Pál Nyíri

Dams, Casinos and Concessions: Chinese Megaprojects in Laos and Cambodia

These days in Southeast Asia, if you find that you are traveling faster than your Lonely Planet guide says you should be, it usually has something to do with China. Here, as in Africa, China has emerged as the new source of funding and execution of infrastructural megaprojects, dams, roads, railways, some in cooperation with global financial institutions, and others, which these are no longer willing to support, on its own. China says it is providing no-strings help, but Western aid donors have largely reacted to this position with suspicion or hostility, accusing China of engaging in a resource grab, fostering corruption, and disregarding the interests of the poor. China’s megaprojects have dramatic consequences for local populations, as like the great colonial railways, they set in motion all sorts of investors, traders and adventurers. In Laos and Cambodia, connected to China by historic migration links and new Chinese-built roads, a variety of meso- and miniprojects thrive on the tailwinds of the megaprojects. In both countries, China has become one of the largest sources of investment and aid. Focusing on a dam in Cambodia and two real estate/casino projects in Laos, this chapter asks how the emerging Chinese “concessions,” viz., areas designated for Chinese-funded investment and/or development aid projects and run by Chinese management, are transforming livelihoods and forms of governance. We thus look not so much at ways in which the physical environments is engineered, but at how orchestrated land management under the guise of international development inevitably implies forms of social engineering that structure emerging social and economic relationships.

Books, Bodies and Bronzes: comparing sites of global citizenship creation

This volume explores music competitions, religious movements, fashion magazines, copyright policy and overseas university campuses, among others, as potential sites for the generation and spread of cosmopolitan ideas, competencies and projects. Our contributors focus on how and when that happens, in what combinations, and what difference it makes when aspects of cosmopolitanism are disseminated at music competitions, UNESCO World Heritage sites, or through membership in elite social clubs. They embed the production and dissemination of cosmopolitanism within cultural and institutional contexts, thereby bringing to light not just the classroom, editorial room and stage, but the complex, power-laden set of organizational arrangements that undergird them and the geopolitical context within which they take shape.

Intercultural Communication: An Anthropological Perspective

This article is a critical review of intercultural communication (IC), an applied academic field whose goal is to understand how members of different cultural – usually national or ethnic – groups communicate, behave, and perceive the world, as well as to facilitate communication between them. The article traces the history and current state of IC, both as an academic field and as a service industry; examines the concepts of culture upon which its assumptions rest; and offers a critical perspective on its usefulness and limitations.

Reporting for China: Cosmopolitan Attitudes and the “Chinese Perspective” among Chinese Correspondents Abroad

Abstract Western scholars’ and policy analysts’ attention to the expansion of China’s media abroad has focused on the state’s strategy of soft power behind the global spread of institutions such as Xinhua and China Central Television, on the propagandistic image of China that these institutions seek to project in their foreign-language programming, and on the potential damage to media freedom in Africa and elsewhere. No attention has been paid to the reverse: how the emergence of a global network of Chinese correspondents impacts dominant Chinese views of the world and China’s place in it. The ethnographic research project on which this article is based reverses this lens, seeking to understand how Chinese journalists who report for PRC media from abroad see their work, what stories about the world they want to tell Chinese audiences about the world and how their choices are shaped by state policies, institutional pressures and individual preferences. Its preliminary conclusion is that while the lifestyles of the new generation of correspondents are increasingly cosmopolitan, this does not necessarily translate into more innovative or reflexive reporting.