Figuring Africa and China (original) (raw)
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Cold War History, 2022
Using Foreign Ministry Archives and memoirs from China, this article explains the nature and the development of Chinese policy in the Congo Crisis, in particular, Beijing's support of two Lumumbist movements in Kwilu and eastern Congo in 1963-5. While initially loyal to the Soviet Union, China sought to position itself as the leader of the newly independent 'Third World', sympathetic to-and able to provide experience, training and weaponry for-rural guerrilla struggles. However, China's military assistance to opposition movements in Congo had to make sure not to provoke direct conflict with the United States.
The Past in the Present: Historical and Rhetorical Lineages in China's Relations with Africa
The China Quarterly, 2009
China's official rhetoric on its relations with Africa is important; it frames, legitimates and renders comprehensible its foreign policy in this ever-important area of the world. This article explores the following puzzle: why China's rhetoric on its involvement with Africa has retained substantial continuities with the Maoist past, when virtually every other aspect of Maoism has been officially repudiated. Despite the burgeoning layers of complexity in China's increasing involvement in Africa, a set of surprisingly long-lived principles of non-interference, mutuality, friendship, non-conditional aid and analogous suffering at the hands of imperialism from the early 1960s to the present continue to be propagated. Newer notions of complementarity and international division of labour are beginning to come in, but the older rhetoric still dominates official discourse, at least in part because it continues to appeal to domestic Chinese audiences.
Revolutionary Friendship: Representing Africa During the Mao Era
China-Africa Relations: Building Images through Cultural Cooperation, Media Representation, and on the Ground Activities (China Policy Series), Routledge, 2017
This article explores the visual representation of China’s early relationship with Africa through an examination of widely circulated images and newsreel footage. Focusing on the Chinese government’s development of an imagined ‘Third World Revolution’, the author argues that African archetypes were crafted and repeatedly reinforced in circulated images, while newsreels introduced images that countered dominant typologies. Additionally, the author investigates the extent to which discourses already present in China, such as race-based nationalism and social Darwinism, as well as attitudes toward China’s ethnic minorities, impacted the ways in which Africans were visually represented during this period.
2016
China's relations with the African continent continues to be misrepresented within the Western (North American and European) academe. This is due, in part, to the methodological and epistemological assumptions underpinning many research agendas. These agendas are founded upon a range of histories, theories and frameworks that have been produced in the West, by the West, and for a particular end – within a particular location, or, event. This paper brings forward some original empirical data-from five months field research in South Africa which questioned power and agency (participation and self-determination) in response to Chinese Development assistance-to support, and bring into conversation, emerging literatures which focus upon the 'uneven production of knowledge' on and about China. It works with critiques of historicism and emerging concepts such as Sinological-orientalism and Sinologism, to explain how the continued measuring and representation of China through Western concepts, understandings and logics, come to reduce, in an Orientalist manner, accurate relations between China and Africa. Conclusions join calls for a more balanced and disinterested scholarship on the China-Africa relationship and argue that this can only be achieved through greater geographical and temporal specificity within writing. Within current work on China-Africa relations there is a lack of empirical qualitative data being collected, or, arguments are being extrapolated from limited cases. This paper represents a critical case that introduces new voices and alternative narratives from (South) African's themselves.
Anyigba Journal of History and International Studies, 2020
This paper examines the growing influence and activities of China in Africa since the dawn of the new millennium. In this perspective, this essay identifies and analyzes the emerging and domineering role of china on the economic, socio-cultural and political matrix of Africa since 2000. By identifying the strategies and similarities, this paper compares and contrasts the current Sino-African relations within the intellectual contours of the 19 th century European imperialism in Africa. The paper avers that China has continued with the unfinished scramble for African raw materials, markets, cheap labour and a profitable source of investment in order to promote and sustain her industrialization process to the detriment of Africa. African countries, in this new Chinese imperialism, lamentably, remain at the periphery due to a disarticulated mono-cultural economy, corruption, bad governance, conflicts/wars and absence of a vibrant thought leadership. The Marxist political economy is adopted while primary and secondary sources of data are utilized. The paper concludes by recommending the entrenchment of a home grown development that will stimulate industrialization, promotion of good governance, provision of basic infrastructure, building of a virile leadership, entrepreneurship development.
Chapter of "Africa and China", in Toyin Falola and Mohammed Bashir Salau
Africa in Global History: A Handbook, 2021
An investigation into what Julia Strauss called “historical and rhetorical lineages in China relations with Africa,” is of historiographical importance and great contemporary significance. In particular, the ways in which this older Afro-Asian solidarity discourse is used to legitimise more recent political, economic, and cultural connections between former “Third World” allies remains under-researched and underappreciated. The uniqueness of China-Africa relations in the socialist and post-socialist periods is reflected in its challenge to the “East/West” and the “North/South” divides. Therefore, an examination of China-Africa relations beyond the Cold War enables an understanding of the extent to which the Cold War itself was the key influence on the evolution of these enduring and complex relationships. This chapter provides an overview of post-colonial Africa’s relations with the People’s Republic of China. The comparative approach of studying countries engagements with China reveals the structural differences in their domestic and foreign politics that were informed and shaped by the Cold War. The resulting contestation of power should not simply translate into foreign manipulation. Facing similar challenges of state-building and economic development, newly independent African nations approached, deepened, and negotiated their relations with China as they searched for ideological and material support. In this way, it hopes to contribute to the much cited but little explained concept of “African agency”.
The failure of China in Africa
The present paper seeks to address to the assertion that China’s presence in Africa since 1960s can only be explained on imperial grounds. In this regard scholarly discourse had come up with terms and explanations those China relations with Africa serves colonial motifs. Chris Alden (2008) explains China presence in Africa as “the new age of the Dragon”. Also China has “suddenly exploded into and now even in the process of conquering Africa”, China as a “neo-colonialist.” Further Marcus Power and Giles Mohan (2008)2 define China’s activities in Africa as “rogue aid” and “soft power.” In addition China dealings in Africa have raised suspicion and responses among the nations of the West and those in Africa some of which made China without exception that its presence in Africa since the 1960s can be best understood on imperial ground. Apart from the above assertion it is important to note that China’s presence had also positive and welcome in Africa due to a number of reasons. For example China had positive impact on development in infrastructure, aid, economic trading partner among others. More to be explored as the essay unfolds.
Congoism Congo Discourses in the United States from 1800 to the Present
Transcript, 2017
To justify the plundering of today's Democratic Republic of the Congo, U.S. intellectual elites have continuously produced dismissive Congo discourses. Tracing these discourses in great depth and breadth for the first time, Johnny Van Hove shows how U.S. intellectuals (and their influential European counterparts) have been using the Congo in similar fashions for their own goals. Analyzing intellectuals as diverse as W.E.B. Du Bois, Joseph Conrad, and David Van Reybrouck, the book offers a theorization of Central West Africa, a case study of normalized narratives on the "Other", and a stirring wake up call for all contemporary writers on international history and politics.