The concept of global China understands China’s influence as manifested in outward flows of capital, infrastructure, migrants, media, cultural programmes and international and civil society engagement, yet for an area of study that purports to be ‘global’ scholarship in the field of global China has focused almost exclusively on the role of Chinese citizens, Chinese institutions, and carriers of Chinese capital (hereafter, Chinese actors) and Chinese capital in developing countries and the Global South. To combat this narrow view of global China, China.EU takes an innovative approach to the study of global China that pivots scholarship on global China to the Global North. The project moves beyond a methodologically nationalist and state-led understanding of global China, to instead focus on how global China, as understood through Chinese actors and capital, is (i) urban, (ii) cultural, and (iii) digital – often simultaneously all three. In doing this, the project will answer four research questions: (1) What concepts are used to understand urbanism and urban development in China? (2) How do Chinese actors see and understand European urban space? What notions do they carry with them from China? (3) How are Chinese actors as (un)willing representatives of global China influencing urban development in Europe? (4) What insights about global China emerge when we analyse global urban China and the role of Chinese actors in European urban spaces? To answer these questions, Europe.CN uses innovative hybrid fieldwork methods to analyse the heterogenous role of Chinese actors and capital in three European contexts: Dusseldorf & the Ruhr Area, Paris, and Athens. Furthermore, the project hypothesizes that Chinese actors in urban Europe will see, understand, imagine, and conceptualize European urban space through Chinese concepts and the recent history of rapid urban development in China. To understand this, the team will produce a handbook of ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ ur

This project will investigate how medieval historiographers employed a range of rewriting strategies to reproduce and subvert narratives of social order and dissent and constructed complex and fluid group identities. The ability of chroniclers to influence the sociopolitical views of their imagined audiences,makes them, in collusion with their patrons, into powerful opinion makers with the ability to reshape social reality. The case study that will be developed here is that of the medieval duchy of Brabant in the Low Countries. Its longstanding and coherent historiographical tradition will facilitate the comparative analysis of the social and political discourses propagated by a number of well-know and anonymous chroniclers over a period of nearly two centuries. Point of departure will be the social and political views of Jan van Boendale, municipal clerk of Antwerp and author of a considerable oeuvre of historiographical and didactic texts. This project will demonstrate how Boendale’s work was reframed by subsequent scribes/authorsto better suit the needs and expectations of new political and social circumstances. Alongside other less canonical texts, this research will present a first in-depth investigation of the 'Livre des cronicques', a compilation of Middle Dutch historiographical texts, translated into French by Jean d’Enghien and dedicated to the Duke of Burgundy. Not only will the project's approach along the lines of narrative theory offer new perspectives on the dynamics of medieval textual culture and pre-modern modes of historiography, it will also yield new insights in processes of transculturation and the importance of languages in the construction of group identities. More generally, results will be of interest to literary scholars, researchers in political theory, historiography and social sciences. The project's engagement with multilingualism and complex identities in composite states is particularly relevant to the Europe of the regions