Associate Research Fellow Niva Yau Tsz Yan delivered a Public Lecture on "Making Sense of the Belt and Road Initiative in Central Asia"

On 23 April the Academy's Associate Research Fellow Niva Yau Tsz Yan delivered a Public Lecture on "Making Sense of the Belt and Road Initiative in Central Asia." Throughout the lecture, Ms. Yau Tsz Yan described the largest Chinese infrastructure project “Belt and Road Initiative” (known as the One-Belt-One-Road before 2016) and presented Chinese foreign policy as a theoretical ground in understanding the Initiative. Central to this argument is that development direction of the Initiative must be examined in the first instance from a Chinese perspective given the instructing capacity and the ideologically driven character of the Chinese Communist Party. During the lecture, Ms. Yau Tsz Yan offered insights into the various BRI policies and practical adaptations in project prioritization and decision-making.

The lecture was followed by a Q&A session, where participants asked about the possibility of engaging Afghanistan into the Initiative, Chinese-Turkmen relations within BRI, and who is ‘in charge’ of this initiative within China.

The video recording of the full lecture is available on our You Tube channel at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6LIyD08BEA

BIO:

Niva Yau Tsz Yan is an Associate Research Fellow at the OSCE Academy and a research Intern at the Belt and Road Strategic Research Centre (BRSRC) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. She has a BSocSc in Politics (International Politics, Political Theory and Ethics) from the University of Hong Kong. Her current research project compares the Central Asian and South East Asian experience of the Belt and Road Initiative.

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