One-day
Workshop, 25 April 2008
Co-hosted
by the Centre for the Study of Political Economy, University of Manchester
and
the British Inter-University
China
Centre
Does the Growth of China Challenge Everything We
Thought We Knew About Development?
Organisers:
Professor Nicola Phillips and Dr Elena Barabantseva
For details e-mail e.v.barabantseva@manchester.ac.uk
This one-day
workshop will address the theme of the challenge to established understandings
of ‘development’ posed by China’s
recent political and economic success. The workshop will consider a range of
issue areas and theoretical terrains, to explore key political economy
relationships involved in development processes, the possibilities for
effective development strategies in the contemporary global political economy,
the political relationships involved in the contemporary development agenda,
and the overarching theoretical frameworks within which the study of
development is rooted. Indicative areas that will be covered by papers and
discussion at the workshop include (but are not limited to) the following:
- How does the emergence of China
call into question the ideologies and agendas of development that are
currently prevalent and have prevailed since the end of the second world
war?
- How, theoretically, can we
understand the particular combination of authoritarian socialist politics
and increasingly market-based forms of economic organisation in China?
- To what extent has China
overturned popular understandings of the political economy of ‘late
industrialisation’?
- What implications does the
political economy of Chinese development carry for ideas about a global
‘race to the bottom’ in terms of labour conditions, environmental
standards, and so on?
- What issues does the emergence of China
raise for understandings of the nature of urbanisation in development
processes?
- Has the apparent boon from Chinese
demand for oil, energy and resources from other developing countries now
put paid to the received wisdom that dependence on raw materials for
export is developmentally regressive?
- Has the emergence of China
disturbed the prevalent north-south structure of global development
politics?
The workshop will
be held at the University
of Manchester, hosted and
co-sponsored by the British Inter-University China Centre (BICC) and the Centre
for the Study of Political Economy (CSPE). It will help to build a small international
network of people working on issues relating to global development in the
context of the emergence of China, which could then serve as a longer-term
basis for thinking about future collaborative efforts that take advantage of
both disciplinary and area studies expertise.
The workshop will
be explicitly oriented to producing work for publication. The working papers
series of CSPE and BICC will be used in the first instance for early
dissemination of the papers prepared for the workshop, with a view to the
subsequent possibility of considering a special section or issue of a journal or
an edited volume. Both possibilities will only be pursued if it were felt that
there was the potential for producing an issue or volume of the highest quality
and likely impact. At the very least, it is intended that individual colleagues
presenting papers at the workshop will do so with a strong commitment to participate
in subsequent publication plans and the workshop would be oriented to
supporting this objective.
Structure of the workshop
The workshop
will be structured around four sessions, each featuring three
‘roundtable’-style introductory presentations of 10 minutes followed by open
discussion.
Session 1:
9.00-10.30
The nature of
Chinese development and the Chinese conception of development
Session 2:
11.00-12.30
China and twentieth-century development theory
Session 3:
2-3.30
Energy, resources
and environment in Chinese and global development
Session 4:
4.00-5.30
China and the future of global development