Quick Update
 
What's happened - brief (Jan-May)

• Launched UoNARI Policy briefs
• Indian elections – Asia House & Weekly Briefings
• UNM visit
• Internally funded PhD projects
• New: Gender Group formed on UNNC
• Belt and Road Initiative Workshop
• Japan inward mission 

What to expect:

• Policy brief activity
• Asia Expertise Guide Refresh
        

Calls to action:

Gaik Cheng Khoo at UNM is seeking academics based in China to help support her research on Malaysian-China Durian trade relations, particularly from a business/economy, social and food sciences perspective. Please see attached for more info.

Photo: Japan Inward Mission to the University of Nottingham, UK.

May 2019 

Dear colleagues in China, Malaysia and the UK.
 
Welcome to your third UoN Asia Research Institute newsletter! To our colleagues currently participating in Ramadan, Ramadan Mubarak!

Whilst we have been busy establishing new projects and gaining expressions of support from across the University, we’d like to share with you some of the Institute’s key highlights, as well as showcasing your own activities and accomplishments.

We are keen that this network becomes a forum to better know about each other’s activities, so we encourage you to reach out to one another. Please feel free to use our Institute’s name in grant applications; just let us know when you intend to do so (and of course, when you are successful!). We are happy to support in any way we can.
We hope to be able to provide funding opportunities in the near future, so please do look out for that in upcoming newsletters.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Below are a brief overview of the updates:

Launched UoNARI Policy Briefs – thanks to all of you who applied for the UoNARI policy briefs. We were able to whittle it down to nine successful candidates, who will be writing to a UK policy audience on topics ranging from human rights in Asian trade deals, attracting more nurses from Asia to the UK, and how the UK should develop a Belt and Road Initiative strategy. We look forward to publishing the policy briefs shortly.

Indian elections – To mark the Indian elections over the 5-week voting campaign, we have profiled our India expertise which have engaged with media both broadcast and print, presented on a panel alongside Linklaters at Asia House discussing the implications of the election results, and established a weekly briefing series which goes out to more than 300 government, media and industry contacts as well as being included by Asia House in their weekly briefing. You can view our previous briefings here, or subscribe to them here.

We also have continuing coverage of the elections on our Asia Dialogue blog and social media #IndiaVotes2019.

UNM Visit – Professor Katharine Adeney, Director of the UoN Asia Research Institute visited Malaysia in January where she was able to get to know more about UNM’s research interests and capacity which is helping to feed into the bigger tricampus ambitions of UoNARI.

Internal funding (PhDs) – We have been able to award a number of Postgraduate research students seed funding for their projects – congratulations go out to Ngo Tang, Khurram Siddiqui, Martha Ledger, Zhun Gu and Khalid Jarral.

New gender group – UNNC IAPS have established the Gender Studies Research Priority Group. Please email Mint Wang to find out more about this group.

Belt and Road Initiative Tricampus Workshop – The third workshop was held at UNNC in May to bring together colleagues working on a tri campus interdisciplinary grant application. Colleagues working on the politics, geography, archaeology, environmental sciences, geopolitics, economics, supply chains and the history of the BRI wrote the first draft of the grant, which will be finalised over the next two months.

Japan Inward Mission - Five UoN ARI fellows attended the event at the UK campus, which had the purpose of deepening relations and collaboration opportunities with universities in Japan. These were Katharine Adeney, Hongwei Bao, Chun-Yi Lee, Jeremy Taylor and Stephen Timmons.
 
What to expect:
 
Policy brief activity – Following the final submission of our policy briefs, we will be looking to hold a select number of activities with policymakers directly concerned with the issues these policy briefs address.

Asia Expertise Guide Refresh - The online version of the Asia Expertise Guide is currently being updated with another thirty names, bringing our community of fellows up to around 200. Make sure to check it out over the next few days and see if there are any colleagues that may be of interest to you.

With best wishes,
The Asia Research Institute Team

Spotlight on:

• Esther Bott secured a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship on “A Qualitative Exploration of the Problems with Orphanage Tourism in Nepal”. Esther in part was successful due to seed funding secured from UoNARI in 2017 which funded the pilot project on which the application was based.
• Hongyi Lai  published “Is the US-China Economic Relationship About to Permanently Shrink?” in the International Economy
• Carole Spary and co-author Shirin Rai (Warwick) presented to the Foreign Commonwealth Office on the findings of their recent book on women MPs in India’s parliament.
• Georgios Kapogiannis held a joint workshop with UCL and the Construction Blockchain Consortium on digitisation and sustainability in construction SMEs.
• Andreas Fulda published a monograph on “the Struggle for Democracy in Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong - Sharp Power and its Discontents.”
• UNM successfully led a food tour  in Malaysia which was designed to demonstrate the traditional ways of foraging for food with the Orang Asli Tribe
• Jan-Hinrik Meyer-Sahling launched a new project on civil service reform and anti-corruption in Nepal and Bangladesh.
• Jacqueline Hicks was a key speaker on an Asia House panel discussing the Indonesian elections at Asia House with Shotaro Tani from Nikkei Asean Review
• Zhihong Yu was a key speaker at the “China and the World Economy” roundtable at Asia House alongside the McKinsey Global Institute
• Carole Spary was featured on Indian national TV discussing the Indian elections and featured in a podcast for The Conversation.
• Chun-Yi Lee featured in the Taipei  Times discussing the growth of the Taiwan Studies field in recent years.
• Martin Thorley was interviewed by DEFRA on China’s positioning along the Belt and Road, and has also featured in articles in the Independent and The Guardian talking about Huawei’s development of 5G in the UK
• Hongwei Bao interviewed He Xiaopei, a leading queer feminist film maker in China and founder of Pink Space.
• Alan Smyth, Esther Bott, Shalini Ojha and Gil Yaron attended a networking meeting on India on the link between “female empowerment and child health”
• Faith Chan recently featured in The Guardian and Bloomberg discussing the impacts of climate change and water policy on China’s megacities.
• Nancy Liu  published her book on English-Chinese translation in news coverage
• Katharine Adeney presented her research on ethnic conflict and federalism in India at Yale University.
• Don Lee  presented in Rotterdam at the “Governance of Emerging Technologies Conference” on “how government agencies respond to new technological developments, focusing on regulatory reform policy in South Korea."
• Ben Barton presented at the International Studies Association in Toronto on China’s Security Policy in Africa, and China’s Maritime Silk Road Initiative in the Indo-Pacific Region
• Minghai Zhou and Giovanni Facchini jointly published in the Journal of International Economics: China’s “Great Migration”: The Impact of the Reduction in Trade Policy in Trade Uncertainty”, looking at the implication of trade policy on Chinese exporters.

Jane Nolan published a book on Western bankers in China, which is based on 60 interviews with managers in the banking sector, including from state-owned, foreign-owned and joint venture banks.