Neo‐Colonialism in South–South Relations? The Case of China and North Korea

The past decade has seen the rapid expansion of economic ties between China and North Korea, leading to questions of whether this emerging relationship resembles neo‐colonialism or a more positive form of South–South cooperation. This article argues that China's engagement is driven in the first instance by strategic considerations, namely the maintenance of the geopolitical status quo on the Korean peninsula. However, North Korea has also become increasingly important in terms of Beijing's aims of revitalizing its north‐eastern region, and as such, economic relations are becoming increasingly market‐led. Although this mode of engagement bears similarities with China's engagement elsewhere in the developing world, North Korea's catastrophic economic decline in the 1990s largely preceded the more recent revival of relations with China. We argue therefore that bilateral relations between the two countries cannot usefully be regarded as ‘neo‐colonial’ since North Korea is receiving much needed trade and investment from China within the context of broader international isolation. As such, we suggest that more attention needs to be paid to how geopolitical specificities influence the manner in which South–South cooperation shapes the possibilities of development, and that the dichotomous terrain of the existing debate between optimistic and pessimistic viewpoints is unhelpful.     

Japan's response to China's rise: regional engagement, global containment, dangers of collision

Japan and China's ability to manage their bilateral relationship is crucial for the stability of the East Asian region. It also has a global impact on the security and economic development of other regions. For just as China's rise has inevitably involved an expansion of its global reach, so Japan's responses to the challenges posed by China have increasingly taken a global form, seeking to incorporate new partners and frameworks outside East Asia. Japan's preferred response to China's regional and global rise in the post‐Cold War period has remained one of default engagement. Japan is intent on promoting China's external engagement with the East Asia region and its internal domestic reform, through upgrading extant bilateral and Japan–China–US trilateral frameworks for dialogue and cooperation, and by emphasizing the importance of economic power to influence China. Japan is deliberately seeking to proliferate regional frameworks for cooperation in East Asia in order to dilute, constrain and ultimately engage China's rising power. However, Japan's engagement strategy also contains the potential to tilt towards default containment. Japan's domestic political basis for engagement is becoming increasingly precarious as China's rise stimulates Japanese revisionism and nationalism. Japan also appears increasingly to be looking to contain China on a global scale by forging new strategic links in Russia and Central Asia, with a ‘concert of democracies’ involving India, Australia and the US, by competing for resources with China in Africa and the Middle East, and by attempting to articulate a values‐based diplomacy to check the so‐called ‘Beijing consensus’. Nevertheless, Japan's perceived inability to channel China's rise either through regional engagement or through global containment carries a further risk of pushing Japan to resort to the strengthening of its military power in an attempt to guarantee its essential national interests. It is in this instance that Japan and China run the danger of a military collision.     

China and Geography in the 21st Century: A Cultural (Geographical) Revolution?

A noted Singapore-based cultural geographer and specialist on Asia reviews the recent emergence of cultural geographic research on and within China and the implications of China's rise for the study of 21st century cultural geography more broadly. She identifies six major issues modern China is confronting that, when addressed from a cultural geographical perspective, may both enhance an understanding of the country and reshape the practice of cultural geography as a subdiscipline: agricultural reform, economic reform, urban change, rural-urban migration and related social inequalities, the changing family structure, and environmental change. The author argues that if China's cultural geography is to help the subdiscipline at large develop a more international and inclusive approach, it must be driven by questions of significance in China, yield constructive answers of relevance to China, and at the same time derive theoretical ideas that diversify the collective geographical imagination.     

Economic statecraft in China's new overseas special economic zones: soft power,business or resource security?

China's rapidly growing economic engagement with other developing countries has aroused intense debates, but these debates have often generated more heat than light. The Chinese government is clearly pushing its companies to move offshore in greater numbers, and state‐owned firms figure prominently in many of the major investments abroad. Yet relatively little research exists on when, how and why the Chinese government intervenes in the overseas economic activities of its firms. China's state‐sponsored economic diplomacy in other developing countries could play three major strategic roles: strengthening resource security, enhancing political relationships and soft power, and boosting commercial opportunities for national firms. This article examines China's programme to establish overseas special economic zones as one tool of Beijing's economic statecraft. It traces the process by which they were established and implemented, and investigates the characteristics of the 19 zones initially selected in a competitive tender process. The article concludes that even in countries rich in natural resources, the overseas zones were overwhelmingly positioned as commercial projects. Particularly in the Asian zones, China is following in the footsteps of Japan. The zone programme, and the Chinese foreign investment it hoped to foster, represents a clear case of the international projection of China's developmental state. However, in Africa (but not generally elsewhere) discourse surrounding the zones publicly positions them as a transfer of China's own development success, thus potentially enhancing China's political relationships and soft power on the continent.     

Learning by Debating

This essay traces the main lines of debate among economists during the course of China's reform. It first reviews how the market has become legitimated in the country. Then it examines three schools of thought that have emerged from an ongoing debate over the economic role of the state in China's “socialist market economy.” Debates have transformed radically the conceptual frameworks of economists, as well as policymakers, and thereby have exerted enormous influence on the policy process.     

Limits to the Washington Consensus: Boundary struggles and China's transition economy

This paper explores the interconnected normative and geopolitical-economic tensions between the Washington Consensus and the Chinese state through an analysis of reform discourses and practices at the World Bank. Frequently framed as opposing visions and templates of development, the World Bank and the Chinese state have engaged in a protracted relationship of mutually-informing exchanges of economic expertise, technical assistance, and policy formulation, evolving significantly since China's ‘opening up’ in 1978. I trace these shifting relations through an interpretive strategy inspired by Nancy Fraser's concept of boundary struggles, focusing on how the World Bank has challenged, affirmed, and affected China's institutionalized division between polity and economy. Through a new periodization of the World Bank/China nexus, this paper shows how transformations in geopolitical-economic relations condition the normative construction, representation, and reception of ‘economic models’. It also challenges antipodean conceptions of the ‘free-market’ Washington Consensus and ‘state-capitalist’ China through demonstrating the qualitative character of their state/market articulations.     

An overview of recent research on modern Chinese economic history

China formally adopted the policy of reform and opening up to the outside world in 1978. Since then, both economic practice and economic theory in China have undergone profound changes, and the academic study of modern Chinese economic history has been encouraged to expand its research horizons under the rubric of “liberating the mind and seeking truth in the facts”. A number of important monographs and essays have been produced and the study of modern Chinese economic history has entered a flourishing period. Current research focuses on two major topics: China's New Democratic economy and the planned economy during the period 1949–78; and, China's socialist market economy from 1978–2006. The study of these two areas shows numerous interconnections, points of comparison and causal links. The many and important lessons to be drawn from these studies both exhibit Chinese characteristics and have universal implications.     

China's "Dash for Gas": Challenges and Potential Impacts on Global Markets

Two UK-based researchers examine the significant recent growth in China's demand for natural gas, a fuel not long ago considered of marginal importance but now viewed as critical for the country's future economic growth. Based on a range of databases as well as industry and media reports, the authors demonstrate how rapid demand growth since 2005 has transformed China from a minor, self-sufficient gas producer to a major buyer on international gas markets. They also analyze projections for future demand growth (25 years), showing China's demand for gas will grow faster that anywhere else in the world, and explore the potential for development of China's substantial domestic gas reserves to mitigate import demand over the short to medium term. The study concludes with an assessment of China's potential impact on global gas markets over short, intermediate, and long time horizons.     

The sustainability and some consequences of Chinese economic growth

During the past 27 years, China's economy and relationship with the outside world has been transformed. The magnitude of annual economic growth and rapid increase in the volume of output of goods and services raise unsettling questions about potential threats to the sustainability of current growth levels and implications for economic and political stability. This paper examines the sources of economic growth and concludes the strong state system, high rates of saving and investment and demographic structure will sustain growth. Chinese authorities must be aware that a failure to maintain the process of financial and political institutional reform or to address the widening regional income inequalities poses potential domestic threats to sustainable growth. Tensions remain in China's international relationships, forcing China to consider further adjustment and accommodation in its regional security and economic relationships.     

China's New Generation of Leaders and Regional Challenges in East Asia

A pair of Hong Kong and U.S. specialists on China examines the dynamic international environment China's new leadership now faces, focusing on East Asia. They first examine the complex balance the leadership seeks to strike between: (1) China's projection of increasing economic, military, and political power internationally; (2) the primary domestic goals of economic growth and stability; and (3) rising public awareness, demand for information access, and (in some quarters) nationalism among the Chinese people. The authors then proceed, in successive sections of the paper, to assess in greater detail China's international and regional security environment, Sino-American relations, China's relations with its East Asian neighbors, and the complex interconnections between the country's domestic and foreign policy. They conclude that Sino-American relations will continue to be pivotal to Beijing's foreign relations in general and its relations with countries in the East Asian region more specifically.     

Feeding fears: competing discourses of interdependency,sovereignty, and China's food security

Following the release of the 1994 report ‘Who will feed China?’ by the Worldwatch Institute, there has been much debate over the implications of China's growing demand for grain. The question of China's food production has elicited a variety of responses. While for some it raises the specter of regional and global instability as China becomes an environmental threat, for others the entrance of China into the world market promises increased trade and profits. In this paper I explore the responses in China and the US to the different notions of interdependence which have shaped the debate. I first turn to how concerns over China's food supply have, despite appeals to the concepts of global environmental and economic interdependence, become linked to classical state-centered geopolitical concerns such as ‘sovereignty’ and ‘containment.’ I then look at how the debate has also been actively distanced from national security concerns through the invocation of an alternative interdependence founded on the logic of commerce. I conclude by arguing for the need within critical geopolitics to further examine the circulation of strategic texts between and within states, particularly in the analysis of texts that map worlds beyond the boundaries of North America and Europe.     

Beyond win–win: rethinking China's international relationships in an era of economic uncertainty

China is the least disadvantaged major economy in the current era of global economic uncertainty. Thus it is becoming the focus of attention of its neighbours and is achieving a prominence in the world political economy unparalleled in its modern history. To a great extent, China's success is the result of ‘good neighbour diplomacy’ such as ‘win–win’ and the policies of reform and openness of the past thirty years. However, despite continuity in policy, China's ‘peaceful leap forward’ since 2008 has changed the context of its external relationships. The increasing asymmetries between China and its neighbours, as well as decreasing asymmetry with the United States, require an adjustment of win–win values beyond mutual benefit to credible reassurance. As China's neighbours become more dependent, they also become more anxious concerning their interests. Meanwhile, China's relative gain on the US requires a different kind of confidence‐building diplomacy.     

China's strategic partnership with Latin America: a fulcrum in China's rise

China has over the last two decades been committed to creating a strategic partnership with Latin American states by persistently extending its economic and political involvement in the continent. China's efforts in this regard reflect not only its desire to intensify its economic cooperation and political relations with nations in Latin America, but also its strategic goals of creating its own sphere of influence in the region and enhancing its ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power in order to elevate China's status at the systemic level. With access to Latin American markets, resources and investment destinations, China may sustain its economic and social progress that bases its long cherished dream of restoring its past glory of fuqiang (wealth and power) and rise as a global power capable of reshaping the current world system. The enormous economic benefits deriving from their economic cooperation and trade may persuade Latin American nations to accept the basic premise of China's economic strategy: that China's rise is not a threat, but an opportunity to gain wealth and prosperity. This will help China gain more ‘soft’ power in and leverage over its economic partners in Latin America, and thereby help it to rise in the global power hierarchy.     

How the other half live in modern China

China's economic development over the past decade has captured the world's imagination. But this has largely been an urban phenomenon. While the current Chinese government has lifted more people out of poverty than any other in history, there have still been a huge number of losers in the reform processes of the last three decades, many of whom are based in the countryside. Chen and Wu's study of the situation in the central province of Anhui for peasants raises some uncomfortable questions for anyone looking at the long‐term sustainability and stability of China's economic development.     

A China Paradox: Migrant Labor Shortage amidst Rural Labor Supply Abundance

A U.S. geographer and noted authority on China's urbanization seeks to explain the apparent paradox between reported recent shortages of migrant labor in cities in eastern China's export-oriented manufacturing belt and the abundant supply of labor in China's rural areas. He examines important socioeconomic contexts often overlooked in the debate over whether China has reached the Lewis turning point (when dual rural-urban labor markets begin to merge and a labor surplus economy is transformed into a full-employment economy), which make possible the existence of such shortages over the short term and in local areas. These include the special characteristics of China's export industrialization (e.g., preference for workers in the age category 16-30); its immense migrant labor force, constrained under the hukou system; the short-term impacts of China's economic stimulus program launched in early 2009 in the wake of the global economic crisis; and cycles in the global economy that support or impede export production.     

China Gazes West: Xinjiang's Growing Rendezvous with Central Asia

A senior American specialist on the geography of China surveys that country's enduring interest and involvement with the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, increasingly on the basis of Xinjiang's role as a bridgehead for economic linkages. Among the key features of this growing involvement reviewed in the paper are the establishment in 2001 of a regional security alliance (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) to combat Islamist extremism as well as separatist activities; growing commercial linkages (especially with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan) in tandem with improved transport links and increasing crossborder movements of merchants, traders, and tourists; and China's growing need for oil and increasing reliance on Kazakhstan as a key source for petroleum. China's growing engagement with Kazakhstan and other Central Asian countries is examined within the context of both opportunities as well as challenges, the latter reflecting the increasing complexity of Han Chinese and Uyghur/Turkic relations owing to increased Uyghur ties to affiliated populations in the Central Asian states.     

Energy Intensity in Light of China's Economic Transition

Two economic geographers examine the impacts of economic transition on the efficiency of energy use in China, the second-largest energy consumer in the world. Following a brief review of reform and deregulation in China's energy sector, they proceed to systematically test the relationship between economic transition (conceptualized as a triple process of marketization, decentralization, and globalization) and energy intensity using a panel data set. The statistical units of analysis are China's 30 provincial-level administrative regions, facilitating the investigation of spatial variations in energy intensity. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: O53, P20, Q40, Q43. 9 figures, 5 tables, 62 references.     

Disciplinary geopolitics and the rise of international development studies in China

There has been a growing political and scholarly interest in the re-emergence of Chinese development cooperation and this work explores the construction of South-South spatial matrix of knowledge, power and imagination. The paper examines the critical geopolitics of producing international development studies in China as an intellectual project over the last 5–10 years, in close relation to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Drawing on eight months' fieldwork in Beijing, it develops a political economic geography of individuals, institutions and ideologies that have shaped the geographically and politically situated processes of inventing Chinese international development studies. The paper traces the spatial genealogy of the disciplinary regime, making visible the rise of a division of social scientific labour at a complicated moment of geopolitical flux, especially against the backdrop of intensifying US-China rivalry. It also maps out the tensions and nuances in an uneven field of knowledge and power. The future of the nascent state-disciplinary apparatus is uncertain, not least dependent on China's ongoing reinterpretation of its national identity and national mission.     

Global energy governance: do the BRICs have the energy to drive reform?

It is widely accepted that the rising power of the BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India and China—has the potential to re‐shape the international system. However, little attention has been given to the BRICs’ role in a growing area of strategic importance: global energy governance. While global governance scholars now argue that the international energy architecture requires substantive reform to keep pace with the rapid transformations in global energy markets, largely driven by the BRICs, it is not clear what role these countries will play in future governance arrangements. Drawing on recent scholarship in global governance and international negotiations, interviews with G20 energy officials, and the observations of the author, a past delegate to G20 negotiations, this article examines whether the BRICs as a coalition have the capacity and willingness to drive substantive global energy governance reform. In doing so, it highlights the problems with the BRICs as a coalition on energy and considers the prospects for energy reform in light of China's increasing engagement with energy governance ahead of it hosting the G20 Summit in 2016.