Description

China’s increasing, and increasingly visible, engagement in Africa has occasioned a burst of commentary from Western governments, NGOs, and businesses, much of it critical. China itself frames its actions in Africa in a very different way: through a rhetoric of historical engagement on the basis of mutual support and equality, non-involvement in sovereign affairs, and ongoing “win-win”. Indeed China continues to propagate a rhetoric with elements substantially unchanged since the early 1960s. Yet this older rhetoric has become increasingly threadbare and only partially relevant to the reality of China’s current deep and varied range of involvements in Africa; whether (and how) political elites can adapt this rhetoric to better reflect current African realit(ies) remains to be further explored.

Julia C. Strauss is Editor of The China Quarterly and Senior Lecturer in Chinese Politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Her main area of interest is in statebuilding, and the ways in which the rhetorical and performative dimensions of the state interact with different institutions and interests. She has written widely on 20th and 21st century China, with particular interests in land reform, grain supply, and forestry administration. She has recently co-edited China and Africa: Emerging Patterns in Globalization and Development (Cambridge University Press, 2009), with Martha Saavdra, and is currently working on expanding this line of analysis to include China and Latin America.