Paper short abstract:

The Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), a South-South institution created in 2000, is a crucial site of reflection and production of idea, policy and practice in China-Africa relations. This paper will discuss the shaping of FOCAC in the changing geography of China-Africa development.

Paper long abstract:

The paper seeks to critically assess and analyse FOCAC, and its emerging 'material, ideational and ontological' challenges to the international development regime (Mawdsley, 2015). Since its inception in 2000, FOCAC meets every three years, and has become a crucial site of presentation and change in China-Africa relations, providing a critical lens on the construction of power in the evolving development landscape.

Despite the almost universal mention of FOCAC in relation to China-Africa relations, and the surge of Southern institutions more generally, this paper will be one of the first to provide a detailed, discursive analysis of the emergence, evolution and functioning of FOCAC. To date, there is only one book in English on this subject by Prof Ian Taylor in 2011.

In this paper, I will discuss the following arguments about the discourse of changing narratives of FOCAC, through a critical reading of its core documents. First, FOCAC consistently makes economic growth the centre of its development agenda, with growing assertion of the private sector and state-corporate interest beyond aid. Second, FOCAC has become increasingly sensitive to external reputation and international norms, in its evolving attention to agendas e.g. local livelihoods and governance. Third, FOCAC undertakes a distinctive 'performance' for various audiences, by inhabiting the language of Third Worldism on the one hand, and being not shy at all of money talk on the other. Fourth, FOCAC is shifting its pattern of focus from individual bilateral towards regional multilateral, alongside Africa's formalising integration and China's expanding efforts of global capitalism.