China Scholarship Council Awardee
Dr. Qingchao Xu is a visiting Science Diplomacy Fellow at The Fletcher School and a China Scholarship Council awardee, working on the Polar Silk Road. The Polar Silk Road initiative is regarded as an extension to the North of the Belt and Road Initiative proposed by China, which mainly focuses on the developing world located in Asia, Europe and Africa to facilitate connectivity and sustainable economic and social development. In this context, Dr. Xu’s research is to figure out how the Polar Silk Road Initiative could contribute to Arctic sustainability in the long run by its large-scale infrastructure developments and governance mechanism building. Dr. Xu completed most of her higher-education in mainland China, except for a six-month stay at Kyushu University in Japan as a joint-training doctoral student from September 2011 to March 2012. She started majored in international relations since her graduate studies began at Peking University in 2004. In 2012 she gained a Ph.D. from Renmin University of China with her dissertation on Public Diplomacy and China’s International Image in the Post-Cold War Era. Dr. Xu was conducting her Post-doctoral research on the Arctic at the School of International Relations of Peking University from 2015-2017 as a Boya Research Fellow. In January 2017, Dr. Xu was invited to of the Arctic Frontiers as a guest speaker of the Science Plenary, talking about China’s Science Diplomacy in the Arctic region. In October 2019, Dr. Xu is going to preside over a breakout session on the Polar Silk Road at the Arctic Circle Assembly in Reykjavik, Iceland. Regarding academic working experiences that Dr. Xu has had in recent years, she worked for the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences for more than two years and she has been working for the China Institute for Innovation and Development Strategy of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) as well as the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS) since 2017.