Giles Mohan
(The Open University)
Indrajit Roy
(University of York)
Format:
Panel
Streams:
Politics and political economy
Sessions:
Friday 8 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
The rise of China and the re-scaling global development politics.
Panel P03b at conference DSA2022: Just sustainable futures in an urbanising and mobile world.
Discourses around a 'new cold war' conclude that the liberal international order is threatened by China. Yet, new mobilities of capital, people, and knowledge re-orient the who, what, where and how of global development politics which this panel addresses through empirically-based theorisation.
Long Abstract:
Putative discourses around a 'new cold war' posit a politics of scale that is based on extant imaginaries of super-power rivalry and 'spheres of influence', and which ultimately conclude that the liberal international order is under threat from China and other erstwhile developing countries. Yet, if we consider new mobilities of capital, people, and knowledge then the reality on the ground suggests a more complex, multi-scalar politics of development. These emerging dynamics force us to radically re-orient the who, what, where and how of global development, which break away from crude 'North-South' geographies to focus on interconnected scales. But development studies' rootedness in political-economy means we retain a critical focus on who benefits and who loses from these emergent processes so that questions of exclusion and peripheralization, and their opposites, are central.
This paper-based panel seeks to assemble empirically-informed theorisations of global development politics in the current conjuncture and to chart emergent trajectories. We are particularly interested in hearing from early career scholars and PhD students, as well as scholars based outside Western Europe and North America. Participants will ideally deliver a video with slides three weeks before the session and the discussant will open the session with a provocation before opening up for discussion. The session would be edited into a video podcast co-hosted by the Open University and University of York.
This paper examines "strategic partnerships" (SPs) as a new framework to understand how Chinese actors engage with those in partner countries. The analysis foregrounds the multi-scalar, sub-state nature of SPs, focusing empirically on Sino-Italian relations as a "typical" case study.
Paper long abstract:
As discussions of a "new cold war" between China and the West intensify, it has never been more important to understand how China engages internationally. With 2,631 projects being implemented under the aegis of the Belt and Road Initiative and a total of $3.7 trillion of global investments, China is at the very heart of contemporary international relations. Crucially, as of 2021 China has established 110 "strategic partnerships" (SPs), without stipulating any formal treaty of alliance, but we know little about SPs and how China uses them, despite their centrality as a foreign policy tool. This paper analyses strategic partnerships as a new form of bilateral interaction that characterises post-Cold War international relations. It argues that strategic partnerships should be understood as a multilevel form of bilateral engagement that involves states but also sub-state entities, including businesses, diasporas and media organisations. To this end, the analysis explores how China - the country that more than any other has made use of strategic partnerships in its foreign policy - has deployed this diplomatic tool in Europe during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a focus on Sino-Italian relations. In doing so, the article shows the adaptability of China's strategic partnership diplomacy. In addition, drawing on the analysis of 1294 news articles published as part of the content-sharing agreement between the Chinese and Italian news agencies Xinhua and Ansa, the paper foregrounds the importance of the ideational component in strategic partnerships, highlighting the image-building purpose that SPs serve.
Using Kenya's Standard Gauge Railway as a case study, this article explores the contingent nature of "spatial fix" of China's infrastructure capital. It identifies the ambiguous position of the state-owned contracting enterprises and their role in representing the state capital and its spatial fix.
Paper long abstract:
In Kenya, the Chinese SOE contractor has been driving the development of the SGR, yet it has also constantly shifting its strategies, as the pursuit of "productiveness" gives way to mixed agendas of the enterprise, also responding to changing political circumstances in Kenya and across East Africa. Analysing these dynamics, in contrast to the analyses that highlight state centrism and structural logics of infrastructure-based "spatial fixes", the article foregrounds the contingency of "spatial fix" that shifts and transforms, as determined by the politics of host countries and changing strategic interests of specific enterprises.
The article will focus on two aspects of the Chinese state capital. First, the SGR project represents a typical "spatial fix" of infrastructure capital from China. Unlike in the resource-rich countries, Chinese capital in infrastructure in Kenya functions with autonomous logic and characteristics and therefore can be disentangled from the frameworks of extractivism. By reviewing the history of the accumulation of infrastructure capital in China, we identify the financing of the SGR and similar BRI projects as a result of "spatial fix", instead of as an exchange for natural resources. Second, we further distinguish the different stakeholders in the planning and implementation of the SGR project and identify the ambiguous relationship between the contractors and the state financiers. This helps us to understand the accumulative nature of the state-owned enterprises and their role in driving the project, as well as the political burdens that hold them back from making purely accumulative decisions.
By surveying more than 800 Africans in 2020 and 2021, this paper contributes to the diffusion of developmental knowledge of an emerging power in the South and it helps us to understand how local people in Africa envision its future development model by interacting with the world.
Paper long abstract:
In the wide-spreading interest in China’s rapid economic growth and its impacts on the rest of the world, this paper starts demystifying four narratives prevailing particularly in the Northern partners in the development community. Upon this intellectual landscape, this paper attempts to fill the lacuna on the South perceptions of China’s development experiences and its impacts globally by surveying more than 800 Africans in 2020 and 2021. It finds Africans believe that China’s development experiences challenged the West's experiences but the two can coexist. African believe that the Chinese development experiences are most relevant to African countries in terms of exploring self-reliant development and improving the development effectiveness, among which three elements are the key, namely, science and technology, industrialization strategy, and giving priority to economic growth. Finally, the survey also identifies the potential risks in the discrepancy of China’s official narrative and that of perception of the South. This paper contributes to the diffusion of developmental knowledge of an emerging power in the South. Also, this paper helps us to understand how local people in Africa envision its future development model by interacting with the world.
I examine China’s control over the rare earths industry—considered one of the ‘critical minerals’ for energy transition and deployed widely across different sectors of the world economy—as a litmus test against theories of globalization and economic development.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the growing significance of rare earths elements (REEs) as a focal point of geopolitical conflicts and as a tool for economic development. I use the example of REEs to illustrate the apparent limitation of economic globalization theories based on notion of interdependence, cooperation, and possibilities of economic development through global market integration. Drawing from the semi-conductor and batteries for renewable technology as cases, the paper shows that the global value chains of renewables are likely to be dominated by China in the next two decades.
I examine China’s control over the rare earths industry—considered one of the ‘critical minerals’ for energy transition and deployed widely across different sectors of the world economy—as a litmus test against theories of globalization and economic development. Firstly, I highlight the nature of China’s state-backed capital as an important feature of how the global political economy is being restructured. China’s fusion of economic and state power is changing the calculus of market actors and Western governments. Secondly, since 2013, Chinese state capitalism as a governance model—some of its features appear transferrable to the global South—is increasingly gaining traction particularly in Africa and Latin America. China’s industrial strategy reflects growing presence of the state and a partial retreat of the market. In the REE sector, China has demonstrated its capacity to domesticate manufacturing and to link mining production and processing to high-value, technology-intensive downstream segments. China provides a credible alternative based on a logic of developmentalism.
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Indrajit Roy (University of York)
Short Abstract:
Discourses around a 'new cold war' conclude that the liberal international order is threatened by China. Yet, new mobilities of capital, people, and knowledge re-orient the who, what, where and how of global development politics which this panel addresses through empirically-based theorisation.
Long Abstract:
Putative discourses around a 'new cold war' posit a politics of scale that is based on extant imaginaries of super-power rivalry and 'spheres of influence', and which ultimately conclude that the liberal international order is under threat from China and other erstwhile developing countries. Yet, if we consider new mobilities of capital, people, and knowledge then the reality on the ground suggests a more complex, multi-scalar politics of development. These emerging dynamics force us to radically re-orient the who, what, where and how of global development, which break away from crude 'North-South' geographies to focus on interconnected scales. But development studies' rootedness in political-economy means we retain a critical focus on who benefits and who loses from these emergent processes so that questions of exclusion and peripheralization, and their opposites, are central.
This paper-based panel seeks to assemble empirically-informed theorisations of global development politics in the current conjuncture and to chart emergent trajectories. We are particularly interested in hearing from early career scholars and PhD students, as well as scholars based outside Western Europe and North America. Participants will ideally deliver a video with slides three weeks before the session and the discussant will open the session with a provocation before opening up for discussion. The session would be edited into a video podcast co-hosted by the Open University and University of York.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 8 July, 2022, -