Chinese Railway Infrastructure and PRC Power in Southeast Asia: Big and Small Nations React

Prof. David Lampton (Johns Hopkins - SAIS)

Topic

Building high and conventional-speed railways in S.E. Asia was not a Chinese idea, but once Beijing had the capital, the technology, the outward-looking leadership, and the increasingly advanced domestic high-speed system, it has promoted its rail technology and construction acumen in Southeast Asia, indeed much of the world, including Europe. China is making progress in implementing a connectivity vision of railways linking seven Southeast Asian countries to southern China. Why is China doing this? What strategy lies behind these efforts? What do we learn about Chinese foreign policy making and underlying domestic politics? What leverage do smaller partner countries have when dealing with the Chinese behemoth? And, what does this case tell us about industrial policy, its effectiveness, and its implications for geo-economic competition? This is the story of a sequence of complex negotiations and projects moving forward faster than
my outside observers realize.

Biography

David M. Lampton is Senior Research Fellow at the SAIS Foreign Policy Institute and Professor Emeritus at Johns Hopkins--SAIS. Immediately prior to his current post he was Oksenberg-Rohlen Fellow at Stanford University’s Asia-Pacific Research Center from 2019-2020. For more than two decades prior to that he was Hyman Professor and Director of China Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Having started his academic career at The Ohio State University, Lampton is former Chairman of the The Asia Foundation, former President of the National Committee on United States-China Relations, and former Dean of Faculty at SAIS.

Among many written works, academic and popular, he is author of: Same Bed, Different Dreams: Managing U.S.- China Relations , 1989-2000 (University of California Press, 2001); The Three Faces of Chinese Power: Might, Money, and Minds (University of California Press, 2008); Following the Leader: Ruling China, from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping , initially published in January 2014 by University of California Press and reissued in a second edition with a new Preface in 2019); and, The Making of Chinese Foreign and Security Policy (editor, Stanford University Press, 2001). His most recent book (with Selina Ho and Cheng-Chwee Kuik) is, Rivers of Iron: Railroads and Chinese Power in Southeast Asia (University of California Press, 2020).

He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University in political science where, as an undergraduate student, he was a firefighter. Lampton has an honorary doctorate from the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Far Eastern Studies. He served for many years on the Board of Trustees of Colorado College and was in the US Army Reserve in the enlisted and commissioned ranks.

Organiser: SOAS China Institute

Contact email: sci@soas.ac.uk