Politics or profits along the “Silk Road”: what drives Chinese farms in Tajikistan and helps them thrive?

Abstract

China’s influence in neighboring Central Asian states is growing at a fast pace. Since the launch of the One Belt, One Road (OBOR) initiative to accelerate China’s engagement in Central Asia and beyond, nearly all Chinese activity in this region has been gathered under OBOR. OBOR now seems to cover a plethora of spatially and temporally expanding state and privately driven projects. In this paper, I discuss large- and small-scale Chinese farm enterprises in Tajikistan, in which discussions around China’s “global land investments” and OBOR intersect. Beneath abstract conceptualizations of OBOR and the Chinese presence in Central Asia, my analysis shows that Chinese land investments in Tajikistan are shaped by Chinese dynamics of agrarian change and are contingent upon country-specific conditions. Rather than state-led endeavors as is often assumed, the main Chinese actors in Tajik agriculture are capitalist yet partially state-embedded enterprises driven by profit-oriented goals. Chinese farm enterprises tap into specific market demands that are either unanswered or underdeveloped in Tajikistan, or which have emerged due to the growing number of Chinese consumers in Tajikistan. The nature and drivers of Chinese land acquisitions in Tajikistan shed light on the various, sometimes competing, factors driving China’s broader foreign “land rush,” in Central Asia (and beyond).     

Going West and Going Out: discourses,migrants, and models in Chinese development

Abstract

In 1999 China announced the launching of the Open up the West campaign, sometimes called “Going West,” to help western China finally catch up to the much wealthier eastern, coastal areas after several decades of lagging behind. The same year, China also announced a “Going Out” strategy to encourage Chinese investment abroad. The 15 years since then have witnessed dramatic Chinese government investment in various development activities in western regions of China, as well as around the world. Though rarely considered together, we argue that there are significant parallels in development discourse, the centrality of physical infrastructure, the characteristics of Chinese labor migration and the nature of migrant-local relations, and the application of “models from elsewhere” in Going West and Going Out. Considering these parallels can help shed light on Chinese development discourse and practice, as China becomes increasingly important in the field of development once dominated by Western countries. Finally, we also consider direct connections and convergences between the two strategies in China’s neighboring countries of Asia and in the One Belt One Road initiative.     

Financialisation through Microfinance: Civil Society and Market-Building in India

Abstract

Microfinance does not reduce poverty, but it does successfully construct economic relations between owners of capital and borrowers of capital, allowing surpluses to accumulate through finance. It does so by drawing on the agency of financialised civil society actors who facilitate financialisation by working around the state to build new markets in finance and other goods. This article understands financialisation as the expansion of the frontier of financial accumulation. Microfinance is shown to achieve this expansion by establishing credit-based linkages between owners and borrowers of capital, allowing surplus accumulation to take place via the credit relation. Underlying this material relationship, there is also a level at which financialisation motivates and pressures civil society actors to bring microfinance to the poor. By becoming financialised agents themselves, civil society organisations act as conduits for an expansion of financial markets and the construction of new market relations for other goods. A case study of microfinance for water and sanitation in India shows in detail how this construction of markets via civil society works in practice, highlighting the pressures and opportunities presented by microfinance as a vehicle for building markets.     

Mental maps of global regions: identifying and characterizing “hard” and “soft” regions

ABSTRACT

This article presents the quantitative synthesis of mental maps that identify different types of world regions. It is the result of a large-scale survey conducted in 18 countries, based on a sketch map approach. The number, shape, and extension of these vernacular world regions vary according to countries, cultures, and the personal styles of respondents who drew the maps. However, when we collectively analyze the regions identified by respondents, we observe that the figures of global regions are more or less recurrent. While the most commonly used division of the world is into “continents”, we can identify “hard” and “soft” regions of the world. Whereas a “hard” region, such as Africa, can be recognized relatively unambiguously as a continent, “soft” regions may include numerous regional distinctions such as East Asia, Russia, South East Asia, and the Middle East. Our methodology involves defining a set of characteristics that discriminate between “hard” and “soft” regions (measuring spatial uncertainty and the relative vagueness of limits and fringes), then accounting for the correlation of these areas on the world map.     

1919 in dynamic East Asia: March First and May Fourth as a starting point for revolution

Abstract

The March First Movement and the May Fourth Movement are like mirrors reflecting each other’s relationship. This article uses the concept of “simultaneity” in global history to reevaluate the significance of both events in world history. It also examines the differences exhibited by the simultaneity of the two events from the perspective of an “interconnected East Asia.” After entering the world-system, imperial Japan, semi-colonial China, and colonial Korea occupied different positions within its hierarchical structure. Here we need to pay attention to the status-diverse but mutually influential conditions in East Asia. To see through the complexity of (semi)colonial modernity and find the inherent opportunities to overcome modernity, it is useful to analyze the “double project” of adapting to modernity and overcoming modernity. Since the 1920s, the two events have been continually reinterpreted in the vein of socio-historical changes. The question of how to remember the two is not only a historical question but also a practical question for the present. Now is truly the methodological turning point in exploring and reinterpreting the two events. The author will use the terms “March First Revolution” and “May Fourth Revolution” in an attempt to tackle this issue. The mass gatherings that took place during March First and May Fourth provide sufficient evidence to support the use of “revolution” to describe them. Although March First and May Fourth are part of two respective histories of Korea and China, at the same time they are part of East Asia’s and the world’s interconnected history.     

Chinese Aid in the South Pacific: Linked to Resources?

Abstract

China’s emergence as a global development actor has implications for developing countries and “traditional” donor agencies. Its current provision of foreign aid and other forms of development assistance to developing countries throughout the world presents both opportunities and challenges for all actors. At the same time, China’s growing need for natural resources and its policy of securing access through state-led “resource diplomacy” are causing concern. While most scholars and commentators are focused on the “China in Africa” dimension, China’s engagement in the South Pacific region has also been growing rapidly over the past decade and offers some interesting and unique insights. This article examines the dynamics of China’s provision of foreign aid and its quest for natural resources in the South Pacific region, with comparative references to other regions. Drawing particularly upon interviews and site visits in Fiji and Papua New Guinea, it argues that although major commercial resource contracts do appear to be supported by Chinese Government assistance, resources deals are not explicitly part of Chinese foreign aid in the region.     

The problem of “technological unemployment” in the industrial research of the 1930's in the United States∗

The article surveys the findings and debates about “technological unemployment” carried out in the 1920's and 1930's in the United States. The huge productivity increases of the 1920's had sizable labour‐displacing effects, which were not matched by the job‐creating trends of prosperity. Unemployment was therefore a sizable and observable phenomenon as early as the late 1920's, while manufacturing employment shrank. After 1929, it was found that the Depression had hit production and investment hard, but productivity per man‐hour continued to increase. This meant that, because of the increases in population of working age and because of technological progress, in the late 1930's it would have been necessary to outgrow the levels of investment and production of 1929 in order to bring unemployment down to the 1929 rate. Even the recovery of 1937 remained much below those levels: the cause was seen in the behavior of large, concentrated industrial firms that administered prices and only applied technological advances in order to reduce costs. Their limited spending did not foster enough demand to move the economy out of the slump. The recovery was eventually brought about not by spontaneous, market‐driven economic behaviour, but by the deus‐ex‐machina of war‐induced Government spending.

A separate study of the theories of technological progress out‐distancing the job‐creating trends of prosperity is in preparation.     

Serious chemistry on set: the molecular structure of film investment in China

ABSTRACT

Using the case of the Mainland Chinese film industry, this paper argues that the competing features that attract commercial capital investment and drive state centralization create a molecular structure of national film investment, or the division of investment in the film industry into several interdependent centers. A combination of regulations, institutions, the built environment and access to capital leads to a distributed investment of strategic assets linked by bonds of complementarity. Beijing dominates in the area of state-supported production. Shanghai outperforms other cities in terms of foreign direct investment. Qingdao has attracted domestic Chinese private investment and entrepreneurship. Unlike the capital agglomeration seen in countries like the United States where film investment is driven centrally by financial considerations, the Chinese national film industry is strategically divided into several centers that rely more dominantly on political or financial resources. While this paper focuses on China, understanding the molecular structure of the Chinese film industry helps us understand both developed and developing countries that are characterized by robust state oversight and strong commercial media sectors.     

Shadowing the White Man's Burden: U.S. Imperialism and the Problem of the Color Line

Abstract

Travel lectures were a popular part of the American self-culture movement of the mid-nineteenth. Audiences enjoyed travel lectures because they possessed analogical potential rooted in narratives of self-discipline and mastery to aid in the adaption to the socio-economic changes of the market and consumer society. Audiences viewed the lecturer Bayard Taylor as a model of liberal/republican masculinity. His career also reveals the role that metaphors of mobility served in the transformation from the ethos of character to the later outer-directed, “personality” driven, pursuit of personal self-realization.     

Hamashita Takeshi's research on regional Chinese history

ABSTRACT

Challenges to the historical rise of “Western-centrism” in non-Western countries are surfacing: the Japanese scholar Hamashita Takeshi, who supports a “regional concept of China,” is one of the strongest voices in this movement. Hamashita suggests that the theories of the “Asian economic circle” and the “tributary system” can be combined to form a theory of a “regional Asia,” thus reconstructing the perspective of research on Chinese and Asian history. The regional Asia model is a composite of the network model, maritime model, and the regional model. Based on the regional concept of China, Chinese history can be studied from various perspectives, such as China as a network, maritime China, and regional China; one can thus develop a long-term view on Chinese, Asian and global history from a spatial perspective, a peripheral perspective, and an Asian perspective.     

Private rental investment and socio-spatial disadvantage in Sydney,Australia

This article unpacks the connection between a growing cohort of small-scale but purposive property investors and urban socio-spatial restructuring. We analyse private rental housing as a tenure share to demonstrate its spatial correlation with the suburbanisation of socio-economic disadvantage in Sydney, Australia, between 1991 and 2016. Then, we show how investors drive this emerging pattern by reference to the geography of property owners’ stated investment objectives—low capital outlay, rental yields, and capital growth prospects. We contend that the link between their small-scale activities and the city’s changing socio-spatial structure is an overlooked consequence of private rental sector (PRS) housing financialisation. Importantly, our focus on behaviours exhibited by small-scale rental property owners in PRS financialisation transcends existing analyses that have concentrated on corporate entity activity in this space. That focus also contrasts with framings of private rental growth as a residual outcome of developments elsewhere in the housing market. Such work is significant because it demonstrates the impacts of real estate investment on urban form.     

Global Politics of Microfinancing Poverty in Asia: The Case of Bangladesh Unpacked

Abstract

This article offers a critical and systematic political analysis of microfinance schemes linking international, national and local development policy. It substantiates the argument that microfinance schemes are a neoliberal development strategy, primarily advanced to realise a dual purpose: (1) financial sector liberalisation and commercialisation, while extending microfinance as a means to “poverty reduction”, and (2) the dampening and undermining of resistance to neoliberal development policies, by relying on the disciplinary potential of these schemes. I illustrate this argument through an examination of the politics of microfinance and development in Bangladesh, which includes analyses of policies prescribed by the World Bank (and also the CGAP). The analysis also draws out the implications (legal and institutional) for many NGOs who have been required to change their status to Microfinance Institutions (MFIs). Microfinance schemes are exemplary of (new) efforts to build markets in Asia in accordance with neoliberal visions of development, and in ways that advance and capitalise on the contradictions of neoliberal development. But they also challenge us to reflect more deeply on the limits of “market society”.     

Absent Regions: Spaces of Financialisation in the Arab World

This paper examines processes of financialisation in the Arab world, a region that has been almost completely absent from the wider financial literature. The paper shows that financialisation is much more than simply the expansion of financial markets within neatly bounded sets of social relations operating at the national scale. In the Arab world, financialisation has been marked by the growing weight of regional finance capital—most specifically, those capital groups based in the Gulf Cooperation Council—in circuits of capital operating at all scales. This has important implications for processes of class and state formation. Approaching financialisation in this manner—moving away from methodologically nationalist assumptions and the literature's largely singular focus on the advanced capitalist core—brings into focus the significance of cross‐scalar accumulation patterns, their spatial hierarchies, and geographic unevenness. The paper thus reaffirms the need for a more spatially sensitive approach to financialisation.     

The Political Economy of Housing Investment in the Short-Term Rental Market: Insights from Urban Portugal

Short-term rentals (STRs) emerged as holiday accommodations, disrupting the hospitality industry in the decade before COVID-19. Mainstream explanations for their growth revolved around digital tourism platforms like Airbnb as market disruptors and the sharing economy rationale. At the same time, critical scholars explored the capitalisation of greater rent gaps in urban central locations. However, these explanations are insufficient to explain the growth of STRs. We supplement them by building bridges between the urban political economy and the geographies of financialisation through the cases of Lisbon and Porto before the pandemic. The paper focuses on tourism-induced housing investment, taking a closer look at the profile of investors in association with STR property managers in the context of the late-entrepreneurial urban regime. We conclude that tourism development has allowed opportunities for housing financialisation through STR professionalisation, enhancing the allocation of interest-bearing capital in tourism-oriented real estate.     

Building a Venture Capital Market in Vietnam: Diffusion of a Neoliberal Market Strategy to a Socialist State

Abstract

Vietnam’s venture capital (VC) industry took shape in the late 1990s during a period of exceptional economic growth in the country and the development of its high-technology sector. High growth rates and technological advances have typically coincided with both strong VC market activity and state support of equity financing. This, however, has not been the case in Vietnam. In this article a policy diffusion framework is used to investigate the international and domestic origins of Vietnam’s nascent VC policies, and how they became part of the agenda of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) as credit-based, rather than equity-based, solutions. The article argues that Vietnam’s heterodox approach to VC policy results from both external forces from donors and from domestic factors. In particular, Vietnamese policymakers have a preference for credit-based SME financing solutions and Vietnam’s official development assistance providers diffuse expertise on loans, not equity investments, to the Socialist Republic. The only donors recommending VC and equity-based financing in Vietnam have gone “around the state” rather than through it by working directly with the private sector. As a result, Vietnam’s SME financing initiatives have significantly diverged from international VC policy patterns.     

The Financialisation of Rental Housing 2.0: Releasing Housing into the Privatised Mainstream of Capital Accumulation

This article presents two cases of listed real estate companies that operate in the Ruhr metropolitan region of Germany. The first is Immeo Wohnen, a subsidiary of the French real estate investment trust (REIT) Foncière des Régions that was previously owned by a US hedge fund. The second is Vonovia, Germany's largest real estate company, originally a subsidiary of a British private equity firm. Both examples embody what we call the shift from financialisation 1.0 to financialisation 2.0, i.e. the transition from pure speculation to long‐term investment. We show that long‐term investment strategies are used by REITs and listed funds in order to release housing into the privatised mainstream of capital accumulation. With the advent of the financialisation of rental housing 2.0, the long‐term investment focus of these funds paradoxically enables a short‐term investment focus by buying and selling shares in these funds on the stock exchange.     

The Senzai Maru's visit to Shanghai and its understanding of China

ABSTRACT

The significance of the Senzai Maru’s 1862 journey to Shanghai was great. From this opportunity, Japan not only learned from its neighbor the danger of closing off one’s borders and refusing to change, but also the importance of expanding its horizons and “learning from the world.” From these lessons, Japan transitioned from “expelling barbarians” toward “enlightenment,” from conservative to “reformist.” After successfully overthrowing the Tokugawa shogunate, Japan’s Meiji reforms thrived.     

“You Cannot Trade What Is Not Yours”: Indigenous Governance and the NAFTA Negotiations

ABSTRACT

Contemporary International Relations scholars and practitioners generally recognize that substate governments affect the state’s international affairs; however, there is less acceptance of Indigenous governments as global actors that meaningfully impact the state. After all, the expectation would be that central governments, with considerably more resources and power, would be unlikely to face a challenge from an Indigenous government. However, Indigenous governments are negotiating new relationships with foreign and domestic governments, forming economic development corporations, hiring private firms to raise capital, funding trade missions, and even opening offices in key international locales such as Beijing to engage in trade promotion and push investment opportunities in projects such as resource extraction. Applying paradiplomacy theory, which argues that International Relations cannot be properly explained absent the global affairs of substate governments, this article analyzes the effect of Indigenous peoples and governance in the Canada–US trade relationship. It specifically considers how Indigenous engagement in the global economy affects the bilateral trade regime, foreign direct investment, and cross-border trade. The driver for these analysis centers on demands for the inclusion of a so-called “Indigenous chapter” in the North American Free Trade Agreement renegotiations in 2017 and 2018.