Transport, communications, and infrastructure

As China continues its rise in the world, transport, communications and infrastructure have emerged as a necessity for developing and sustaining its growth. The current flagship project of the Chinese government is the Belt and Road Initiative, the largest programme for mobility and connectivity the world has seen, which includes railroads, pipelines, seaports, digital connectivity, policy coordination, and cultural exchanges. Beijing suggests that it indicates a ‘new type of international relations’, and some argue that it indicates the shift from an American to a Chinese world order. The BRI is the kind of empirical phenomenon that is best approached through the kind of futures-oriented, stakeholder-led, and multi-disciplinary research with China expertise that LUCC is outstandingly able to undertake.

Lancaster University has a strong history of research and consultancy relating to China and digital communication, mobility, and transport, including on a number of projects researching the Belt and Road Initiative. We have a joint college in Weihai, Shandong province, together with Beijing Jiaotong University, which focuses on infrastructure. We also have campuses in Africa and Southeast Asia, as well as a network of academic, government, social, and business partners, with whom we conduct research on the broader interactions, intersections and interdependencies involved in China’s overseas presence.

Recent publications on transport, communications, and infrastructure

Jones, L., & Zeng, J. (2019) 'Understanding China’s “Belt and Road Initiative”: Beyond “Grand Strategy” to a State Transformation Analysis'. Third World Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2018.1559046

Zeng, J. (2019), 'Narrating China's belt and road initiative'. Global Policy. 10(2), pp. 207-216.

Nordin, A.H.M. and M. Weissmann (2018) ‘Will Trump make China great again? The Belt and Road initiative and international order’, International Affairs. 94(2), pp. 231-249.

Luan, S., Chen, C., Zhang, B., Han, J., Liu, J. (2018) ‘Gabor Convolutional Networks’, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing. 27(9), pp. 4357 - 4366.

Liu, Y., Han, J., Zhang, Q., Wang, L. (2018) ‘Salient Object Detection Via Two-Stage Graphs’, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology. pp. 1

Guo, Y., Ding, G., Han, J. (2018) ‘Robust Quantization for General Similarity Search’, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing 27(2), pp. 949-963.

Guozhi Cao, Lei Yang, Lingxuan Liu et al. (2018) ‘Environmental incidents in China: Lessons from 2006 to 2015’, Science of The Total Environment, 633, pp. 1165–1172.

Resources on Transport, communications, and infrastructure

Belt and Road Blog: weekly analysis on the Belt and Road Initiative.

White Papers of the Chinese Government: programmatic documents explaining China’s activities in areas such as outer space, the Internet, the environment and climate change.

MERICS China Mapping: rich visual renderings of many China-related transport and infrastructure initiatives, including the Belt and Road, from the Mercantor Institute for China Studies in Germany.

Website Test behind the Great Firewall of China: handy tool for checking whether a certain online site is available in China.