SPERI presents...Live: Second China shock at #BISA2026

SPERI Presents, the podcast of the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute, recorded a live episode during the BISA 2026 conference in Brighton. 

How should we understand the ruptural shift of the second China shock? How does it effect what we thought we knew about China and global production? How can we study this transformation? What comes next?

This SPERI Presents... episode is a live recording of the roundtable 'The global impact of China’s technological leadership and offshoring: Towards a second China shock' at the BISA 2026 conference. It was sponsored by the International Political Economy Working Group (IPEG) and took place in Brighton on Thursday 4 June 2026.
 

Professor Yvette To is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Social Sciences at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Dr Frank Maracchione is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS University of London. Dr Shizhi Zhang is a post-doctoral Research Associate at the Urban Institute in Sheffield. Dr Zhengli Huang is a Research Associate also at the Urban Institute in Sheffield.

They join Chris Saltmarsh to discuss the theoretical and empirical challenges posed by the the reconfiguration of production networks led by China poses a fresh set of theoretical and empirical challenges; how existing paradigms of development, dependency, and power in the global economy are being unsettled; and in what ways scholars and policymakers alike must rethink the frameworks they use to study global production from the systemic to the everyday levels.

Listen below.

The episode was produced by Frank Maracchione and Chris Saltmarsh and edited by Chris Saltmarsh.