Research Centres and Projects
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Research Centres
Professor Xiaoming Huang (Political Science and International Relations Programme) is the Director of The New Zealand Contemporary China Research Centre. The Centre provides a national platform for knowledge sharing among tertiary institutions, the business community and the public sector to foster New Zealand's engagement with China.
Professors Max Cresswell and Ed Mares (Philosophy Programme) are members of the Centre for Logic, Language, and Computation.The Group aims to promote research in logic, computation and the logical analysis of language (including related areas, such as formal syntax), particularly at the interface between these disciplines.
Dr Alexander Maxwell (History Programme) is the Director of The Antipodean East European Study Group, which is a non-political scholarly society devoted to advancing knowledge about the peoples and cultures of Eastern Europe.
China's Great Transformation Research Projects
Professor Xiaoming Huang, Director of the New Zealand Contemporary China Research Centre, has initiated a series of innovative research projects that will bring internationally renowned scholars together to understand various dimensions of China's 'great transformation' into a world power:
- China and India: The End of Development Models (with Professor Sekhar Bandyopadhyay) Victoria University of Wellington
China and India are two major world civilisations that have taken very different paths in modern development. Modern state building started in each of these countries under a set of very different conditions. China and India have been problematic cases in modern development. With the two countries reaching a new historical phase of their modern development, it would be useful to revisit the scholarly debate on modern development again and hopefully to lift it to a new level. - The Institutional Dynamics of China's Great Transformation
Today, few scholars would dispute that institutions matter. The question is perhaps how exactly they matter in particular national and historical settings. Moreover, institutional analysis is increasingly facing challenges from diverse national experiences and institutional environments. On the other hand, there are a large number of studies on China's transformation, but not many from a unifying intellectual approach involving a multi-disciplinary investigation. There is also a great deal of scholarly interest and research activities in China itself on institutions and Chinese political economy, but this has not received the wider scholarly attention it deserves. - China's Ascent: New Superpower or New Global System? (with Professor Robert Patman, University of Otago)
For many years, scholarly and public policy debates reflected a concern that the rise of China represented a potential challenge to the existing international system. Today, China is often seen as a 'responsible stakeholder' in the global system. Still, realist concerns about China's future direction have not altogether disappeared. What will China do when its international interests become dominant? Will a new China fundamentally change the rules of the game in global system or will China simply become another great power using the traditional tools of money, force and diplomacy?