The workshop organised by Dr Mark Bailey and Dr Christian Mueller (School of International Studies UNNC) in collaboration with colleagues in SPIR, History and Archaeology at UNUK, Dr David O'Brien from the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany and our guest speaker, Dr Niall Duggan of University College, Cork, Ireland, aimed at discussing the following topics:

Why China has appropriated the imperial rhetoric of the Silk Road at all in its discursive framing of the twin initiatives of BRI and MBRI in the light of China’s historical experience during the 20th century?

Where is the benefit in this appropriation for China, and how does China envisage this appropriation benefitting others?

Other significant inquiries concerned the relationship of the twin initiatives, which are primarily projected outwards, to the domestic vision of 21st-century China presented in the narrative of the ‘China Dream’.

The workshop was divided into three panel discussions with short introductory remarks by the organisers to stimulate discussions.

1. History
2. Memory and Representations
3. Political Myth

During the discussions, the interdisciplinary links between the different fields and the question of who frames the narratives and how do regions outside of China respond to these narratives were discussed.

This workshop related to a series of tri-campus workshops hosted at UNUK and UNNC over the last year that aims at interdisciplinary tri-campus collaborations to bid for large external funding grants. The next step of this workshop is to write up some of the discussion contributions as papers for a special issue in a journal and conceptualise parts of the discussions to apply for external funding.