Joshua Eisenman

China and Africa

Since the turn of the century China has constructed a foreign policy toward Africa designed to secure natural resources, future markets, opportunities for its construction firms, and its position as leader of the developing world. To realize these goals, Beijing has employed approaches that address African nations’ economic, diplomatic, and security needs, while ensuring China’s continued ability to influence the political and commercial landscape of this resource-rich continent. China’s increasingly proactive foreign policymakers have taken advantage of a void left by an indifferent USSR, a preoccupied USA, and a divided Europe to create fresh opportunities and pursue new bilateral and multilateral dialogues. For the USA, China’s strategy in African affairs has unique implications. Washington (preoccupied by the Middle East and the South China Sea) has allowed Africa to remain low on its foreign-policy priority list. As a result, until recently Beijing has pursued its strategy in Africa without drawing much attention and has expanded the depth and breadth of its political, economic, diplomatic, and military relationships on the continent. This chapter will begin with a brief historical overview of Sino-African relations. It will explore the development of Beijing’s strategy, with particular attention to China’s contemporary objectives and methods.

Organizational Structure, Policy Learning, and Economic Performance: Evidence from the Chinese Commune

Using original county-level panel data on Chinese communes over two decades, 1958 to 1979, this article builds upon existing theories about the influence of organizational size and structure on institutional performance. We found a consistent and robust interaction effect among the size of the commune (i.e., the coordination level) and its subunits, the brigade (i.e., the supervisory level) and production teams (i.e., the working level), on agricultural productivity. Future work on the relationship between organizational performance and size would likely benefit from including such interaction variables. We also provide evidence that to create a more productive institution, county-level officials learned from their most productive neighbors and adjusted the size of their communes accordingly. This work explains the role of organizational structure as a driver of economic performance and how policy diffusion occurred during China’s Maoist era—a period generally treated as a monolith rather than a period of institutional change.

Comrades-in-arms: the Chinese Communist Party’s relations with African political organisations in the Mao era, 1949–76

Abstract This study examines the evolution of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) motives, objectives, and methods vis-à-vis its African counterparts during the Mao era, 1949–76. Beginning in the mid-1950s, to oppose colonialism and US imperialism, the CCP created front groups to administer its political outreach in Africa. In the 1960s and 1970s, this strategy evolved to combat Soviet hegemony. Although these policy shifts are distinguished by changes in CCP methods and objectives towards Africa, they were motivated primarily by life-or-death intraparty struggles among rival political factions in Beijing and the party’s pursuit of external sources of regime legitimacy.

Building China’s 1970s Green Revolution: Responding to Population Growth, Decreasing Arable Land, and Capital Depreciation

This chapter uses national-level data to identify three evolving economic challenges faced by rural communes in China during the 1970s—rising rates of population growth, falling arable land, and high capital depreciation rates—and describes the policies the Chinese Communist Party adopted to alleviate them. The chapter has two primary conclusions: first, the agricultural investments undertaken during the 1970s were an essential driver of productivity increases both before and after decollectivization; second, beginning in 1979, the abandonment of the commune, the lowest level of governance in 1970s rural China, crippled the ability of localities to invest in productive agricultural capital and technology. In the early 1980s, without communes to extract resources and implement agricultural modernization plans, rural investment fell precipitously.

Beyond Engagement? Rethinking America’s China Policy

Since the Nixon Administration, the US strategy towards China has been predicated on the assumption that if the bilateral relationship is properly managed conflict can be avoided. Many Americans ac...