Since I first started University I have spent my time studying and researching Chinese international relations in the UK and China, spending roughly two thirds of my time in the former and a third in the latter. After studying international politics at Warwick, with Prof. Shaun Breslin, and in Hong Kong, with Dr. Nicholas Thomas, I joined the British Inter-University China Centre in 2007. After my Manchester MA in Contemporary China, and some time studying Chinese language at Jilin University, I began my doctoral research with Prof. William A. Callahan and Prof. Maja Zehfuss in 2008. I was lucky to spend a year at Peking University in 2009-2010 as part of my doctoral study. I love dim sum, Maoist propaganda films and loud debates on Chinese IR, all of which are readily available in Manchester, which makes it the perfect place to be doing my PhD. My research is concerned with the implications of how we think about time and space, in the context of contemporary China. This means I am interested in all kinds of spatial and temporal concepts, like spacing, recycling and reversibility, as well as in the current affairs and identity politics of China. When I am not reading I love to meet new people and get them talking, which is why I am engaged in a number of organisations that you can find out more about here.

Current projects:

I am currently planning a volume on Innovation and/of China under globalization, to be co-edited with Nicola Horsburgh at the University of Oxford.

I have spent October 2011 to January 2012 as a visiting scholar to the Swedish Institute of International Affairs (Utrikespolitiska Institutet) in Stockholm. During this period I worked in their East Asia programme, with Dr. Linus Hagström and Dr. Johan Lagerkvist amongst others. Some of my participation in the Swedish public debate is accessible online, including my commentary on the UI blog, appearance on TV-programme Studio 12, and broadcast of one of my public lectures.

My thesis:

The coming decade, it is said, will be China’s decade. Popular media and academia report with great anxiety on China’s rise and regularly predict at what point in time China will surpass the US as the first economy of the world. The world’s future, it is said, will be China’s future – it is just a question of time.

These discussions of the future of China in the world are engaged in pre/dicting and pre/scribing, of speaking and writing this future into existence before it has come about. Under scrutiny in my thesis is this world-making, or 'worlding'. At the very basis of such imaginations of what China is, was and will be, and of what China does, did and will mean to the world lie assumptions about time and space. A hereto-neglected aspect of 'worlding' lies in the way such spatio-temporal imaginings reorganise the world, through the way these terms are conceptualised and played out against one another. The world’s future as China’s future is not just a question of time. It is also a question of space.

In the case of China in the world there are two common political cosmologies. The first is what I call 'modernist space', that of space as calculable, bounded space, as containers of societies. The second is what has been referred to as a space "with no outside" (无外), what I call 'holistic space'. The first kind of space comprises common western conceptualisations of nation states, modernisation and development. 'Cultures', 'societies', 'civilizations' and 'nations' are imagined as having an integral relation to bounded spaces, internally coherent and differentiated from each other by separation. The second kind of space, 'holistic space', has parallels with some extreme ideas of globalisation as free unbounded space, where everything is always already networked and connected to everything else. It is, moreover, prominent in the Chinese concept of Tianxia, or 'All-under-heaven', which has become increasingly popular with both a domestic and international audience. It is developed at least partly in response to perceived problems in the Westphalian system, and claims to do away with them.

The two spatial imaginaries are commonly described as opposites in the literatures, with one replacing the other. First, it is said, pre-modern China had a holistic view of space. This cosmology was replaced by a modernist territorial imaginary when China had to transform into a modern (nation)state. Now, it is claimed again, the territorial notion of space is no longer plausible under globalisation, and China is deterritorialising. My thesis challenges such notions through arguing that both these spatial imaginaries are working simultaneously in contemporary China and that they rely on each other. My argument is that although they are portrayed as opposites, the most common ways of speaking of China in the world are problematic in precisely the same way: they align spatial difference in a temporal sequence, a move which prevents the conceptualisation of the other as equal, or coeval.

My thesis traces this problematic through the way IR theorists conceive of China in the world and subsequently how they have played out on the ground through the 'harmonious world' discourse as it was negotiated in my case study, Expo 2010 Shanghai China. I draw on the form of tactical wordplay that has developed as a prominent form of resistance amongst Chinese 'netizens', in combination with the thought of Jaques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard, to rethink 'harmonious world' in a way that opens it up to the challenges that open time and open space could, and should, present us with.

Research interests: the "Chinese school" of IR, Tianxia, poststructuralism, harmony, conceptions of time and space, world fairs, Expo 2010 Shanghai China.