The General Education Office (GEO) at UIC is starting a Lecture Series with the broader theme, "Cultural Impact of the Belt and Road Initiative". In-house and external speakers across the Belt-Road region will be invited to present their research papers under this series throughout the academic year, which will be published as an edited book. The first lecture of this series will be given by Professor Khun Eng Kuah on Monday 30 October from 1:00 to 3:00 pm in T29-105.
Professor Khun Eng Kuah
This lecture series will focus on the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI) which is sometimes referred to as the Silk Road, an ancient route of transportation and trade for merchants across Eurasia. The Silk Road was also one of the major paths of cultural interaction and exchange among various civilizations including Arabs, Chinese, Central Asians, Indians and Europeans. With the announcement from Chinese President Xi Jinping to build a Maritime Silk Road and Land-based Silk Road to connect 68 countries, the idea of ‘One Belt, One Road’ emerged. The major objective was to revive the ancient Silk Road by building ports, roads, railways and other infrastructure to enhance global connectivity. In addition, this initiative may also contribute social, religious, environmental, educational, economic and technological impact across the included regions.
Professor Kuah’s talk is titled “Cultural Intersection: One Belt One Road Initiative and The Singapore Diaspora Connections”. During this lecture, Professor Kuah will talk about how the Belt and Road Initiative has helped establish China’s ascendency on the world stage. While infrastructure development constitutes its primary pillar of reaching out to the world, the BRI Initiative has also cemented China as an important cultural player. Professor Kuah will examine new forms of cultural intersection between Mainland Chinese and the Singapore Chinese Diaspora. This cultural intersection has been continued since the early years of migration, intensified since the Open Door Policy in 1978 and consolidated with the BRI. There are several areas of cultural intersection that will be explored. These include food, Chinese popular culture, education, consumption and tourism. While there are similarities between these two groups of Chinese, there is in fact quite a gulf. Professor Kuah will go on to explore how the BRI reinforced cultural intersection and at the same time established new sets of dynamics among these two groups of Chinese, creating competitions and tensions. In doing so, it expands its transnational ambition to entrench itself more fully in the Singapore Chinese Diaspora community.
About Professor Kuah
Professor Kuah is presently an Honorary Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong, and will take up a visiting position at Nanyang Technological University in January 2018. Previously, she was Professor of Anthropology and Head of the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Monash University Malaysia. Prior to this, she was Associate Professor at the University of Hong Kong, a visiting scholar and coordinate research scholar at the Harvard-Yenching Institute at Harvard University, a visiting fellow at Oxford University as well as a visiting professor at the University of Paris Diderot. Her research focus is on Chinese Diaspora-Mainland China Connections and Religion and Politics, focusing on Buddhism, politics and philanthropy as well as gender and social movements. She conducts her research primarily in Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and China. She is the author of two books (one with a Chinese version), editor/co-editor of nine edited books, guest editor/co-editor of four journal issues and numerous journal articles and book chapters. Her new book Social Cultural Engineering and the Singapore State, will be published in 2018 by Springer (Singapore, London and New York).
Report: Samuel Burgess
Photograph provided by GEO
Editors: Deen He, Samantha Burns
(From MPRO)
