China’s Maritime Silk Road Initiative: Implications for Southeast Asia and the World

Friday, May 26, 2017
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
(Pacific)
Philippines Conference Room
Encina Hall, Third Floor, Central, C330
616 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305
Speaker: 
  • Jean-Marc F. Blanchard,
  • Suisheng Zhao

Co-organized with the Mr. and Mrs. S. H. Wong Center for the Study of Multinational Corporations

First proposed by President Xi Jinping in Indonesia in 2013, China’s Maritime Silk Road Initiative (MSRI) aims to finance and build infrastructure—roads and railroads, ports and pipelines, power grids and telecom networks—that will link China southwestward through Southeast Asia and on across the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, and the Mediterranean to Europe.  In the near term, the initiative may unfold fairly smoothly to the benefit of China’s economic and political stature and influence.  In the longer run, however, the success of the project may limit or even undercut China’s gains.  Capitalizing on American withdrawal from global leadership, Beijing wants the MSRI and its sister scheme—the Silk Road Economic Belt—to lay the sea-and-ground-work for a new Asian-Indo-Pacific order that China would launch and manage.  But will China be able to supplant US power and articulate the values necessary to underwrite this new order?  Professors Blanchard and Zhao will explore this and other questions raised by the MSRI.  Stanford’s Don Emmerson will moderate their discussion within the panel and with the audience.

Jean-Marc F. Blanchard is Distinguished Professor in the School of Advanced International and Area Studies at East China Normal University (Shanghai).  He has edited, co-edited, or contributed to 13 edited volumes and special issues of journals; written more than 50 other articles and book chapters; and is the co-author of Economic Statecraft and Foreign Policy (2013).  He has been a visiting professor/scholar at Shorenstein APARC twice, in 2013 and 2014.

Suisheng Zhao is Professor in the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver.  The founder and chief editor of the Journal of Contemporary China, he has written or edited more than a dozen books and dozens of articles in scholarly and policy journals.  Previous positions include residence at Stanford as a Campbell National Fellow at the Hoover Institution and two elective terms as a member of the Board of Governors of the US Committee for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific.