Towards a Post-Western Global Governance? How Africa-China relations in(form) China’s Practices

 

We often hear and read about the various ways in which China can help African countries develop, about how Africans should learn this lesson or the other from China, and about how China’s interests in Africa in the early 2000s have made Africa become more visible as an international market and a trade partner. We do not, however, hear or read enough about the ways in which Africa reciprocally provides opportunities for China (other than natural resource supplies), about how trading (multilaterally and bilaterally) with African countries helps China gain much-needed experience in global economic development, or about how cooperation platforms between China and African states have provided much needed feedback for China to adjust and readjust its conduct according to different contexts. Trading with African countries opens up many unique opportunities for China that remain underexplored in the extant literature. This article seeks to rectify this mainly by focusing on what China learns about global governance from its experience implementing trade and investment projects across Africa.

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China’s Peace and Security Strategies in Africa: Building Capacity is Building Peace?

 

There is a growing body of scholarship that examines China’s security engagement in Africa. However, such scholarship largely views security cooperation in terms of military aid, military equipment and considers security from a traditional perspective. This article proposes to expand the scope of security to include non-traditional aspects of cooperation such as capacity building programs and investments in human resource development. Going beyond the view that security should be understood in terms of military hardware and naval bases, I propose a security-development nexus as a framework to understand China’s security practices in Africa. This nexus highlights the integration of security and development and views peace and conflict resolution to be the result of successful economic development. The core argument of this article is that central to Beijing’s security strategy in Africa are not arms sales, deployment of combat troops, or establishment of military bases only, but that equally vital are investments in human resource developments through capacity building programs. The article closes with a critical analysis of the development-security nexus by highlighting its major shortcomings and unintended consequences. As China’s experience in the South-Sudan indicates, over-relying on economic development as a broker for peace has its own challenges and limitations.

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The Belt and Road Initiative and the Making of Chinese Grand Strategy: contesting the international order by integrating it

 

What does the One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative tell us about China’s perception of the international order? The debate on whether China has a grand strategy for its regional and global relations was put to rest under Xi Jinping’s leadership. Since the launch of the initiative of the One Belt One Road and the coinage of “new type of major power relations”, there is little questioning about a grand strategy. During 2015, China’s diplomacy has been engaging in hosting and participating in several summits and state visits in order to market the goals and values behind the OBOR. This paper takes an inductive approach by examining OBOR initiative for a two-pronged purpose. First, to understand the Chinese perception of the international order by examining the official discourse from Beijing around its intentions and vision for the initiative. Second, to examine the role and functions of Chinese-led initiatives (such as OBOR and AIIB) in the current order. Some of the findings about China’s view of the international order through OBOR point at the centrality of three main pillars: development (mostly through infrastructure) is the foundation of security and peace, China is a non-hegemonic power that prefers cooperation over confrontation, and last, China sees itself as increasingly able to contribute lessons from its own development experience to regions in Eurasia, Latin America, and Africa.

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