Developmental Diasporas in China and India: A Reconsideration of Conventional Capital
Guest lecture with Professor Kellee S. Tsai, Johns Hopkins University on January 31, 2013.
Comparisons of China and India’s economic development typically focus on either the nature of state intervention in the economy, or the role of foreign direct investment (FDI) in shaping production. Yet this privileging of state capital and FDI ignores a vast network of informal financial flows generated by remittances and ethnic investors residing abroad. Attending to diasporic capital as a distinct variable presents an opportunity to generate more empirically accurate and nuanced explanations in the literature on economic development. The talk will consider China and India’s historically contexualized “developmental diasporas” and their mixed implications for local patterns of production, consumption, and savings.
Kellee S. Tsai received her PhD in political science from Columbia University and is Professor of Political Science and Vice Dean for Humanities and Social Sciences at Johns Hopkins University’s Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. As a scholar of contemporary Chinese politics, Tsai’s research has influenced broader debates in comparative politics, the political economy of development, and the study of informal institutions and endogenous institutional change. She is the author of three books, including Back-Alley Banking: Private Entrepreneurs in China (Cornell), Rural Industrialization and Non-Governmental Finance in Wenzhou (co-authored in Chinese), and Capitalism without Democracy: The Private Sector in Contemporary China (Cornell). Her articles have appeared in journals such as China Journal, China Quarterly, Comparative Political Studies, World Development, and World Politics. Her current research concerns the political economy of remittances and ethnic foreign direct investment in China and India.
Registration
The event is arranged by Asia Research Centre and is free of charge but please register by writing arc.int@cbs.dk.