Short Biography

A China scholar of German and British extraction, Creutzfeldt graduated with a BA in Chinese Studies from Durham University in England and earned his MA from SOAS, University of London, whereupon he joined Christie’s as an auctioneer and specialist for Chinese porcelain and works of art. He has studied and worked extensively in China over the past two decades, and has co-founded and managed multiple start-up companies. For over eight years, he was a university lecturer for China and East Asian Studies in Bogota, Colombia. He received his PhD in political studies in 2015, for research on China’s foreign policy towards Latin America, under the supervision of Qin Yaqing (China Foreign Affairs University) and Matt Ferchen (Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy). After a postdoc position for China-Latin America-U.S. Affairs at Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, he continued in Washington, DC, as a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center. Currently, he is a lecturer for Chinese politics and a researcher at the Centre for the Study of China and the Global South at Universidad del Pacifico in Lima, Peru.

Project

The project explores the roles of China’s diplomatic corps and academic networks in the transmission of Beijing’s government strategy and messaging abroad. It aims to document and analyse China’s international relations through the work of diplomats and scholars, and the evolution of China’s diplomatic strategy and discursive power in Latin America – a group of countries distinct from other world regions for a broad linguistic coherence and for China’s comparative lack of institutional baggage. Through extensive online data-collection, the use of social network analysis, and interviews with diplomats and scholars, this study examines how effectively these figures have translated their country’s goals into multi-dimensional engagement with that region over the past decade. The project builds on my previous work comprising extensive fieldwork and the building of cross-cultural networks involving interviews, surveys, and academic collaboration in the Andean countries of Latin America, as well as the United States and China, having spent the past thirty years living in those countries.