Going West and Going Out: Discourses, migrants and models in Chinese development

In 1999, China announced the launching of the Open up the West campaign, sometimes called “Go West,” to help western China finally catch up to the much wealthier eastern, coastal areas after several decades of lagging behind. The same year, China also announced a “Go Out” strategy, to encourage Chinese investment abroad. The fifteen years since then have witnessed dramatic Chinese government investment in various development activities in western regions of China, as well as around the world. Though rarely considered together, I will argue in this talk that there are significant parallels, in development discourse, the centrality of physical infrastructure, the characteristics of Chinese labor migration and the nature of migrant-local relations, and the application of “models from elsewhere” in Go West and Go Out. Considering these parallels can help shed light on Chinese development discourse and practice, as China becomes increasingly important in the field of development once dominated by Western countries. Finally, I will briefly consider direct connections and convergences between the two strategies in China’s neighboring countries of Asia and in the One Belt One Road initiative.

Emily Yeh is the Chair of the Geography Department at University of Colorado Boulder. Her main research interests are on questions of power, political economy, and cultural politics in the nature-society relationship. Using primarily ethnographic methods, she has conducted research on property rights, natural resource conflicts, environmental history, development and landscape transformation, grassland management and environmental policies, and emerging environmentalisms in Tibetan areas of China. In addition, she has also worked on the politics of identity and race in the Tibetan diaspora, and on several NSF-funded interdisciplinary, collaborative projects on putative causes of rangeland degradation and vulnerability to climate change on the Tibetan Plateau. Broader research and teaching interests include transnational conservation, critical development studies, the relationship between nature, territory, and the nation, and environmental justice. Her regional expertise is in China, Tibet, and the Himalayas.

Sponsor(s): Center for Chinese Studies, Geography