The China Insights Fund granted funding to two student and one faculty members for their research that explores how China engages with the world. Congratulations to our 2025 awardees: Haoran Change, Christopher Stevens and Qiang Zha!
Haoran Chang, Doctoral Candidate, Cinema and Media Studies
Project: Making Taoist Game with Transnational Tai Chi Community between China and Canada
Haoran’s research-creation doctoral dissertation explores the potential of games as a healing and reparative medium through the lens of Taoist philosophy and practice. This transdisciplinary project bridges a centuries-old tradition with cutting-edge research in game development for health by creating a Taoist Tai Chi Virtual Reality (VR) game in collaboration with various partners. Specifically, Chang is developing a VR game based on Zhan Zhuang (standing meditation), offering a 30-day immersive experience rooted in this common Taoist practice that aligns body, mind, and breath through stillness. The iterative, collaborative design process will engage both Chinese and Canadian Tai Chi communities, fostering meaningful cross-cultural dialogue on Chinese meditation and mindfulness practices in the digital age. It investigates how Taoist Tai Chi practices can inform the design of games that support mindfulness and meditation, and how ethnographic game design methods can address the limitations of current health gamification applications. By foregrounding a non-Eurocentric perspective, the project seeks to challenge dominant paradigms in interactive media and propose a framework that emphasizes bodily awareness, flow, and meditative engagement as core mechanics in gameplay. By bringing Taoist philosophy and practice into dialogue with Western game studies, I aim to contribute to the emerging field of Chinese game studies and the broader domain of Sinophone game culture, centering traditional Chinese thought in the development of game design theory. My research advocates for a pluralist approach that enriches understandings of games through Chinese cultural frameworks, bridging Western media theories with local practices. By creating computational media grounded in Chinese philosophical traditions, I aim to diversify both the conceptual foundations and design methodologies of digital games.
Christopher Stevens, Doctoral Candidate, Political Science
Project: Does a Southern Investment Playbook Exist? Comparative Insights on South-South Investment from Zambia
Steven’s research focuses on South-South cooperation and the complex relationships that these investments create within recipient countries. It is looking to build a deeper understanding of the impacts and benefits of foreign direct investment, in agriculture and mining, from China and South Africa on Zambian development and communities (workers, local businesses, etc.). He is interested in learning more about the relationships between these investments and Zambians, how they interact, what benefits are possible from them, and how Zambians may be able to increase their gains from such investments. This comparative analysis of Southern investors will help elucidate any similarities and differences in Southern approaches, bringing much needed nuance to the roles played by different Southern investors, and how their different historical knowledges and experiences provide opportunities for unique developmental investment approaches. Crucially missing from much existing work on the topic, Stevens’ research also focuses on home country attributes; by integrating knowledge of the current socio-economic positioning, ideology and practices of investor states it will add new insights to the roles played by China and South Africa in the Global South and the changing sphere of the global economic system.
By moving away from work which is siloed off from broader comparative questions, the internal shifts in political economy and power relations in home countries (China and South Africa) can be incorporated into a broader understanding of how political settlements surrounding investments in the South are formed. Utilizing knowledge of these broader home countries shifts, and how they relate with the reshaping of the global system, in addition to the deep understanding of investments themselves gained from fieldwork in Zambia, allows for an level of comprehensiveness, across all actors and changes which may impact investment practices, as yet unseen in work on South-South investment.
Qiang Zha, Professor, Education
Project: Between Giants: Canadian Foreign Policy Professionals’ Attitudes Towards China in a Shifting Geo/political Landscape
Professor Zha’s research investigates how Canadian foreign policy professionals perceive China and how those perceptions are shaped by the changing geo/political and institutional pressures. Inspired by Cerny and Truex’s (2024) study with respect to the United States, this study adapts their framework to the Canadian context to uncover the range of views held by professionals directly involved in shaping or advising on foreign policy. While existing analyses often focus on State-level strategy (Paltiel 2024), this project brings empirical, individual-level insight into the beliefs and priorities of policy actors. The findings will contribute to scholarship on Canada–China relations and offer practical insights for policymakers navigating an increasingly complex and contested Indo-Pacific environment.
Specifically, this study attempts to address such research questions: 1) How do Canadian foreign policy professionals perceive China’s role in the international system, and do they view China more as a threat, an opportunity, or both? 2) To what extent are these perceptions shaped by institutional affiliation, policy domain (e.g., security, trade, diplomacy), professional or personal experience? 3) How are Canadian professionals compared to their American counterparts in terms of threat perception, willingness to cooperate, and trust in China? And 4) What similarities or differences exist between individual-level attitudes among Canadian foreign policy professionals and official Canadian policy positions towards China?
The China Initiatives Fund was created in 2019 and provides funding for research projects, graduate student field research, international research/ teaching collaborations, and workshops/symposiums/conferences. The next deadline for applications is Monday, 11 May 2026. Learn more at this link.