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.     

Loyalist,patriot, or colonizer? The three faces of Zheng Chenggong in Meiji Japan and late Qing China

ABSTRACT

This article examines the transformation of Zheng Chenggong’s image in Meiji Japan and late Qing China. Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, Zheng Chenggong was often depicted as a Ming dynasty loyalist in Chinese narratives and as a Japanese hero adventuring in a foreign land in Japanese narratives. The two groups of narratives converged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, transforming Zheng Chenggong into a patriot, an anti-imperialist hero, and a conqueror and developer of Taiwan. Underlying the convergence of Chinese and Japanese narratives of Zheng Chenggong was surging nationalist sentiment in response to different forms of imperialism. This study aims to show how different nationalist agendas activated efforts to recreate Zheng Chenggong’s image in China and Japan at the turn of the nineteenth century.     

Toward an Understanding of Canada’s International Identity

ABSTRACT

This article examines the construction of Canada’s postwar international identity and how that identity continues to influence Canadian foreign policy, especially with the United States. Furthermore, the article illustrates how changes in Canadian policy necessitated by the Trump Administration may impact Canada’s international identity in the future. The article argues Canadian policy makers have consistently constructed an international identity in opposition to the United States and continue to use the US as a reflective tool in shaping their own policy. The first part of the article briefly examines the concept of state identity outlining both type and role variants and their relevance to foreign policy and this is followed in the second part by a discussion of Canada’s postwar international identity.     

Australian aid after the ‘Golden Consensus’: from aid policy to development policy?

ABSTRACT

In the decade preceding the election of the Abbott Coalition Government in 2013, a so-called ‘golden consensus’ governed Australian aid policy. During this period Australia’s aid spending increased by over 80% in real terms. However, after winning government the 2013 Federal Election, the Abbott Government made a series of significant and unexpected aid policy decisions, cutting the aid budget three times in fifteen months and integrating AusAID, Australia’s aid agency, into the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. This article considers the future role of aid in Australia’s diplomacy primarily by engaging with a prior question: how was it possible for the golden consensus to be uprooted so easily? Conducting a post-mortem reveals that Australia’s development constituency bears some responsibility for the fragility of the consensus. This analysis also reveals the critical role the development constituency will play in determining the extent to which Australia is able to embrace the ‘beyond aid’ agenda. To meet this contemporary challenge, the development community must heed the lessons of the collapse of the golden consensus and, in particular, overcome its reticence to engage in broader foreign policy debates.     

The power of the “Stockpile”: American aid and China’s Wartime everyday

ABSTRACT

This article argues that American and British narratives about the existence of a “stockpile” of Chinese goods had a powerful impact on US-China relations, China’s war effort, and China’s wartime everyday. Focusing on both the material and discursive construction of the so-called stockpile in the early 1940s, the work seeks to deconstruct a powerful symbol that was long used by both British and American officials (particularly in the US War Department) to delegitimize the Nationalist government’s war effort against Japan. Drawing on sources collected at archives in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Taiwan, the article seeks to rethink many commonly held assumptions about American aid and to reveal the powerful influence that the symbolic presence of the stockpile had in shaping Sino-American relations in the wartime period and beyond.     

Nationalizing international relief: Romanian responses to American aid for children in the Great War era

ABSTRACT

This article examines the interactions between American humanitarian agendas and initiatives and domestic efforts for child relief in Romania in the aftermath of the Great War. While focusing on the presence of the European Children’s Fund (ECF) in post-war Romania, the article traces the domestic organization of relief, the Romanian elites’ turn to American humanitarian assistance, and their active responses to this external aid on behalf of war-suffering children. The article argues that Romanian leadership of child welfare initiatives nationalized American humanitarian aid by integrating ECF’s institutional efforts into domestically established philanthropic associations. This nationalization was sustained in three key ways: (1) American humanitarians’ own engagement of local channels in aid diffusion; (2) the growing network of national associations of child welfare in post-war Romania; (3) the competing political agendas of both donors and recipients. The case of Romanian responses to American aid for children, and its eventual domestic institutionalization, challenges the seemingly unequal relationship between Western donors and East-Central European recipients during a period of post-war reconstruction and sociopolitical transformation. It sheds light on the transnational dimension of the humanitarian process, driven by the dual agency of foreign humanitarians and domestic interlocutors in the country of aid reception.     

Rule of Law Expedited: Land Title Reform and Justice in Burma (Myanmar)

Abstract

The development of rule of law is touted as one of the most important considerations in Burma (Myanmar) today, yet its meaning is highly contested after fifty years of military rule. This paper will examine how the rule of law in Burma’s transitional political environment has been influenced by the legacies of military rule and the government’s development policies since 2011. A series of laws introduced by the Thein Sein government under the rubric of rule of law and good governance had a significant impact upon small hold farmers across the country. While some laws specifically related to farmers and their land, others encouraged private investment in the land used by farmers. The combined effect of these laws was to formalise the pattern of land grabbing that had developed under the previous government and to encourage land speculation. Moreover, they show how an expedited procedural rule of law incited conflict and further injustice. Any progress towards substantive justice and a more democratic rule of law must keep pace with improvements in the country’s limited administrative and judicial capacities. Whether, and how far, Burma can develop and move beyond a thin or procedural rule of law will be tested as the country experiences life under the NLD government.     

GIs and “Jeep girls”: sex and American soldiers in wartime China

ABSTRACT

This article examines how sex affected the larger politics of the Sino–US alliance during World War II. By early 1945, Chinese from across the social spectrum resented the US military presence, but just one issue sparked a violent backlash: sexual relations between American soldiers (GIs) and Chinese women. Two interrelated, patriarchal narratives about sex emerged that spring. Starting in March, government-backed newspapers began criticizing “Jeep girls,” an epithet coined to describe the Chinese women who consorted with American servicemen. Rumors also circulated that GIs were using Jeeps to kidnap “respectable” women and rape them. Each narrative portrayed women’s bodies as territory to be recovered and inextricable from national sovereignty. These narratives resonated widely, turning Jeep girls into the catalyst through which all variables causing resentment against the US military presence intersected and converged. With Japan on the ropes, China’s allied friends now stood in the way of irreversibly consigning foreign imperialism to the past. Sexual relations were not the Sino–US alliance’s seedy underside, but the core site of its tensions.     

China,the international criminal court,and global governance

ABSTRACT

This article explores the Chinese policies towards the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the context of global governance. Despite China’s fast-growing foreign policy competence, the level of confidence held by China in engaging with global governance systems has not yet fully transmitted to the legal institutions governing human rights issues, and the ICC is such an example. This article examines specific policy concerns of China regarding the ICC in light of China’s engagement with global governance, and some of the traditional concerns that have had an impact on that engagement. It discusses the extent to which these concerns should still be regarded as policy barriers preventing China’s full accession to the ICC in years to come.     

The changing role of the FIRB and the politics of foreign investment in Australia

ABSTRACT

Australia’s policy on foreign investment aims to achieve both the liberal goal of maximising capital inflows and the statist one of ensuring that those inflows are in ‘the national interest’. This article analyses the tensions between these goals through interviews with policymakers who have direct knowledge of the Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB), which has functioned as an ‘offstage’, pre-market regulator for capital inflows to Australia. The tensions between these policy goals were manageable because the FIRB exercised its powers rarely, decisively and quietly, and the government believed that foreign investment did not threaten the national interest. The emergence of state-owned enterprises as foreign investors, however, significantly altered this calculus, and the FIRB has been tasked with assessing the national security implications of proposed investments. Instead of working offstage, as in earlier decades, the FIRB has become central to debates about how Australia should respond to the rise of China.     

Nationalism and anti-ethno-politics: why ‘Chinese Development’ failed at Myanmar’s Myitsone Dam

In 2011, the Burmese military-backed government stunned global audiences by unilaterally suspending the construction of the Myitsone Dam, the cornerstone of China’s largest hydropower project abroad. This prominent failure of China’s “Going Out” investment strategy reverberated globally. Both Western and Chinese accounts frame the event as a pivotal moment in Myanmar’s celebrated reform process, the cooling of China–Myanmar relations, and US–China geopolitical rivalry in the Asia-Pacific. However, my ethnographic field and media research from 2010 to 2015 reveals that the mega-project’s failure does not originally stem from inter-state geopolitics or contested economics and ecology. Through chronological narration, I show how the Myitsone Dam is primarily the casualty of a distinctly ethno-political causality, whereby three nationalisms clashed and the replication of China’s “anti-ethno-political” model of development failed. Though no monolithic Chinese state directs “Chinese Development” overseas, individual Chinese entrepreneurs nonetheless draw from the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) anti-political and state-centric paradigm when facing foreign social worlds. In the particular case of Myitsone, Chinese proponents drew from PRC’s state-nationalist heuristics of “national minorities and state-led development” and “Western anti-China conspiracy,” when facing Myanmar’s ethnic Kachin and Burman nationalisms. State ideological subjectivities of these developers seemed to blind them to the weakness in their own anti-ethno-political strategies, even when those collapsed publicly. I conclude that the Myitsone Dam’s construction will likely not be restarted, despite the hydropower company’s efforts. The Myitsone case also exemplifies how China’s previous historical entanglements in its neighboring regions uniquely disrupt the progress of “Going-Out” in Asia.     

促进还是抑制:中国对非直接投资的对外援助效应

论文聚焦中国对非援助与对非直接投资的不确定性关系,将援助细分为社会基础设施援助、实物资本援助、经济基础设施援助、政府和民间社会援助四种类型,构建了援助与投资的解析模型;基于中国对非洲52个国家的援助项目数和直接投资项目数,利用分位数回归方法,分别考察了中国对非援助项目总量及各类型援助在对非直接投资项目中的作用。研究发现：①中国对非援助集中在东非、南非,援助项目总数、各类型援助项目数、对非直接投资项目的空间分布具有很高的相似性。②中国对非援助类型结构相对均衡,对非援助在中国对非直接投资中发挥着先锋促进效应。其中,经济基础设施援助的促进效应强劲、稳定,且强度随分位数提高有浅U型变动特征;实物资本援助、社会基础设施援助的促进作用分别在对非直接投资项目少、中等数量下促进效果显著;政府和民间援助的促进作用不显著。③友好城市关系、出口关系与双边政治关系分别仅在中国对非直接投资项目较少、中等规模、大规模情形下显著,空间关系的影响不显著。④受援国人口规模的促进影响最清晰、最稳健;成本规避、资源寻求、受援国的投资环境质量和腐败状况的影响尚不清晰。中国在非投资有追随他国投资区位的倾向,但这一倾向仅在经济基础设施模型中显著。     

Does size matter? Foreign aid in Taiwan's diplomatic strategy, 2000–8

This article is the first systematic attempt at estimating the size of Taiwanese foreign aid and, thus, the cost of Taiwan's aid diplomacy. It questions the Republic of China (ROC) President Ma Ying-jeou's justification of his ‘diplomatic truce’ with China as necessitated by an ineffectiveness of his predecessor Chen Shui-bian's costly aid diplomacy. Deriving its evidence from the ROC governmental budgets, local media reports and interviews with Taiwanese officials involved in foreign aid implementation, the article argues that President Chen did not engage in ‘generous financial aid’ and proposes that this parsimony, rather than futility of aid diplomacy as a strategy to expand Taiwan's international space, should be considered as contributing to Taipei's diplomatic failures from 2000 to 2008.     

The history of Australian legal opposition to Japanese Antarctic whaling

ABSTRACT

Whaling has been a consistent theme in Australia’s relations with Japan since the 1930s, Australia having endeavoured to regulate, restrict, or bring to a complete halt Japan’s Antarctic whaling virtually since it began. Australia’s motivations have been mixed, involving at various points, some combination of protection of Australia’s coastal whaling industry, concern for Australia’s security, for safeguarding Australia’s Antarctic territorial claim, and more recently, concern for Australia’s whale-watching industry and/or for the whales. Since environmental consciousness became a primary factor in the 1970s, Australian policy has been aligned with that of anti-whaling non-governmental organizations (NGOs), albeit that certain actions of NGOs have caused difficulties for the Australian Government. Law – inclusive of legal argument in the course of diplomacy, domestic laws, and international litigation – has been a mechanism of influence used by the Australian Government and NGOs. This paper traces Australia’s legal opposition from its beginnings until Japan’s announcement in December 2018 that it would end Antarctic whaling.     

US attitudes towards China before and after the Washington Conference based on US mainstream media reports

ABSTRACT

The problems China faced in the world order after World War I and the position and measures China took in the tussling between Western countries needs to be analyzed not only using historical records in Chinese and from the perspective of China itself; researchers should also consult foreign documents to determine the attitudes and ways of thinking of other countries, so as to reflect on the choices China needed to make and the roles that Western countries played at that time. Only in so doing can we fully understand how much space and strength China then had to strive for its rights in the international arena. This article examines the social basis of the attitude and policies of the United States (US) towards China in the period between the May Fourth Movement (1919) and the Washington Conference (1921–1922) by focusing on reports on China in the US mainstream media, including the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. The US government’s attitude towards China was determined by the interests of the United States, the Far East, and the other countries of the world. However, the US mainstream media’s reports on China also reflected the values of American society and popular sympathy for China’s destiny. When discussing how to support China, the US media distinguished between support for the Chinese government and support for the Chinese people on the way to democracy and governance by law. In this case, the media reflected different views on how to assist China.     

International accompaniment,reflexivity and the intelligibility of power in post-conflict Guatemala

ABSTRACT

‘International accompaniers’ use their physical presence as a form of peaceful intervention to deter political violence against local human rights defenders. Threatened members of Guatemala’s civil society have relied on accompaniment as part of their security strategy since the early 1980s. Approximately one thousand volunteers from a dozen countries have accompanied in Guatemala. International accompaniment has been a key component of the effort to prosecute former military general and president Efraín Ríos Montt and other perpetrators of mass human rights violations in Guatemala. Victim witnesses and their legal counsel have included accompaniment as part of their protection strategy since 2000. Important questions have nonetheless been raised with respect to accompaniment’s effectiveness as a tool for witness protection and the possibility that it reinforces power inequalities. This article builds on Gada Mahrouse’s critique of accompaniment and draws on Michel Foucault’s understanding of reflexivity and power. The authors use insights from two case studies to support the argument that accompaniment’s usefulness as a tool for witness protection depends on its ability to accommodate the witnesses’ position within webs of interconnected power dynamics and the multiple ways in which they conceive of security. It also depends on how intelligible these different power dynamics are to accompaniers. This argument is used to highlight how accompaniment in Guatemala is relevant for other situations where the prosecution of human rights atrocities is long term and depends on witness testimony.     

Conserving by aesthetics,conserving by development: the rescaling and worlding of global south heritage

ABSTRACT

This study investigates the genealogy of rescaling the cultural armature of heritage in the Global South rooted within the colonial culture and postcolonial aid programs. Taking the case of historic Cairo, it explores how policies have developed through experimental practices of conservation to scale up authority, control, and power over residents and neighborhoods from the 19^th century to the present. The paper theorizes two paradigmatic approaches of conservation practices – by aesthetics and development – which have expanded Cairo’s inventory of monuments. The infatuation of heritage experts (the Comité de Conservation des Monuments de l’Art Arabe and Aga Khan Trust for Culture) with old neighborhoods has fostered accumulation by dispossession, disrupting people’s environments to generate a worlding image of heritage. The paper concludes with the metaphor of conservation practices as re-construction sites, as they repurpose the relationships between heritage, people, and their means of governmentality.     

Rare Earths: Future Elements of Conflict in Asia?

Abstract

China’s sudden suspension of rare earth exports to Japan in September 2010 represented the opening of a new front in the international competition for natural resources. As the demands of the global economy change, the international demand for rare earths, which are used in a diverse range of high-tech industries, has also increased. As China is currently the largest rare earths exporter, its actions in regulating rare earths exports will directly affect the interests of other states in the supply chain. This paper therefore examines how China assumed this dominant position in the supply chain. It also looks at how major rare earths consumers such as Japan and South Korea are reducing their reliance on and vulnerability to Chinese rare earths supplies through means such as seabed exploration in disputed territories, which might contribute to geopolitical tensions and instability in the East Asian region.     

The Nanjing Massacre as recorded in American sources

ABSTRACT

During the Nanjing Massacre, American figures who remained in Nanjing, or who took an interest in Nanjing’s plight despite not being present in the city, produced copious reports, observations, records, and analyses with respect to the events that unfolded, forming highly unique third-party sources on the history of the Nanjing Massacre, and disseminated them across China, Europe, and the United States. The American sources recorded the facts of the massacres, rape, looting, arson, narcotics trafficking, implementation of a “comfort women” system, and other atrocities committed by the Japanese Army, and revealed the actions taken by Japan to conceal its war crimes; their evidentiary value was demonstrated during the war crimes trials in Tokyo and Nanjing. The documents were produced during the course of the Americans’ efforts to provide humanitarian aid to Chinese soldiers and civilians, but at the same time, they also reflect these figures’ consideration for American interests in China.     

Political humanitarianism in the 1930s: Indian aid for Republican Spain

Abstract

This article examines Indian humanitarian help for Republican victims during the Spanish Civil War. It focuses in particular on aid initiatives by the Indian national movement, which were embedded in the larger quest for independence from British colonial rule. By creating their own humanitarian programme in favour of Republican Spain, Indian nationalists dissociated themselves from Britain’s foreign policy and tried to orchestrate a politics of moral superiority for themselves. The article also explores Indian participation in transnational networks of Left solidarity. Established to generate political and humanitarian support for Republican Spain, Indian actors concurrently utilized these networks to enhance their status in the international community and to advance their own end of an independent state.