Teaching Workshop

Over the past decades, China's emergence as a power capable of competing on an equal footing with the United States and other players in the new multipolar world, has been seemingly unstoppable. Strengthened by a process of industrial modernization and economic financialization started in the Eighties, the People's Republic has been able to place itself at the centre of the dynamics of the last globalization following the end of the Cold War. A process that was sanctioned by the 2001 controversial Chinese admission within the World Trade Organization (WTO).
In recent years, a purely economic and industrial dimension has also been accompanied by cultural, scientific-technological assertiveness - including the area of space exploration - and ultimately even on a military perspective, as the renewed geopolitical tensions in the Pacific arena continue to remind us. A further sign of a new awareness of its capabilities, and of its geopolitical role, has also occurred in the recent attempt at mediation in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, a year after its beginning.
Starting from primary and secondary sources produced since the Seventies of the twentieth century, the Workshop aims to address, in a seminar perspective, the roots and developments of these complex dynamics.

By the end of the Workshop, students are expected to have acquired a sound general preparation on the state of contemporary international relations, and in particular on the capacity for external commercial, economic, military and cultural projection of Chinese power. Both these hard and soft power dimensions will be analysed in their historical roots by the teacher with a seminar approach, by primary sources and secondary literature mainly in English and French.