Culture Paves The New Silk Roads

This book approaches Silk Road studies from within the microcosm of China’s Southwest avant-garde arts sector in order to approach the macrocosm of China’s cultural heritage and creative industry influence worldwide. While reading China’s cultural hegemony and its attendant ideologies as ‘shaping’ memory and history throughout New Silk Road regions, the book includes new regional research from within China's borders, as well as throughout New Silk Road regions. With twenty years of experience in China, Sophia G. Kidd fills a void in discussions of the New Silk Roads (NSR) which fail to underscore the importance of the initiative’s people-to-people component. Cultural diplomacy aids cooperation between New Silk Road Regions by reducing ‘cultural discount’ of Chinese cultural exports, i.e., ideas and values, creating a shift of geo-cultural thinking to come. This book will prove illuminating for students of the arts and soft powerin greater China. Dr. Sophia G. Kidd is an Associate Research Fellow in the Classical Chinese Literature Department of the College of Journalism and Literature at Sichuan University in Sichuan, China. She has been Visiting Scholar at Ruhr University Bochum and the University of Göttingen, where she lectured on Chinese contemporary art and politics as well as the role of cultural production in the building of China’s New Silk Roads. Her Ph.D. research focused on spatial production and literary geography in Eastern Jin Guo Pu’s literature, in particular the ‘River Fu.’ Sophia Kidd works as an arts professional, scholar, and writer in both Southwest USA and Southwest China, integrating regional aesthetics with cultural studies to gain both synchronic and diachronic insight into the greater milieu of China’s role in global governance.