Tifa as Discursive Infrastructure: Silkroadism and the Commercialisation of Authoritarian Governance

Speaker: Dr Giulia Sciorati (LSE)

Organiser: Professor Todd Hall (University of Oxford)

In this project, Dr Sciorati treats Silkroadism itself as a tifa (提法) – a fixed political formulation that organises and stabilises meaning across China’s external narratives. Building on previous scholarship, Dr Sciorati conceptualises tifa as discursive infrastructures: patterned, state-sanctioned formulations that make China’s governance model coherent and exportable. Empirically, she examines how Silkroadist tifa are deployed in China’s responses to political crises in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, showing how instability in neighbouring regimes creates opportunities for Beijing to (re)affirm the appeal of its model through language constructions instead of ideology. Through an interpretive, narrative-focused approach, the project identifies the functional categories through which Silkroadist tifa operate and how they contribute to the transnational commercialisation of authoritarian practices.

Giulia Sciorati is an LSE Fellow in International Relations specialising in narrative performance, with an empirical focus on Global China. Her research examines how China constructs and projects identity across domestic and international settings, with work on strategic self-representation, authoritarian governance, and narrative power published in leading journals. She has a co-authored book on variation in state responses to sovereignty violations forthcoming with Amsterdam University Press (2026).