Name: From Mao to Now: China’s 20th-century Global Development Finance
Start: 2026-03-25T16:30:00-04:00
End: 2026-03-25T18:00:00-04:00
Location: Weatherhead East Asian Institute (located at the School of International and Public Affairs)

$From Mao to Now: China\u2019s 20th-century Global Development Finance$

The nature, aims, and impacts of Chinese overseas aid and lending have attracted major policy and scholarly attention since 2000.
About this Event

For non-Columbia affiliates, registration is required to access the Morningside campus. After registering you will receive an email with a QR code that must be presented along with a government-issued ID (your name must match exactly the name registered for the event) at either the 116th Street & Broadway or 116th Street & Amsterdam gates for entry. Please register using a unique email address (one email address per registrant) by 4:00pm on Jan. 20 for campus access.

Names will be submitted for QR codes 1-2 days prior to the event. Registrants will receive an email from CU Guest Access with the QR code before or on the day of the event. NOTE: You cannot access campus using the QR code from Eventbrite.

Speaker: Austin Strange, Associate Professor of International Relations, Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Hong Kong

Moderator: Andrew J. Nathan, Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science, Department of Political Science, Columbia University
The nature, aims, and impacts of Chinese overseas aid and lending have attracted major policy and scholarly attention since 2000. However, the first 50 years of China's international development cooperation are often omitted from discussion. I introduce a dataset on China's 20th-century development finance including approximately 4,000 projects in over 130 countries, and show how these data can be analyzed to enrich theoretical and empirical research on Chinese development finance in international relations.

Speaker's Bio: Austin Strange is an associate professor in the University of Hong Kong's Department of Politics and Public Administration, where he researches and teaches Chinese foreign policy, international political economy, and international development. Austin recently published Banking on Beijing: The Aims and Impacts of China's Overseas Development Program (with collaborators) and Chinese Global Infrastructure with Cambridge University Press. He was previously a fellow in the Columbia-Harvard China and the World Program.

This event is hosted by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and co-sponsored by the China and World Program.