaysian and international studies national university of malaysia he is concurrently a non-resident fellow at the foreign policy institute at johns hopkins he earned his phd at sis in 2010. he is calling in from malaysia good wednesday morning chiang chui rivers of iron represents many things it is an ingenious study of rich comparative inquiry it is a recognition of the new paradigm of chinese power extending outward breathing new life into the study of the interplay of domestic and international politics and it is also a testament to the power and the possibilities when a mentor-mentee relationship evolves into one of deep collaboration where former students become colleagues finally it is also one hell of a story one with wide scholarly and policy implications about china asia and the future of regional transactional behavior with all kinds of global implications the webinar will unfold as follows each of the three authors professors lambton ho and quick will speak for 10 minutes then we will have a 15-minute moderated discussion and then around 8 55 we'll open up the floor for questions i'll ask you to please write your questions in the zoom q a function and i will try to get to as many of them as i can please identify who you are as well in your questions then around 9 20 or so we will leave some time for some final comments before wrapping up at 9 30. and now it is my pleasure to pass the microphone over to mike lanton mike the floor is yours well andy thank you very much and to thank all of you for giving us the opportunity to talk about a subject of deep interest to us and we hope you'll be interested by both the uh the monologues and hopefully a lot of dialogue is as well i do want to thank sites china studies and andy murtha and madeline ross uh for all the effort they put into organizing uh this panel also i need to acknowledge uh this was such a large-scale project involving by various counts nine plus countries that uh it required lots of uh financial support and i do want to thank the smith richardson foundation for the the major grant but also seis and indeed stanford university i contributed money that made it the final product possible so i want to thank them also the university of california put in a nor press put in an enormous amount of effort and i want to thank the acquisitions editor there reed malcolm for doing a wonderful job and including this in their uh lillianthal series that the press puts out so uh we have many people to thank and uh i just want to express that appreciation uh as uh this book was in galley proves of course uh uh cove had descended on the world and uh of course tensions in u.s china relations going up and there was lots of talk and is lots of talk of decoupling uh diversifying supply chains and so forth um i think the the authors the three of us uh celina ho and chung tree quick and myself felt that we wanted to dedicate the book to the proposition that building connections is the future and building walls is the past now of course we're entering a complicated era but this book really looks at a connectivity project of enormous scale uh and i think on balance they'll leave it aside what the pace of future construction will be and whether the final system looks like what we envision it today uh connectivity is going to be the long-term trend so while we are mindful of the pressures towards supply chain diversification and decoupling i at least for one don't think that's the mainstream in the future that we ought to be overly preoccupied with uh in part this book uh is the story of how china acquired the technology the engineering talent uh the planning vision to first of all create a domestic industry that almost didn't exist that is a high-speed rail industry in the year 2000 and by 2013 2014 2015 had a world-class competitive industry so one of the very interesting stories is how china put itself in a position to begin to talk about exporting a high speed and conventional speed or pretty high speed uh trains outside of the country that would not have been possible prior to uh 2010 at the at the earliest so it's partly the story of how china developed that industry and industrial policy plays a big role in that and so the book invites you to think about the role of industrial policy and recall america's past with respect industrial policy whether it was a transcontinental railroad or the panama canal or the eisenhower interstate system or the internet the the us government over the centuries has not been an inert force and has shaped infrastructure and many other endeavors in our country and so it likewise in china the government is playing a very um uh let's say assertive role particularly in infrastructure domestically and increasingly as an export uh industry the second major point i want to make that i think is important we're in this kind of a national mood to see china as a juggernaut unstoppable force fount of ideas and of course there's an element of truth in all of that but this idea of a connectivity uh and selena can you put up the map there uh is uh an idea that did not have its genesis in china it had it actually in southeast asia uh and it actually goes back to the british and french in particular uh who were trying to enter the heartland of china from their colonial perches in in southeast asia and south asia and indeed china was connected to hanoi at least china's west to hanoi before it was connected to its own coast so the southeast asians looked at the the problem the challenge of trying to connect to china back in the 19th and early 20th century and so part of the story is just simply uh where did the vision for connectivity in southeast asia come from and how much of it was a chinese vision and how much of it um let's say a neighbor's decision and i think on balance you have to say that the project and conception in its broadest contours was a southeast asian project when china got the technology had built out its industry had built out its domestic rail system then china had something to offer that that pre-existing southeast asian vision so i would say in a very real way china has jumped on a southeast asian idea more than southeast asia jumping on a chinese idea now what what is the idea what is the vision we're talking about this map shows you in a sort of overly stylized fashion three routes the hub in china and south china is quin ming and the terminus is singapore at the end of the melee peninsula and you will see from quinman there are essentially three basically uh north-south lines radiating out of kunming to the west one if this vision is built uh to the west you have the idea of going from queen ming to mandalay down to rangoon yangon on to bangkok uh in this what's called the central line you run from quin ming down through the capital of laos vientiane and on to bangkok and then if the line is built you have another one that would run from queen ming hanoi down to ho chi minh city phnom penh and cambodia and bangkok the first thing to note is all three of these lines meet in bangkok and so if this vision works out bangkok and thailand see themselves as enormous winners it's becoming sort of the equivalent to chicago in the american continental development transportation hub for the middle part of the country and then from bangkok all three lines run down to singapore now this map looks small but each of the lines i just described is bigger is longer than the transcontinental railroad of the united states so a number of questions arise from this vision now let me make it clear uh there there's quite a bit of progress building the central line from queen ming down to vientiane and i i i would believe they'll probably be to the border between laos and thailand that is vienton vientiane on the mekong probably around 20 21 maybe 2022 something in that order also there are discussions in thailand and uh foreign minister huang yi just was in uh thailand uh and uh i believe they're gonna get that project going beyond a small test strip that they've already built but in any case what we're talking about here if this vision were to materialize is something on the order of three transcontinental railroads and this gives rise to a lot a number of i think important and comparative questions what is that what is the vision and where did it come from why did china why was china in a position to jump on this vision what are the problems they're facing in implementation how is this going to change power dynamics in south southeast asia and certainly with other pacific powers including the united states japan korea australia and so forth how how should the united states think about this development is it is it something that should affect our vision of how we provide development assistance should we get involved can we get involved what concept should involve whatever engagement we decide upon also what why do different southeast asian countries respond differently to the chinese let's say initiative or to this vision at least as it involves china and the book spends a lot of time and uh chung shi will talk about it as well uh why did different southeast asian countries have diverse responses uh the next thing that i think we just really want to talk about is a few findings and then i will pass the baton to selena and one of the findings is that china does have a strategy china does have a vision and i think the sort of one sentence version of it is china as the economic intellectual human resource hub of east asia and its enormous periphery and so uh china is building quin ming you'll see all those arrows radiating out those are going on the domestic high-speed and conventional rail system of china so that this vision is one it would puts china at the economic center of development and activity in east and central asia potentially now while they have that general vision and they also believe that if they contribute to the development of the economies around them this will create demand for chinese exports china will be able to diversify its uh supply chain southward in short china will uh gain lots of economic and economic strategic geopolitical advantages from this on the other hand there isn't exactly a master plan what projects get built in what order is very much a function of a very complicated system a political system in china which we talk about but for simplicity's sake we'll say there's a lot of initiative provinces state enterprises at the provincial national level lobby groups and other countries all pushing beijing in the direction of their preferred policy so while there's a vision that is china as the hub it's a very entrepreneurial uh um system in which what projects get built in what order and with what results is very much a function of what happens locally as well as what happens nationally secondly i think another major conclusion is that there are major implementation problems all the way from corruption to taking out unexploded ordinance that the americans dropped during the secret war and laos just endless uh implementation complications but what really calls at least in my mind for some explanation is despite all the problems why is there so much progress and so sometimes if you look at implementation you get overwhelmed by the problems just merely enumerating them but on the other hand when you look at what's happening on the ground and we spent a lot of time on the ground from bangkok all the way to the chinese border what strikes you is the progress as well as the problems so i think that calls for some explanation also another major finding is i think china's foreign policy in many respects creates some obstacles it makes it china's foreign policy now is not reassuring to many of the countries in southeast asia so one on one hand they want to do business with china get chinese capital build out their connectivity but on the other hand they're not exactly sure how connected in all respects they want to be to china and what some of the effects like ex added exports from china migration tourism the effects of tourism and the populations of these countries so each of these countries has its own calculus its own anxieties but i would say china's actions in the south china sea the east china sea in the himalayas with india is not entirely reassuring to these countries and works against their foreign economic policy well i think i've said enough i want to introduce selena ho as she's already been introduced and invite her to speak selina thank you mike and hello everyone and um i would like to start by saying thank you to andy and madeline and of course science china um it's good to be back at size i've always considered science to be my second home so it's good to be back even if it's virtually um so today um i'm very pleased that uh we could share about our book and uh so what i'm gonna do for the next few minutes is to pick up from where mike has has left off and um to talk about negotiations and implementation uh issues as china ventures into smaller states now one of the things that our book strives to be different from books on china is that we try to be as balanced as possible to give perspectives from both sides uh from the side of the chinese as well as the side of the the viewpoints of the smaller states now ielts theory normally don't talk about smaller states as in small states have no agency so the spotlight is really almost completely on the great powers in this book we try to do something different we look at the interactions and how they react to each other china and southeast asian countries in fact uh three chapters of the book chapters four five and six are devoted to uh southeast asian views of um this pen asia railway and one of the things that we we have to buy in mind is that i think which mike uh mentioned along the way is that um while uh china you know offers aid and investment and technology uh the thing is that southeast asian countries have agency in the sense that they are the ones who actually went to china and say that can you do this we have this vision we don't have the money but now that you are richer maybe you can help us do this so i think that's something that we need to bear in mind so by looking at the at the behavior of our small states we hope to you know uh that our book will contribute to a greater understanding of our small state behavior now let me start by talking about the negotiation process between china and the smaller states and i would like i would like to highlight three conditions uh three conditions that determine the bargaining power of smaller states as they negotiate with china the first condition is that size wealth and location actually matters so southeast asian states are not you know of equal size or of uh same capacity for instance but you have middle powers and you have smaller states so you have middle powers like indonesia and thailand who actually have greater leverage when they bargain with uh with with china than say a country like laos so for instance indonesia was able to get the chinese to agree to no sovereign guarantees for the project meaning that uh it is basically uh saying that the indonesian government is not responsible if their the project fails and uh indonesia also managed to get the chinese to agree to a lower interest rate now malaysia and singapore are also better well are better developed and they are middle-income countries so that helps in the negotiation process as well now um geography geography gives thailand a small a major advantage not a supplement for the major economy i'll show you the map again um so if you look at the map all the three lines that envision um three lines they all have to run through bangkok in order to get to singapore at the end so that gives thailand quite a huge leverage in negotiations um all routes must pass through thailand so this strengthens its bargaining power in fact in one of our interviews a key thai government advisor actually described thailand as a in quotes a beautiful woman who can wait to choose the best suitor sutures are referred to the great powers that come in at her doorsteps now for laos geography is not an asset it can be bypassed to its east and to this west by myanmar and vietnam respectively in fact in our interviews there is actually a significant amount of anxiety in laos among law officials that they that laos will be bypassed now the second condition uh for to that can determine the bargaining power of the smaller states is state capacity um secondary states have more options when they have greater capacity such as robust government institutions ability to regulate and monitor civil society rule of law and better uh train human resources for instance now singapore historic capacity and is not overly dependent on china economically however countries like laos are heavily reliant on the chinese economy and technical expertise for instance um even the feasibility study for the china law uh high speed railway was conducted by china and you can imagine that when the host when the um invest the country the country that's investing in in laos china is the one doing physically to study um certain findings will be skewed um the third condition that determines bargaining power is domestic public politics and public opinion now this plays a huge rule chain 3 will elaborate on it later on but let me just say that with at least in the aspect of bargaining uh this makes a key difference um well when we think of bargaining as a two level game uh recalling uh what robert robert putnam says about his two-level theory well the first level is international bargaining so china and you know the national governments of the south asian countries and then at the second level we have bargaining among domestic agencies right this bargaining also includes uh public opinion so leaders like former prime minister malaysia najib and uh indonesian president jokowi have been attacked for selling their countries to china okay and there are local concerns over technological whether you know things like technological transfer job creation will actually uh manifest and uh there are also chinese companies who often bring in materials from china and this sideline local smes there is just a very big question of whether economies of host countries benefit in the end now negative public opinion and unhappiness over chinese presence actually exerts significant pressures on these leaders southeast asian leaders so coming back to the two-level theory at level two which is the domestic level of negotiations the wind sets for association countries uh the politicians there are very small so this ironically strengthens their bargaining position when they negotiate with china at level one meaning they can tell china look i'm putting my domestic position at stickier you have to give me more concessions let me now turn to the challenges of implementation so as chinese companies venture into southeast asia they encounter problems and issues which they are really not familiar with in their own country so um there is just a lot of trial and error and learning involved there's a lot of delays in implementation okay and um not that there are no problems with implementation delays within china itself but the problems actually multiply when these companies encounter different political systems with a very confusing array of actors and veto points let me give you some examples and i think i have about four points to make here in this under implementation uh for for instance number one the uh the chinese companies encounter decentralization politics when they go into indonesia especially when they're trying to acquire land in india malaysia this is the first step for the construction of the railway to take place so as a result of the delays in land acquisition the jakarta bandung railway was actually delayed for several years so let me explain um post 1998 uh indonesia uh decentralized age there was there was decentralization and democratization of politics and in that in that process the center was actually uh the central actually weakened jakarta actually weakened while the local agencies would strengthen so the jakarta bandung railway was an agreement between beijing and jakarta with minimal consultations of the local governments so when when the chinese companies tried to acquire land from local regencies they encountered huge resistance so in total there are 29 districts and 95 villages in west java which are directly impacted by the high-speed railway construction so you can imagine the amount of difficulties the chinese construction companies face as they deal with very powerful local authorities and very strong land tenant laws in indonesia now another factor that has hindered implementation is bureaucratic resistance you see this very much in thailand for instance the state railway of thailand makes money actually by selling land but loses money when it comes to the rail operations hence compensation for the loss of land is actually a key issue in negotiations with the chinese um there are also significant legal obstacles to the construction of the bangkok non-kai uh high-speed railway non-kai is at the border with laos so laws and that offer some of these laws uh include those that offer labor protection procurement standards uh land usage and environmental protection so what um prime minister prayun had to do was that he evoked an executive order article 44 to overcome some of these legal barriers now the third point that i want to make about challenges to implementation is that having a champion is actually very important this is the case when it comes to real development within china it is also the case when it comes to real development in southeast asian countries so um but what happens you know when the champion actually disappears from the political scene we saw this case very clearly in malaysia um former prime minister najib was a stalwart champion of the east coast railing and the kuala lumpur singapore has been real however when he lost power in the may 2018 general elections these projects actually lost a very powerful patron and was almost scouted uh subsequently by the next prime minister mahathir uh but of course mahathir managed to negotiate and restart some of these projects but there was at one point a real danger whether projects could have been cancelled um the other obstacles of that uh that is related to challenges to um to the implementation process is that it's technical we can take laos as an example you can imagine that you know people who have visited laos laos is really extremely mountainous so it's a huge uh task when you have to do things like tunnel through uh mountains uh and and and build bridges across rivers so it's a huge engineering project in fact a total of about 170 bridges and 72 tunnels are expected to be constructed um there are also a lot of unexploded uh mines remaining from the indo-china wars in fact you know one chinese railway engineer working on the project actually said and i quote we should have the united states demine the area so it's quite it's quite uh funny in a sense but it's actually not if you think about the seriousness of the matter uh in in some uh what i want to say uh and uh to conclude is that there are significant challenges that china experiences as advantages into southeast asia whether in terms of when they are negotiating terms of the contract or when it comes to uh constructing the hsrs themselves uh kingtree will elaborate more on this on the diverse responses of the southeast asian states to china and also uh the geopolitical and dual economics competition and the other major powers ching tri thanks very much selena and good evening and good morning to everyone and depending on where you are i would cover primarily about how and why smaller states in southeast asia have responded to a china backed real project differently so this is a very core issue which uh chapter four tries to address and in fact we call chapter 4 as the connecting chapter it's a connecting chapter for the book in the sense that this chapter by addressing the issue of how and why smaller countries and responses try to connect the early chapters uh that the mic has already presented earlier on the big picture and also a china-related chapters with the subsequent chapters especially at the one that selena has presented about the small state the agency and also before we turn to uh the geopolitical and your economic dimensions of the whole and dynamics just before the concluding chapter and so we use we have in chapter four we have this uh two by two metrics as you could see uh from the slide um so this is the metrics that we try to identify how and also to explain why so let's uh deal with the issue of how before we move on and to talk about why so you could see uh four quadrants here these four quadrants represent basically four major types of small state responses and even though uh here we focus on the main examples of laos malaysia thailand and vietnam but really the same logic the patterns uh the typology can be applied to other southeast asian countries and i would argue also actually uh the larger the broader phenomenon of how smaller countries respond to big power initiated the power centered infrastructure inducement yeah so uh let's uh begin from quadrant one and the quadrant two so quadrant one and quadrant two i represent the receptive uh responses they are very uh uh enthusiastic about this project and in fact uh in many cases those are the kind of embraces that reflect that when it comes to save belt and road or big power back the infrastructure inducement sometimes it's not about big powers push but smaller countries are trying to pull as well so laos particularly has been very very enthusiastic and malaysia to a large extent especially under narjim i would say that even later on uh leaders are basically very very pragmatic so in quadrant one and quadrant two these two represent i would say enthusiastic embraces the distinction between the two between uh laos in quadrant one and malaysia in quadrant two is that in laos case the enthusiasm embrace is more stable and whereby malaysia's case quadrant ii it's a receptive but they has been characterized by what i would call a cyclical recalibration there's some adjustment and in the case of allows the reason why i described as a kind of a stable in a sense that once the decision was made and also once the groundbreaking ceremony was held in 2016 you know the process uh the construction process has been going on quite steadily even as we talked in the phase of corvita issue uh we know that construction has been ongoing and the whole project is on track to be completed by uh december next year so that's going to be uh the first uh high-speed rail project in southeast asia backed by a china that is to be completed and in the case of malaysia the reason why we describe it as receptive but with recalibration and adjustment it's a very much illustrated by the case that selena has just mentioned earlier on and now you could see that uh mahadilla came back to power in may of 2018. one of the first things that he did was really to suspend three up of a few uh china related projects so east coast railing ecrl railing project as the most expensive project in the country and probably at the region has been suspended uh so there is a recalibration there but as soon as the renegotiation dealer was reached by april 2019 uh this has been a resume and now under the new government uh parikatan uh national la plus government under muhir they have been thought to kind of adjust about the sultana realignment but the whole project still continues so this kind of a recalibration would be expected in the future years because of the nature of political system in malaysia something that i would elaborate later on so these two quadrant one and two is kind of like a contrast to a three and four there are three and four in the case of thailand and vietnam they are more cautious more selected thailand definitely more selected and also more limited in terms of engaging so thailand still engaged china but in amer very selective and also a gradual graduate and the perfect example i would be uh the phase one of the sino-tire project by the time we completed our writing only 3.5 kilometer and i am saying 3.5 not 35 a kilometer uh construction has been uh ongoing and that's a part of phase one and phase two from non kai to uh from bangkok to nongkai is still uncertain so this is a perfect example to illustrate that thailand engage a china related project but in a very cautious way still um if compared to quadrant four vietnam and that's uh another i would say extreme uh reaction in the sense that it's very limited uh if at all involvement uh the only china related project real project in vietnam it's really the one that the urban rail system in hanoi and we knew that that has been delayed for many times so overall vietnam has a very strong sense of power balancing vietnam does not want to put all eights or have a too much independent relationship with china so hence the limited involvement so these are the kind of uh four major types of patterns that that we could uh bring in to illustrate the how issue so now why the different responses i think domestic politics uh as highlighted early on by celine and also might clearly play a big role and selena early on i think i mentioned i highlighted quite a few uh issues like for example state pep about science about wealth location and public opinion and clearly we know that as a student of politics we know that the inter elite dynamics and also a political system all play a part and for this project that we have decided to group this cluster of a domestic conditions into two big explanatory variables so number one it's a elite legitimation and number two about power pluralization so these two variables are reflected along the two axis of this symmetry matrix so let me uh perhaps uh very briefly i talked about the first explanatory variable elite legitimation so as a factor it refers to uh what rule elites do regardless of the political system so all ruling elites want to maximize enhance and justify the authority to rule at home but the way how they achieve this the way how they legitimize their internal authority varies and basically there are three uh pathways of legitimation so from the slide you could see uh we highlighted about development based legitimation is the economic development growth base we call it as the performance legitimation so you need to perform economically in order to gain your legitimacy and there are other types of uh legitimation as well so the second one is uh particularistic so it's a particular idea or identity this can be a nationalism or perhaps a national base uh sense of a sentiment like for example a thai autonomy so all this identity a base legitimation is something we call as particularistic legitimation that exists side by side with the first legitimation which is performance so we have a two piece here and there is a third p the third p is the procedural legitimation things that are about democracy about rule of law but by having highlighted these three uh pathway of legitimation performance particularistic and procedural we are not suggesting that the ruling elites choose one over the other that's not the case in reality definitely in southeast asia very messy complex complicated political environment and we have seen that the ruling elites try to pursue all three but with different emphasis different degree and different forms of emphasis so here because of we are focusing on infrastructure development so we thought that it made more sense to contrast primarily the relative degree of development based legitimation with others especially identity based legitimation so that really explain for example uh the case of why malaysia and laos are more enthusiastic than the other countries because in these two cases performance legitimation are the principal pathway for elites to justify their rule and by contrast thailand and vietnam performance definitely economic performance definitely very important but when it comes to their relationship with china there are other pathway or legitimation that is equally if not more important vietnam is a very clear cut case anti-china sentiment anti-china nationalism certainly would limit and constrain of vietnam's china policy definitely on the belt and road but definitely also on south china sea and many other issues so that makes sense that explain why vietnam's case is a very limited involvement and whereby in thailand it's not so much about anti-china but it does has a lot to do with the identity element in this case would be uh the sentiment of uh thai autonomy uh so during our field work we have heard many thai elites are saying saying that this is thailand we want to do things in thai way and that clearly uh highlight a lot about the entire sense of identity and clearly we need to also uh um bear in mind that this is also a military regime and because of the perceived dependency of the thai regime on china i think the more reasons that uh politically the thai elites would want to keep some distance not going too far so that in order to uh kind of present a political shield again uh other contending elites or even the bottom up from the society these bring us to the second explanatory a variable which is on the left side of this matrix power pluralization and this is something that uh mike himself has been elaborating and also developing in his earlier works mainly on china but here we are trying to apply it uh to the case of civilization so we have a high and low here so power pluralization basically refers to the degree of power concentration centralization visa visa on the competing elites and also other segments of the society so why malaysia's case uh it's a fluctuated recalibrated because of decisions that made by our leaders will be challenged by different elites and also different parts of the society some same thing a similar logic for thailand uh so thailand also is very much even though under military regime but you could see at the bottom up but dynamics is very strong and as we talk we know that the political crisis is thailand is ongoing which is another evidence of the degree of power pluralization even under military origin so here uh this uh metrics uh clearly highlights that in order to explain how and why smaller countries respond to china back the belt and root project or in this case real projects differently we have to uh bear in mind these two big variables uh elite legitimation primarily and then uh the inter intervening a variable or in the form of uh the degree of uh power pluralization so with that let me make just a very quickly a few points about the uh uh your economic and also your political issues and this is a subject matter that we try to deal with in chapter seven the chapter just before the concluding chapter so we want to uh study this dimension primarily because we thought even though this project is about china back real railroad in railroad projects in southeast asia but clearly other powers other players are in the picture as well and we want to address the issue of the availability of alternative to uh china-backed projects so and when we started back in 2016 basically in southeast asia there was only one uh alternative scheme which is a japan scheme 2015 we knew that the rb government launched the so-called partnership for quality infrastructure so for quite some time a few years japan was perceived as a kind of the only alternative for southeast asian governments and in fact not all governments uh kind of could consider that the japan option uh either because of is too expensive or to some extent because of japan's own calculation for example bangkok chiang mai project has been talked about for many many years but quite recently um japan has decided that for economic reason they are not going ahead but what is interesting uh to say is that by the time we have completed our manuscript and uh in fact i would say 2018 is the turning point where we where we see more powers and players are also entering into this chessboard of infrastructure development earlier on u.s particularly i said that the infrastructure is not the game that we would play and that was at the beginning of a belt and road and all that but 2018 you do see uh there is a shifting uh uh attitude and there is a build act for example and later on followed by a number of uh either us initiated but also involving other quad members of japan india and also australia in the form of blue dot network and more recently we also heard about the so-called economic prosperity and network so all these becoming like uh offering more possible alternative to a smaller countries in the region and it's not just about japan us and also europe uh and it's not just about japan us and also uh other court members but europe also is becoming i would say a key a player uh also the same year 2018 in fact before u.s passed the act u.s has launched the eu asia connectivity so that make a very clear direction what is most interesting and that's my final point is china itself also by 2018 when celebrating the fifth anniversary of belt and road china itself began to talk about a new formula for belt and road initiative which is what they call as a third country or third party corporation so meaning that third country and the party mean that in addition to china and the host country other countries should be uh collaborated as well and at the very beginning in fact i think the main targets of uh the the main target partners of china's the third country corporation is actually japan and also uh india and uh we could see that uh during uh modis and also uh our base a visit to china so i think geopolitical and geo economic wise we are going to see a more dynamic uh picture where the more power and player are entering into this infrastructure development transport the more possible choices alternative that smaller states could have and should have and with that i will end my presentations to do before we get to the the q a is i have a couple um i have basically one question for each of our participants and i just thought that maybe we could uh um maybe we can um i can ask each of you or i i can ask them to all three of you and we can uh kind of think about them take which question first and and and uh how to get through them so mike the question i had for you was um you know i mean this is such a rich study that it's it's really hard for me to jump on a particular question uh especially when uh our pro our audience keeps on coming up with the same questions that i had so i had to come up with new ones but mike the one i have for you is um you know there was a lot of scoffing back in uh you know back in your say 10 15 20 years ago about china's you know china's intimations about establishing a high-speed rail network um and yet what you demonstrate is in fact um china was remarkably successful in doing so um and making creating the conditions necessary uh for this outward expansion and i guess i have a big question a little question the big question is why were we wrong you know what did we miss um and then the the other ques the smaller question is you talk a lot about indigenizing uh in china beyond simply kind of taking the technology and it was i was not clear about what that meant what indigenizing actually meant to say very very intrigued um selena the question i have for you is what does what do your findings have to say about the conventional wisdom of debt trap diplomacy uh which we have heard so much about uh i i'd really like to hear your answers because it sounds like you might have you know quite a bit to say uh and then which has a high degree of concentration and a high degree of legitimacy based on development sorry i didn't hear that because of the connection i didn't hear the earlier part sorry sure sure in quadrant one you had uh you know where you had high levels of concentration and high levels of development-based legitimacy um i would have put cambodia in that quadrant as well except i don't see the kind of enthusiasm um that was suggested in that quadrant i see something that's far more ambivalent and so i'm just curious about um kind of how that enthusiasm uh manifests itself and and and its enthusiasm on on the part of which kind of which segment of the uh of the the state versus the society even in even in a particularly concentrated uh top-down system so those those are the questions that i wanted to throw out uh to you there's there's there's a bunch more on deck but um mike did you um yeah i uh i was intrigued by your question uh i think um succinctly put was why were we wrong about the degree of progress and ultimate effect of china's domestic infrastructure build out and i would say we could also why are we predisposed to underestimate what may result from this initiative by both china and the southeast asian countries i think in short we're prone to underestimate what china has or is likely right to produce that that deserves a lot of discussion but i think that's the core question and i think uh or you could just put it positively why did china was why was china able to move so rapidly so my answer will sort of be on both of those why did we underestimate and why could they go so rapidly one of the to me interesting uh parts of the book it deals with the biography of the minister of railroads his name was leo georgian in fact as far as i know he's still living although in prison or at least under some kind of detention in china but he was a truly remarkable entrepreneur within the chinese bureaucratic system so i would think often time when you find big dramatic changes and i'm not one that describes all change to all scene wise leaders but in any case entrepreneurship and vision are important and i think first thing i would say is on this issue the central government got the right guy in charge of the program uh and so that's the first thing secondly china really was more pragmatic than you might think uh leo george key theory was is the best technology lies in europe uh we should unabashedly buy that technology and cut a deal we'll give the europeans some at least short-term business in exchange for the rights to this technology the rights to adapt it and build our own brand name and let's put it this way the europeans in particular the french and uh the canadians to a certain extent and the japanese all were willing to make that deal so china actually in the setting here made a commercially attractive deal now i think there's a lot of regret now of having transformed so much uh technology to china that now they're facing a competitive industry but the point is you had a good chinese leader for these purposes and you also had an attractive financial arrangement thirdly and this is something that the chinese i believe share with almost all the southeast asian leaders with whom we spoke and that is the the chinese aphorism if you want to get rich build a road the idea is build infrastructure and growth will come it's sort of the field of dreams approach you know build it and the people will fill the stands right well frankly we're in such a frame of mind of seeing china is imposing everything on its surrounding environment that it doesn't always occur to us that maybe the chinese are actually proposing something people are attracted to and so i think there's a basic shared view to various extents depending on the country but the notion is you can't wait for people to get rich and then build infrastructure you got to build the infrastructure and then development will occur along these nodes and the us got out of the infrastructure business both domestically to some extent and now you can see the results of that here but also in terms of multilateral organizations world bank aid all of these development agencies either country or multilateral to greater or lesser degrees got out of the infrastructure business well china was the only one in it and so a lot of countries if they wanted to move in this direction china was supplying what people a needed and secondly had a view that infrastructure leads development uh of course all of this couldn't have happened if you hadn't had china growing 10 percent 9.7 compounded for 30 years i mean china had a lot of money particularly when the economy when you still had financial repression and the state could tap these resources so i think and i think those factors account for both uh that push externally uh just say one last thing china's external push came after it had substantially built out its domestic system and just like the french in the 19th century who had which had too much steel wanted to export it to southeast asia to build railroads china's now got too much steel and concrete and and has employment needs for engineers and so forth so china's got excess capacity and that's one reason that it's so uh interested in exporting this but it's a complicated story but i think we we are a little too much in the uh framework of all the reasons china's going to fail uh rather than let's look at some of the assets here and why they might accomplish more than you expect okay andy shall i answer the next uh the question you have for me okay so your question what do i make of the that trap uh diplomacy right i think that phrase that trap diplomacy suggests um that is deliberate on the part of the chinese but i also think that that term is the result of punditry and is also being politicized by certain uh quarters and people with certain agendas uh whether it's with respect to china uh or or something else or selling just selling newspapers um what but i think that that term is oversimplified uh the whole uh issue of that is actually uh very much more nuanced okay um i can understand why people would say you know you know that it looks like a debt trend i mean if you think that laos um you know the real national security and uh national sovereignty issues that could be uh affected by this uh being in debt to china well laos for instance is about um the debt that laos owed to china is about 45 percent allows gdp that's a huge amount right um but um and you know what what are the means so how is china go as laos going to pay this right but i think we have to be very clear that a lot of these projects uh you know it's southeast asian countries or you know uh even a country like sri lanka going to china asking for help so um we have to be mindful that laos uh is willing to take on this risk knowing full well that uh the the risks that are involved the the uh the amount of debt that's gonna owe china which might have to be repaid in terms of land concessions or you know uh in terms of the minerals uh potassium and bauxite that they have to send to china um so for for a lot in the way that the people like laos are thinking is if we don't take this risk then we will not we will not grow we will be poor so this is literally almost a quote i'm i'm paraphrasing it but it was a quote from one of our interviews and this kind of sentiment is actually very prevalent in uh laos and uh different parts of southeast asia as well um and the other thing that we want to we want to bear in mind is that when china gives up these loans it is carrying on risk for itself too uh risk to its own banking system so i think that you know you you you have heard reports of chinese bankers coming out to one of these kind of loans that are being um uh being given to countries uh developing countries right and and one of the things we have to bear in mind that actually in 2014 and i think it's uh in the book it's written in a book in 2014 actually china suspended loans to laos precisely because they fear uh the impact of this kind of loans uh knowing that law that laos will not be able to return this loans i will have on you know their own banking system so i i think it's much more nuanced than that and that's my uh that's my short answer uh andy can i respond to your excellent question and perhaps the selena will need your help to put up the slide for the two by two metrics uh andy can you hear me um but right okay i think he should be back at well let me uh address that um why the i think andy asks a very good question as to uh why cambodia uh is not the listed in the quadrant one so i agree with uh and this assumption also observation that uh theoretically logically uh cambodia should be uh there and that's clearly the case but because our book project actually concentrate on the real uh road project rather than a belt and road related project in general and hence that we didn't we choose to focus on laos which actually has a railroad project on going and the most receptive one and we already have it here but in my other project that i try to cover um the broader types of infrastructure project the one that i collaborate with a british scholar dr lee jones we tried to compare all 10 asean countries responses to belt and root related projects and in that particular project clearly shows that cambodia just like laos is very enthusiastic about china uh back infrastructure project and in the real cases you do see that uh cambodia has a lot of projects with china and but that concentrate on other types of a project so the issue here is not so much about cambodia not in quadrant one the issue here is why cambodia's uh infrastruct very close uh infrastructure projects with china concentrate on other types of infrastructure rather than real and hence i think the variables about the development needs and also urgency are come into play i i think might recall uh during one of a few work in cambodia we actually uh uh rented a car travel from uh the capital uh phnom penh to sihanouk's view it is quite a not a very long distance it's only like 180 kilometer but it took us five or six hours and uh because of the road condition is so bad so that shows that because of the level of development of individual countries in this case uh cambodia different the governments of respective countries will have to judge other than political logic they also need to think along the development logic so some infrastructure projects are more urgently unneeded than the others so so cambodia expressway ports and other things that would be more urgent more needed than say for example a high-speed rail in the case of laos is very different i think selena early on make it very clearly it's for them it's kind of a do or die because of laos is a landlord country so they see a landline uh they see a high-speed rail as kind of a a solution both for their development and also a political law logic that they need to they need to have it in order to uh overcome and also address these gaps in many ways so i hope uh i answer uh your excellent question uh andy thank you could i say a word on that please mike yeah i just can't with cambodia is a really interesting case and it makes the general point that each of these countries is tremendously complex and the kinds of things that influence decisions and their complexity are not captured by one or two variables but cambodians see and you know much more about it than i do but i was struck by the degree to which the cambodians though they're seen as so closely aligned with china the degree of penetration by chinese commercial interests gambling interests tourists uh have let's put it this way created a certain amount of cultural friction with with the cambodian so that that struck me also china while it might on the one hand be um you know seen in in threatening terms is also seen as a big power that will protect cambodia from uh thailand and vietnam so these countries sometimes see security problems where where we're not attuned to that and therefore see china as a as a as comprehensively more useful than maybe we quite understand it's it's really true i mean there's a there's i'll come back to to to that point uh in my in my just my concluding um uh words but what i want thank you mike and and and thank you uh uh celina and chung tui we're running a little bit behind schedule uh in part because of the um connectivity problems that i've been having so what i'd like to do is just move to the q a um what i wanted to ask is i wanted to start if if i could with um our our friend and colleague peter boutellier uh his question is he said he says two related questions um the first is what do we know about the proposed financing of these large projects but the second one is is it possible that some of these projects will be affected by a shortage of chinese financial resources due to the chinese and global economic slowdown and apparent shift in ccp priorities um uh he doesn't say this in the question but i'm i'm uh inferring uh in in in part due to um the fallout from kovitt uh so i'll just throw the the question open uh to uh to all of you uh and uh whoever would like to um um well i'd be glad to just throw out a couple of ideas for my colleagues to elaborate on or correct or indeed declare to be inaccurate let's talk about the slowdown first well first of all china is is slowing down has been before covet certainly covet has reduced it further but my understanding is is growth is positive in china there are various estimates about how positive but probably at least a couple of percent even if you're kind of conservative and china uh i i think is right on an upward trajectory uh if you take the the nader of covet for the chinese economy as your base so they they are slowing down have been slowing down but they don't have zero growth and of course i think they still amount to what about one-third of total global growth right so uh yes they'll probably slow down probably for another reason too and that is china is now because of its experiences in pakistan and with with chavez and in venezuela some problematic projects in africa and so forth china is beginning to pay more attention to political risk and partly for lessons that learned in southeast asia uh as one of them put it to us you know democratic countries are a little more risky to deal with because they change people and networks and and who you're negotiating with so uh i i think china is paying more attention to financial and political risk and that combined with a slowing economy combined with covid combined with frankly there are a lot of people in china that are upset that china's devoting so much uh foreign aid as they would see it abroad and in fact uh a professor at qinghua university xu jong-un uh has wrote a an extensive critique of all these projects particularly in southeast asia but around the world and condemned the party for these uh profligate uh uh things and certainly covid points to the need for healthcare and all all of that china's aging population so there's there's a big pushback in china itself so my guess is yes it will slow down but there's a countervailing attitudes among strategic people in china and that is the us is stumbling the us doesn't have its act together china's performing fairly well at least in some measures i'm not endorsing all their policies like xinjiang and so forth but the point is i think there's a feeling in china now is our opportunity let's push so yes i expect some slow down but not as dramatic as some people might either anticipate or hope thanks mark selena maybe i'll just add that you know um not so much about the financial part but uh in terms of whether kovit is actually slowing down some of these projects um it one of the cases uh it might be in certain cases where kovitt really hard but for example in in now's the project was actually suspended for like 23 but it uh you know after 23 days it came back online and it's due it's going to be in time for the scheduled uh finishing of the project which is december 2021 and that's just next year in one year's time so it's it's uh it's oh things are moving ahead you know so it's not um there will be some you know some stumbling along the way but i don't think that at the end of the day um that it will be significantly uh changing the trajectory of the of the real world projects professor peterson was my teacher when i was a student at science so very happy to see uh he posed two questions here let me deal with his second question before dealing with the first so the second question is about whether or not you know to what extent the shortage of chinese owner financial resources might have an impact on these dynamics early on i mentioned about the the new formula so to speak china's third country corporation and to me that initiative on that that arrangement that proposal that idea perhaps that indicates to a large extent china realized about the financial sustainability issue on his part but also about the political sustainability of a china-backed project so that initiative perhaps is an indicator of china's own financial um you know sustainability of supporting all these projects uh regionally and globally it's going to be uh if not has already become a factor in this whole process and then the earlier question about the financing uh mode and all that clearly i think this is a big big factor if we concentrate primarily on the host country's perspective for example in the case of malaysia some people call the malaysia as a kind of ground zero of belt and road in southeast asia so in malaysia you see a different types of china-related real projects and they all vary in many ways but definitely a financial mode i would say it differs for example ecrl it's a true loan and it is the link to uh the scandal of 1mdb so it make the whole process become politically highly contestable but renegotiation helped to address that but it does involve a kind of loan and also a debt issue but on other projects that china has in malaysia for example uh the german jb double tracking that is actually less a problem because of it not so much about loan and then china also i have other like the different infrastructure projects for example in a place called pera in bhaktu gaja crrc establish a very i would say good project in the sense that you know they are establishing a factory to produce manufacture locomotive the rolling stock and with the aim of using malaysia as the hub to uh produce and export for the demands and needs in malaysia and also asean region so those are investments they are not the loan enhancer you know the so-called that trap issue and all that i don't think it's irrelevant here thank you all i'm going to move to uh the next question which comes from perry bloom um and he asks about the impact of china's dam building on the upper mekong uh and and the effect that that has or the on the um the high-speed rail development and vice versa so do the two kind of exist as to mix a metaphor ships passing in the night or do they actually have some sort of a kind of an interactive effect that might complicate things maybe i'll take a step at that should i um okay because i i do look at them building activities um i actually want to say i mean i'm going to try and unpack this question because it's a very broad question and um i'm trying to get to the root of it but um one of the things that we have to bear in mind when we look at this um is that all the dams all the countries in southeast asia are involved in them buildings so you'll find that in laos there's a very controversial damn uh the excitable redemption right and um so laos is second highest riparian on the on the mekong so i would say the national governments uh with perhaps the exception of thailand which has uh voiced some criticisms of some of these activities um well under prior that might have changed but previously there was but um most of the national governments actually do not criticize the dam building projects on the upper mekong the criticisms that we hear and this is where we need to bear in mind the differences between the elites and the lower levels of society the non-state actors the criticisms that we hear actually from civil society groups uh i wish thailand has a you know a very vibrant civil society there um those those are the criticisms uh they are coming from there not the national governments so um whether that the dam actually affects the national responses to the various high-speed rail i don't really think so because both projects the damn building the high speed rear projects are actually widely supported by governments so if we mean if we need national responses to mean government responses and i say no and the other thing is that um you know under belt and road these dams and the high spirit projects are all coming together under berlin road they've been placed on the belt and road initiative as belt and road projects so they are linked in that way um i think that's that's all i have to say i don't know where the mic and change is before we move to selena i just want to follow up do you um are you saying that there's some kind of coordination that's going i mean because i i i would be surprised if there was the kind of coordination at least on on the part of the various chinese um actors involved on those two sets of infrastructure projects but uh no so i don't think that the um there is actually coordination among the ministries or perhaps even the companies um but because you have the hydropower so cyanohydral building all these dams and then the the uh infrastructure project crc doing all the um the high-speed railway staff are not suggesting more but as in being designated as a bri project they're all being lumped together under bri um and you know it's it's about developing the mekong region so basically the in the mekong region the infrastructure projects whether they are dams whether they are high-speed railways have been lunged together under the theme of development under bri thanks sweetheart mike you might just inject a thought here i i believe the question was asked about the upper mekong and i think we have to disaggregate between the upper mekong and then let us say once it gets into laos uh there's a lot of worry and at least i've been up in the uh area of yunnan and the headwaters of the mekong china has an inner a water law and it's basically selena will correct me if i'm wrong but basically china within water that flows within china's borders is china's to do what it wants that's the basic principle here and so there's been a lot of criticism of china's building of a huge cascade of dams within its own boundaries uh and that has a lot of negative effects well it puts a lot of power for regulation of water flow in china which you could understand lower riparian states wouldn't appreciate but there isn't on the other hand and that is that most of the flow of the mekong is generated once it's out of china so all of the water problems on the mekong are not because of china although a lot are so the the hydrology gets a little relevant here the other thing i would say is that the laos have a they're they're asking where's our revenue gonna come from in the future and simplistically put they want to charge a tax on all the railroad activity going through they want to be a toll booth so to speak and then on electricity they want to use their great hydro potential to become the battery of asia and they're already exporting power to vietnam and and back to china actually so uh you know it's a complicated uh the calculus is and china is meeting some goals of the players and at the same time it does its own thing in china is offending the interests of southeast asian countries so i think it's a complicated picture right maybe i just uh because mike reminded me of something um the water law that you're referring to takes what is known as the absolute sovereignty view of um the resources that travel through river resources to travel through china so um it's an absolute sovereignty view meaning i can do whatever i want with the resources that go through my territory um so this this is obviously at odds with local riparian i mean and most critically actually vietnam who is suffering from the drought that's enemy com so a lot of the countries actually from from uh the drought simpson center is very much involved in this brian ellen and all that um the the drought so vietnam has actually been suffering from that and uh it has been uh quite unhappy with it but i just want to point out one thing here and very quickly our end is that vietnamese companies are actually involved in them buildings as well uh you know um the long problem them we were we were there right yeah but the blood pressure of them is actually built in partnership with the with the lao government uh thai companies are involved and so are vietnamese companies so you know there is all this um uh what i'm trying to say is that while countries may be unhappy with what china is doing up up there there's very little they can do uh downstream or even voice strong cruisers because they have very little moral authority and they are in different degrees involved in this stem building projects on their own parts of their they all take this view that they have a right to develop their uh resources right even vietnam when these companies are involved in the upstream activities it's really interesting that you say that it reminds me of work that i was doing on hydropower way back in the day that some of the biggest opponents to these large uh centrally mandated projects were from the local governments that wanted to build their own smaller dams so uh you know it's uh we seem to just see the internationalization of uh kind of some local domestic politics which is fascinating and leads me to the last question we don't we're running out of time but maybe we can do a lightning round um really the basis of the question is um this comes from hospital and a phd student um the uh and the question is what happens when china is the cause of conflict between governments and citizens um and she cites myanmar as an example and the uh uh miyazone dam and uh it's a complex question but maybe one of the ways to to to get at it is by doing it in a lightning round like this so um uh i don't know who would like to go first um tree you want to go first um i actually uh i think that question perhaps is for selena and mike but i did notice the other two questions uh uh they were before that if perhaps that's a melee for me maybe i address the other two questions the question from mario um is about the uh uh her observation that the performance based extermination and identity base don't seem to be the same and why they were on the vertical axis of the metrics so the answer is yeah they are different there are two different uh two of the three different pathways of legitimation that i talked about and the reason why they were there on the matrix it's a mainly because of i am what i was emphasizing about the relative degree of development versus the other pathway and hence they were on top of the metric metrics and then for two ping who's the question about whether or not the smaller countries to what extent uh small countries in southeast asia embrace the idea of connectivity uh the answer is clearly that uh from and i learned from various scholars uh southeast asia based scholars like the late eileen bavira chiang wana so and so forth all asan countries big and small developed or less developed all are committed and take connectivity and very seriously in fact early on we know that we asean does have the master plan for connectivity so that itself uh already shows that uh all 10 arsene countries take connectivity development very seriously but they do face financial constraint and other technical constraints and hence the need and also the demand for external partnership belt and road come into picture but there are also uh other external players that are coming into play and uh i would think that over the long run we are going to see a more broader and also uh more competitive processes that would be uh come under what mike has described in the book as the balanced connectivity thank you very very much i thought it might lightening round just you in effect asked what are uh to the degree that civil society and uh let's say domestic societal interests come to bear on this how do they generate conflict and what can be the result and it seems to me the ultimate result is projects can be scrubbed you can invest as they did in the midsume dam in myanmar you know millions and millions of dollars in feasibility studies preliminary foundation work and then the regime comes under sufficient societal pressure even a military regime like in myanmar that they in fact back out of the project in myanmar is now trying to find other projects to satisfy the chinese as replacements so to speak um but i think you you can see societal groups get upset for a number of reasons vietnamese got upset when there were offshore disputes with china nationalism kicked in and any talk of selling or leasing land to china became a non-starter topic you can see it when the chinese bring in workers and uh i i won't mention the countries but you know sometimes it it it has a waft of colonialism i remember one person described well one chinese worker is worth five other countries workers which is worth ten other countries workers that is to say we have a preference for chinese workers well you bring them in and they are in enclaves and you know you get lots of young males in a society you see this with our own military outposts in the pacific so you've got lots of societal uh friction that way and then corruption i mean the malaysians you correct me if i'm wrong uh chiang chi but essentially najib was too corrupt for the society to tolerate is that a fair characterization and you see the results in the 2018 election one of the main reasons right so i guess this gets to our overall point is china's powerful china's imp got lots of resources but there are lots of points of pushback and china if it's going to be you know influential sustained and bring a lot of its projects to successful completion is going to have to learn selena do you want to uh yeah just just very quickly to add on to mike's point which is that um at the end of the day i think we have to remember something right there is such a thing as great power restraint and sometimes when uh china becomes the issue between governments and society china can be the solution uh what china will do because recently in cambodia we all know about those casinos right chinese run casinos and it has been going on for years where civil society and you know people on the ground have been complaining about the criminal criminal activities in sihanoukville and in other places as well in cambodia and the cambodia government is on the chinese side right so what uh so one of the reasons is that you know um the chinese embassy in cambodia is not doing anything about these kind of negative uh public perception but recently what cambodia did was to uh sorry what china did was to close down some of these casinos i mean so what i'm just saying is that uh what i want to highlight you know my last sentence which is that small states have agency and great powers need to exercise restraint uh when it comes to certain things like even public opinion they have to react uh you can't be a leader without followers uh in the words or some other academic friends that we have who say the same thing right i mean you can't be a leader without followers so great power stream smaller students can bind their hands thanks elena so mike uh do you have uh any penultimate words of wisdom to uh close us out well uh no other than to thank you and just say that um i think this book probably points in two directions as as china becomes a little more let's say closed relative to the last in terms of interviews and so on we're going to be pulled towards more comparative studies and looking at china's impact on surrounding or other countries in other words we're going to have to do more comparative research from a variety of purges and so i think in terms of just the methodology of the book this may indicate at least one direction for future uh research the other thing is that i think infrastructure is messy everywhere and we can spend our time looking at all the problems china generates with its activity put that way but on the other hand infrastructure has problems everywhere and so i think it's an argument to when you look at these kinds of areas whether it's dam building infrastructure of other sorts in many respects china's got the same problems that everybody else has thanks mike um let me just i want to thank all of you as well but let me just say just a few more words in closing um that you know mike selena chung tui you've broadened the parameter you've done a number of things with this book you've broadened the parameters of the study of china you've made a compelling case for the importance of in-depth field work and multiple countries in multiple countries studies and you've set the bar very very high for scholarly collaboration and you've also put flesh on the pared-down analyses of bri making the actors the stakes and the strategies almost tangible by comparison and so what i would tell the people who are who are still with us if you want to see what the future is this is it so i want to thank the three of you for sharing with us this wonderful study and and your time and i want to thank all of the people in the audience for attending

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Length: 91min 47sec (5507 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 26 2020