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The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), launched by the Chinese government in 2013 with infrastructural investments of over 1 trillion yuan, is leading to a historically unprecedented intensification of links between China and nations in the Afro-Eurasian region. Until now, most discussion and research on the BRI has focused on physical infrastructures, financial investments, and commerce. However, China is an officially atheist country with tightly managed regulation of religious communities, while religion is central to the culture and national identity of most BRI and adjacent countries, and, often, their political system and ideology as well.
How are BRI visions, policies and infrastructural developments becoming entangled with religious imaginations, communities and circulations? In this talk, based on an ongoing international collaborative research initiative on “Infrastructures of Faith: Religious Mobilities on the Belt and Road” [BRINFAITH], I will propose a threefold framework for understanding how religious factors shape and are shaped by the construction of the Belt and Road, at the level of (1) local religious ecologies; (2) transnational religious circulations; (3) national and civilizational imaginations. At each of these three scales, contemporary dynamics are shaped by deep “historical geologies” of empire, religion and infrastructure.
Speaker: Dr. David A. Palmer
(Professor, the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Department of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong)
Date/Time: April 5, 2022, 7:15 PM (Hong Kong Time)
Language: English
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