RAS Beijing Zoom – A Lifeline for China: Building Wartime Connectivity along the Burma Road (1938-1942), with Andres Rodriguez – January 28 2026

Posted: January 23rd, 2026 | No Comments »

A Lifeline for China: Building Wartime Connectivity along the Burma Road (1938-1942)

a Zoom talk by Prof. Andres Rodriguez

How did wartime ‘lifeline’, the Burma Road, draw China closer to its Western allies, and turn the nation’s southwest into the vital hub connecting Southeast Asia to India and to the world; a hub it become again 80-plus years on? Prof. Rodriguez from the University of Sydney will examine the history of this notorious and treacherous route in RASBJ’s next Zoom talk.

China’s Burma Road (1938-1942) acted as a channel for wartime material to move between British Burma and China during the initial years of the Sino-Japanese War. Prof. Rodriguez will examine how the development of this lifeline for China forged a powerful wartime narrative that helped consolidate support among Western nations to counter Japan’s invasion. The Burma Road gave rise to new ideas of connectivity that positioned China’s southwest region as a vital hub connecting the nation with Southeast Asia, India, and the rest of the world.

Andres Rodriguez (PhD Oxford) is Senior Lecturer in Modern Chinese History at the University of Sydney. He is the author of “Frontier Fieldwork. Building a Nation in China’s Borderlands, 1919-1945” (University of British Columbia Press 2022).

And moderated by Cao Yin is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Peking University. He works on infrastructures, multispecies ecologies, technological circulation, and state formation in South and Southeast Asia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is the author of “Chinese Sojourners in Wartime Raj, 1942–45” (Oxford University Press, 2022) and “From Policemen to Revolutionaries: A Sikh Diaspora in Global Shanghai, 1885–1945” (Brill, 2018).

More details and sign up here

---