The Faculty was honoured to have Distinguished Professor Henry Yeung from the Department of Geography, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore deliver the Smart Society Distinguished Seminar titled "Rethinking Interconnected Worlds: Geopolitical Shifts and Reorganization of Electronics Global Production Networks in the 2020s" on 12 January 2023 (Thursday). The seminar attracted 48 staff members and students from HKBU, as well as other Asian universities.
Knowing that not all of the participants were from the geography discipline, Prof. Yeung tailored the seminar such that the content was relevant to the general understanding of this fairly contested world in the economic realm. The whole seminar was centred on the idea that many of the world’s crises today are related to the supply chain problems that everybody experiences. Prof. Yeung started by discussing the geo-political key contests in relation to high-tech industries, such as geopolitical shifts and post-pandemic challenges in the 2020s like the continual US-China trade war since 2018, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, rapid market shifts and manufacturing dependency.
Prof. Yeung further talked about global production networks (GPNs) and global value chains, not by dwelling on the theories, but by looking into existing empirical troubles and challenges with GPNs. He pointed out that those such crises, which are technological contests, has then become geopolitical contests, and vice versa. He took the crisis of global chip shortages as a prominent example, which has recently become a very hot contestation. He illustrated to the audience how has the pandemic created this GPN trouble, which is also related to supply chain problems, inflation, trade wars, geopolitical wars and decoupling etc., and how the two crises are interrelated.
After the insightful sharing, participants actively grasped the opportunity to ask questions, seek opinions from and exchange ideas with Prof. Yeung.
