China's role in global inequality since 2019

In the context of this year´s Helmut Schmidt Lecture we awarded our first fellowship closely linked to the lecture´s theme “For a just democracy!” Data analysist and political economist Dr. Aya Adachi has joined the team of Bundeskanzler-Helmut-Schmidt-Stiftung (BKHS).

During her fellowship, Aya Adachi is investigating how China's overcapacities and the resulting trade surplus have affected global inequality since 2019, especially in the relationship between developed and developing countries. It analyses the influence of Chinese exports on industrial development in emerging countries as well as the increasing dependence of these countries on Chinese imports. The aim is to gain insights that can contribute to the development of strategies to mitigate potential negative impacts on the global economic structure and to identify policy implications for the EU.

Dr. Aya Adachi specialises in economic statecraft, economic security, geoeconomics and de-risking strategies. Her work focuses on analysing the foreign economic policies of the EU, Germany, China, and Japan, with particular emphasis on their engagement vis-à-vis the Indo-Pacific and Global South regions. She employs both data analytics and qualitative research methods in her analysis. Aya Adachi has previously worked at the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS) and has regularly served as a consultant on regional economic cooperation for the German Corporation for International Cooperation (GIZ). She was a visiting fellow at Waseda University and the German Institute for Japanese Studies (Max Weber Foundation) in Tokyo, as well as at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou, China during her PhD research. Aya Adachi holds a PhD from Ruhr University Bochum. She studied International Relations, Economics and Politics of East Asia and Mandarin Chinese at the University of Groningen, Ruhr University Bochum and Zhejiang University of Technology.

As part of the programme “Global Markets and Social Justice” the fellowship will focus on the topic “International Trade Policy and Social Inequality”.