Barry Sautman

Friends and interests: China's distinctive links with Africa

Abstract: Chinas expanded links to Africa have created a discourse of how to characterize those ties. Western political forces and media have criticized every aspect of Chinas activities in Africa, while Chinese, with significant support from Africans, have mounted a spirited defense. This article examines several factors that make Chinas links with Africa distinctive, including Chinas aid and migration policies, the distinctive “Chinese model” of foreign investment and infrastructure loans, and the development model known as the “Beijing Consensus.” It argues that particular aspects of Chinas links with Africa make the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) seem a lesser evil than the West in terms of support for Africas development and respect for African nations.

Preferential policies for ethnic minorities in China: The case of Xinjiang

Preferential policies for ethnic minorities in China are implemented in family planning, school admissions, the hiring and promotion, the financing and taxation of businesses, and regional infrastructural support. Affirmative action has created greater social equity, while not impairing and likely promoting positive Han‐minority relations. This is so even in Xinjiang, a fast growing, but unstable PRC minority region. Chinas preferential policies represent a case that does not conform to the hypothesis of Thomas Sowell and other scholars that affirmative action everywhere fails to produce substantial equity, inhibits economic efficiency and creates inter‐ethnic tensions.

Peking man and the politics of paleoanthropological nationalism in China.

Much attention has been focused on the recrudescence of Chinese nationalism in the 1990s. The PRC government generally denies, but occasionally defends, the existence of nationalism within China (Xi 1996). Many Chinese scholars acknowledge the phenomenon and debate its impact, with most evincing a positive attitude toward nationalism (Zhang Xudong 1997; Xiao 1997; Sheng 1996; Wen 1996; Li 1995). Outside the PRC, Chinese nationalism is increasingly scrutinized (Zhao 1997; Zhu 1997, Gries 1999). Some hold that it is rational and manageable (Nathan and Ross 1997; Metzger and Myers 1998; Zheng 1999), while others speak in more premonitory tones (Chang 1998; Su 1997; Mosher 2000). All conclude that it is statesponsored, popular, and fills an “ideological vacuum” left by the waning of socialism (see, for example, Oksenberg 1997; Christensen 1996).

Anti-Black Racism in Post-Mao China *

Expressions of anti-black sentiment by Chinese students have caught the worlds attention periodically since the end of the 1970s. Demonstrations against African students in Nanjing and other cities between late 1988 and early 1989 received wide press coverage. Because the African population in China is small and transient, some observers saw these events as a manifestation of a vestigial xenophobia, not as part of a developing trend of thought within a key segment of Chinese society. Placed next to the brutal ethnic conflicts that plague much of the world, the episodic, non-lethal incidents in China seemed evanescent, with only fleeting implications for Chinas foreign policy.

Sirens of the Strongman: Neo-Authoritarianism in Recent Chinese Political Theory

Chinas year of upheaval, 1989, was full of incongruities. For example, students invoked the historic struggle of intellectuals to “revive China,” while at the same time erecting statues modelled after the symbol of a foreign power with a long history of objectionable conduct toward their country. One of the most interesting incongruities, however, emerged not in the streets, but in the pages of Chinese journals. Highly-placed intellectuals debated the theory of neo-authoritarianism, a doctrine new to the Peoples Republic, but one which reflects the policy prescriptions of pre-revolutionary Chinese leaders and contemporary Third World strongmen. Advocates of the doctrine were ideologically and, in some cases, organizationally, close to Zhao Ziyang, then the general secretary of the worlds largest Communist Party, but their theory was classically conservative. The debate, moreover, was waged without reference to Marxism by either proponents or opponents.

Chinese Farms in Zambia: From Socialist to “Agro-Imperialist” Engagement?

Participation by Chinese in Zambia’s agriculture has involved three modes of engagement. Two of these, agro-socialist cooperation until the late 1980s and agro-capitalist “win-win,” since the 1990s, can be examined. The third one, an “agro-imperialist” mode, is not an experience, but a speculation, one possible future based on the Chinese state’s potential to allow firms from China to join in the large-scale, export-oriented “land grabs” by big transnational firms that have occurred since food crises in the developing world in the late 2000s. This paper analyzes all three modes of Chinese engagement, but necessarily concentrates on the second, present-day mode, agro-capitalism. We argue that the present Chinese engagement with Zambian agriculture makes small-scale positive contributions to the domestic food market in Zambia. At the same time, its agro-capitalist production involves the exploitation of farm workers that is typically at the core of commercial farming regardless of the national origins of farm owners. We also contend that while Chinese in Zambia and Africa are not carrying out agro-imperialism, they will likely do so if Chinese leaders decide that this practice represents an international standard.

Paved with Good Intentions Proposals to Curb Minority Rights and Their Consequences for China

Since 2004, academics concerned about a prospective fracturing of China’s territory have advanced proposals to phase out ethnic regional autonomy, preferential policies, and other minority rights. Riots in Lhasa, Tibet, in 2008 and Urumqi, Xinjiang, in 2009 gave greater impetus to the proposals, as they moved from academic to wider circles and complaints about preferential policies in criminal justice, family planning, and school admissions grew, with even state recognition of minorities challenged. Yet many minority and some Han intellectuals continue to see the proposals as deleterious to interethnic and minority–state relations and arguments for them based on practices in the United States and India have lacked persuasive power. The state has reacted to this discourse by reemphasizing existing policies, but it has also brought about a “subtle shift” in ethnic policies since 2010, albeit not the shift that proponents of curbing minority rights have sought.

“The Beginning of a World Empire”? Contesting the Discourse of Chinese Copper Mining in Zambia

A discourse fostered by Western politicians and media of Chinese copper mining in Zambia has been central to global discussions of China-in-Africa since the mid-2000s. Based in the West’s putative strategic rivalry with China, the discourse also invokes racial stereotypes about Chinese cruelty and disregard for human life. Focusing on Human Rights Watch’s 2011 attempt to prove China’s firms to be Zambian copper mining’s “worst employers,” we show that the discourse is highly inaccurate: methodological mistakes compound elementary empirical errors, even as the politics of the discourse serve up a synecdoche for the global rise of a monolithic China.

The forest for the trees : trade, investment, and the China-in-Africa discourse

* We thank the Hong Kong Research Grants Council for its generous support. 1 See Maxi Schoeman, “China in Africa: the Rise of a Hegemony?” in China and Africa: Partners in Development and Security?, Danish Institute of International Affairs, Copenhagen, 23 August 2007. 2 Ironically, the discourse is most developed in the US, yet the US stood alone in refusing to recognize a right to development when the United Nations adopted it in 1998. “US Votes Against Development as Basic Human Right,” Inter Press Service (IPS), 10 December 1998. 3 “Patron of African Misgovernment,” New York Times (NYT), 19 February 2007. 4 See, e.g., Yaroslav Trofi mov, “In Africa, China’s Expansion Begins to Stir Resentment,” Wall Street Journal (WSJ), 2 February 2007. The Forest for the Trees: Trade, Investment and the China-in-Africa Discourse

Tibet: Development for Whom?

Barry Sautman is a political scientist and lawyer in the Division of Social Science, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China. Irene Eng, formerly associated with the Division, is an economic geographer and writer. The Tibetan 6migr6 administration headquartered in Dharamsala (India) and Chinese leaders have fiercely debated the question of who benefits from development in Tibet. While some officials on both sides may have more nuanced views, the &dquo;govemment-in-exile&dquo; represents Tibetans as exploited colonial subjects,’ while the PRC portrays them as content recipients of modernization.’ The 6migr6 administration and most of its Western supporters find no strengths to offset the weaknesses of the development process in Tibet. They appraise its benefits in terms of a binary of &dquo;the Tibetans&dquo; and &dquo;the Chinese&dquo; and contend that Tibetans are mired in poverty that would not exist in a free Tibet, because development solely serves state interests: roads are built only to facilita-