The Chinese Development Finance Team
Team Background The Chinese Development Finance Team
The CDF team was established in 2015 with the purpose of following the newly established AIIB. Since then, the team has grown in size and purpose. Now instead of focusing solely on the AIIB, the CDF tracks global news related to Chinese-led development finance and writes blog-posts analyzing both bilateral and multilateral financial flows coming from China.
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MethodologyEach week, the CDF team tracks global news in over seven languages, including English, Mandarin, Japanese, French, Spanish, Arabic, and Hindi. We use Google Alerts and a variety of key words and phrases covering Chinese development finance to find daily news from around the world. We catalogue the news sources we find, tracking author, web source, attitudes towards China, and summarize the content. We collate the summaries to produce a weekly digest.
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Task Team Leader of the Chinese Development Finance Team
Elizabeth Teare
Elizabeth is a fourth-year student studying International Relations and Rhetoric with minors in Middle Eastern studies and French. Her research interests include conflict and peace studies, as well as international development. She spent most of 2016 living in France and studied at SciencesPo as apart of a Franco-Anglophone exchange program. She spent summer 2017 interning with an edu-tainment social enterprise in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, working on multiple marketing and business development projects. Elizabeth is working on an IRG honors thesis researching peace-building programs and the importance of education in regards to development and conflict. After graduation, she hopes to pursue a career that links her marketing experience and interests in peace-building and development policy. Elizabeth is the only undergraduate task team leader at IPD. |
Meet the Team
Amelia Hsieh
Amelia is a third-year student majoring in Psychology with a minor in Sociology. She is part of the University Leadership Network (ULN) and is an intern for the IPD through this nationally recognized incentive-based scholarship program at UT. She is interested in promoting social justice, equality, civility, and worldwide economic stability. Her goal is to learn about the foundation of foreign aid planning and formulate possible solutions to providing adequate psychological counseling/therapy for those without access to it. Amelia tracks news for the CDF team in both Mandarin and English. |
Shuming Chen
Shuming is a second-year student majoring in Economics and Japanese. She is part of University Leadership Network (ULN) and is an intern for the IPD through ULN. As a Chinese American, she is interested in learning more about Chinese development and finance. She has language proficiency in both English and Chinese which allows her to keep up with both Chinese and English sources. |
Ethan Masucol
Ethan is a first-year student majoring in Plan II and International Relations & Global Studies with a minor in Chinese. His research interests include international trade, global peace development through public policy, and development policy. As a member of CDF, he hopes to learn about current research in the fields of international development and diplomacy to help formulate possible solutions for worldwide economic stability and conflict resolution. |
Check out Ethan's blog posts:
Is China supplanting the US as the Philippines' main ally? India and China Rivalry Presents an Opportunity for Nepal |
Felix Clevenger
Felix is a third-year Government major. His interests revolve around intergovernmental funding policy and global development. As a Spanish minor and dual citizen of Argentina, Felix follows the developments in Latin America for the CDF team. He is conducting a project analyzing the determinants of Chinese direct investment through the Research Practicum Program that the Government Department provides. His project evaluates the impact of oil prices and reserves, economic states, and geographic location significance on Chinese foreign direct investment allocation. Felix is an active member of the Delta Tau Delta Gamma Iota Chapter at UT and contributes to The Deeper Dig, a website reviewing upcoming music artists. |
Check out Felix's blog posts:
Chinese Investment's in Latin America and the Caribbean: Goodwill or Self-Interest? |
Sandra Schwalen
Sandra is a fourth-year undergraduate student, majoring in international relations and German, with minors in French and European Studies. Her interests include security studies, conflict resolution and humanitarian aid. In the fall of 2016, she studied abroad at Sciences Po in Paris, and the following summer, she interned at Mouvement de la Paix, a French NGO focused on peace education and non-proliferation. In fall 2017, she interned at the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Berlin, and currently she is an intern at Congressman Lloyd Doggett’s Austin office for constituency affairs. After completing her Bachelor’s, Sandra would like to continue her studies in international affairs in a Master’s program. |
Thomas Sipp
Thomas is a second-year undergraduate student studying Government at the University of Texas at Austin. |
Varun Hukeri
Varun is a second-year undergraduate student majoring in Government and International Relations and Global Studies, with a minor in Chinese. He is focused on the political economy of the Asia-Pacific region, and is specifically interested in emerging markets, international financial institutions, and foreign direct investment. After graduating, Varun plans to attend law school. |
Check out Varun's blog posts:
Himalayan Water: Economic Blessing or Environmental Disaster? Breaking the Ice: China and the Arctic |
Devon Hsiao
Devon is a third-year student studying Humanities and Korean in the College of Liberal Arts. She is also the President of the student organization Women in Foreign Affairs. Her experience as a summer intern in the Education section of UNICEF China sparked her interest in China-Africa relations and the impact and consequences of Chinese educational aid to Africa. She is excited for the opportunity to learn more about Chinese financing and investment with the Chinese Development Finance team at IPD. |
Simon Menet
Simon is a first-year Master student from the University of Lyon III in France. He is majoring in International Relations with a focus on Security and East Asia. He also studies Chinese with the goal of working in the field of diplomacy in China. Before coming to UT, he earned a dual undergraduate degree in Law and Political Science. He has done an internship at a French Chamber of Commerce. There, he advised the Director and led a comparative analysis on a institutional reform within the French Chambers of Commerce network. On the Chinese Development Finance team, Simon manifests his interest for Chinese foreign policy. 
Keeton Schenck
Keeton is a third-year student studying Finance and International Political Economy through the McCombs School of Business and Liberal Arts Honors program. His research interests include US-China trade relations, international development, and investment trends in renewable energy technologies. Keeton has interned as a Market Research Analyst for a venture-funded startup in Palo Alto, where he conducted a 10-week research project to track target market trends and analyze product development. He is looking forward to working as a Summer Investment Analyst at Prudential Capital Group, where he will analyze debt and equity investments in renewable and traditional energy sources. Keeton also serves as the Public Equities Director for Texas Alternative Investments and is an active member of the Tejas Club. |
Yanrong Zeng
Yanrong is a third-year undergraduate student majoring in International Relations and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. |
Siyu Luo
Siyu is an international student from China. She got her Bachelor’s degree in Finance from Hong Kong, and is a second-year graduate student in LBJ School of Public Affairs. She had experience in research and data analysis in the fields of international development and finance. She is a research affiliate in the Chinese Development Finance Team in IPD, and a graduate research assistant in the LBJ School. With internship experience in think tank and business corporations both in the United States and China, her passion is in research on international development finance and nonprofit organizations for development. Patrick Harned
Patrick graduated from Hunter College, City University of New York in 2015 with B.A. in Classical Languages and Arab Studies. Currently he is a masters student in the Dual Degree program at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. His interests are in political emancipation, leftist movements in the Middle East and contemporary Arab literature. He has presented papers on political emancipation and Lebanese literature at conferences and is currently working on his thesis on political emancipation in Northern Syria. |
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