Our Chinese Studies member Dr. Monique Taylor just published an article on China’s evolving energy security strategy in Asian Affairs. Energy security had become an urgent policy priority for Beijing by the mid-2000s because of China’s rapidly increasing oil import dependency set against the backdrop of oil scarcity and rising oil prices. Rather than rely on purely market-based means to secure oil supply, China pursued a state-led or neomercantilist approach. Initially, the most notable and distinctive element of its oil neomercantilism was the overseas acquisition of oil assets by China’s national oil companies (NOCs) under broad strategic direction from Beijing. However, China’s energy security strategy, while remaining neomercantilist in orientation, increasingly over the past decade has exhibited greater reliance on the market. Reasons for this shifting emphasis include the changing geopolitics and geoeconomics of the global oil industry, which moved to oversupply following the US shale oil revolution, along with transformations within the Chinese state under the leadership of President Xi Jinping. For more information, please visit https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03068374.2021.2004031.

Prof. Julie Yu-Wen Chen will be one of the keynote speakers for the 24th biennial conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies (EACS) next year! Please submit your abstract to the conference before January 15, 2022! More info is on conference website! https://eacs.upol.cz/index.php/keynote-speakers/

The Ministry of Education and Culture, together with Finnish higher education institutions, research institutes and other stakeholders, has prepared recommendations for academic cooperation with Chinese partners. The recommendations help to identify the key challenges of cooperation and the features of the academic environment in China. The recommendations (in Finnish) seek to ensure that it is possible to uphold the principles that are important for Finnish HEIs and research institutions.