Assessing China’s Belt and Road Initiative: ASIA: “Dam Diplomacy? Chinese Dam Building and Water Disputes in Asia” (Friday, Sept. 17, 2021)

The first lecture for the Fall Semester in the series Assessing China’s Belt and Road Initiative will present

ASIA: “Dam Diplomacy? Chinese Dam Building and Water Disputes in Asia”

Speakers: Selina Ho and Carla Freeman

Discussant: Jessica Liao

Hosts: Center for the Study of Asia & Global Development Policy Center

Friday, September 17, 2021, 9-10 a.m. EST

About the speakers: 

Selina Ho is Assistant Professor in International Affairs at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. She specializes in Chinese politics and foreign policy, with a focus on infrastructure politics and water disputes. Her work stands at the intersection of comparative politics and international relations. She is the author of Thirsty Cities: Social Contracts and Public Goods Provision in China and India (Cambridge University Press, 2019), co-author (with David M. Lampton and Cheng-Chwee Kuik) of Rivers of Iron: Railroads and Chinese Power in Southeast Asia (University of California Press 2020), and co-editor (with Kanti Bajpai and Manjari Chatterjee Miller) of The Routledge Handbook of China-India Relations (2020). Selina has published widely in peer-reviewed journals, including International Affairs (ranked no. 4 in International Relations), Chinese Journal of International Politics, Journal of Contemporary China, among others. Selina served a two-year term as Chair of the Master in International Affairs Program from January 2019-December 2020. She is currently a non-resident senior fellow with the Asia and Latin America Program at the Inter-American Dialogue and a non-resident senior fellow of the Singapore Institute of International Affairs. She was appointed a Global Futures Council Fellow with the World Economic Forum in September 2017-September 2018. 

Selina received her Ph.D. from The Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University, where she also received a Master in International Public Policy (Honours). She graduated from the National University of Singapore with a B.A. in History (Honours). She was a Singapore public servant before joining academia.

Carla P. Freeman is a senior expert in the China program at the US Institute of Peace. For more than a decade, she was a member of the China Studies faculty at SAIS, where she also served as director of the School’s Foreign Policy Institute.  Previously she worked on international civil society and sustainable development for The Johnson Foundation and as a political risk consultant focused on Asia. She is a graduate of Yale University, Sciences Po in Paris, and Johns Hopkins University, where she completed her PhD in international relations and China at SAIS.  She specializes in China’s foreign policy, nontraditional security issues, and US-China relations. Recent published work includes a comparative study of China’s policies in the high seas and outer space, which won The China Quarterly’s 2020 Gordon White Prize.

Jessica C. Liao is an assistant professor of political science at North Carolina State University. Prior to NC State, she taught at George Washington University and was a visit fellow at Monash University, Kuala Lumpur campus. She received her PhD in international relations from the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on Chinese foreign policy and East Asian politics. Her current project is about China’s resource and infrastructure development in Southeast Asia.

This presentation is part of the virtual conference series  “Assessing China’s Belt and Road Initiative,” hosted by The Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University and its affiliated regional centers,  which examines the economic, social, political, and security impacts of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

For the full series poster with live links to speaker biographies and suggested readings, and to register for each event, click here 

BRI Fall 2021 Presentation Series poster