*Topicality/Definitions Democracy Promotion Includes Military Intervention
China CP: China Mainly Funds Infrastructure Projects
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China CP: China Mainly Funds Infrastructure ProjectsCHINESE AID MORE LIKELY TO FUND BIG INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECTS THAN “CAPACITY BUILDING” He Wenping, Professor-Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, 2010, Challenging the Aid Paradigm: Western Currents and Asian Alternatives, ed. J. S. Sorensen, p. 153 While Western countries focus on “software” such as capacity-building, China puts more investment into “hardware,” such as roads, railways, and other tangible infrastructure projects that bring direct and visible benefit to the host country. The China ExIm Bank, founded in 1994, has played an important role in providing financial support for such infrastructure projects. By September 2006, there were 259 projects financed by the China ExIm Bank in 36 African countries, 79 percent of which were committed to infrastructure development, such as railways (Benguela and Port Sudan), dams (Merowe in Sudan, Bui in Ghana and Mphanda Nkuwa in Zambia), thermal power plants (Nigeria and Sudan), oil facilities (Nigeria), and copper mines (Congo and Zambia). Most of these loans were issued as buyers’ credit with low interest (2 percent) to Chinese companies and are not classified as bilateral assistance by the OECD/DAC.
He Wenping, Professor-Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, 2010, Challenging the Aid Paradigm: Western Currents and Asian Alternatives, ed. J. S. Sorensen, p. 140 Guided by the above theory and thought, the Chinese government spared no efforts to support the struggles of the African peoples against imperialism and colonialism and for national liberation and independence in this period. For example, when Algerian Front de Liberation National was fighting against French colonialism in late 1950s, some French officials put forward an idea, saying the French could consider recognizing China in exchange for China’s stopping support to Algeria. Then Chinese deputy prime minister and foreign minister Chen Yi responded by saying, “We could wait for the establishment of diplomatic ties with France. However, we will continue to support the Algerians’ struggle for their independence until they achieve the final victory.” During their armed struggle for independence, the Algerians also received some material aid and cash grants, valued at RMB70 million (US$28.4 million). China also hailed Egypt’s resumed sovereignty over the Suez Canal in 1956. In September 1956, Mao met with the Egyptian ambassador to China and said, “Chinese people are firmly behind Egypt in its struggle to resume sovereignty over the Suez Canal. China is willing to do its best to help Egypt without attaching any conditions and to offer what you need within our power.” In November 1956, the Chinese government provided a 20 million Swiss Francs (U.S.$4.6 million) grant in cash to the Egyptian government to support their struggle over the Suez Canal.
Discourse KeyDISCOURSE SHAPES IDENTITIES AND REPRESENTATIONS Maria Eriksson Baaz, Goteborg University-Department of Peace and Development-Researcher, 2005, The Paternalism of Partnership: a postcolonial reading of identity in development aid, p. 3 The first premise of this book is that identities and experiences are constituted within discourse – that is, within partial, temporary closures of meaning, closures which are never fully successful and which imply an exclusion of other possible meanings. Identity is, in this perspective, not something that already exists, transcending discourse, place and history (Hall 1990: 225). Identities are constituted through the meanings we provide to the Self and the Other. This book examines this process: how identities and experiences in the development aid context are provided with meaning through discourse.
Maria Eriksson Baaz, Goteborg University-Department of Peace and Development-Researcher, 2005, The Paternalism of Partnership: a postcolonial reading of identity in development aid, p. 11 A discourse can be defined as a historically, socially, and institutionally specific structure of representations or articulations through which meanings are constructed and social practices organized. Discourse is primarily about the production of meaning. Contrary to some tiresome criticism and misreading, acknowledging the discursive nature of knowledge and practices is not the same as asserting that there is nothing outside discourse. As Laclau and Mouffe (1990: 100) observe, the term “discourse” emphasizes “the fact that every social configuration is meaningful…the discursive character of an object does not, by any means, imply putting its existence into question.” Thus, to understand the assertion that discourse produces objects of knowledge as implying that nothing exists outside discourse is a misreading. Rather, the notion of discourse implies that meaning is located within – not outside – discourse. The being of objects is different from their mere existence: “Objects are never given to us as mere existential entities; they are always given to us within discursive articulations” (Laclau and Mouffe 1990: 103). DEVELOPMENT DISCOURSE PROMOTES DISEMPOWERING REPRESENTATIONS OF AID RECIPIENTS – SHAPES REALITY Edward Ramsamy, Africana Studies Professor-Rutgers, 2006, The World Bank and Urban Development, p. 11-2 Postmodernism regards development as a discursive field, a system of power relations which produce what Foucault (1979:12) calls the “domain of objects and rituals of truth.” Using Foucault’s theme of discursive power as well as the deconstructionist method of analyzing the representation of social reality, Escobar (1995) seeks to interrogate “development” in order to illustrate how the dominance of this system of knowledge has silenced non-Western knowledge systems, and how peasants, women, and nature are objectified and targeted by the “gaze of experts.” His work has received considerable attention and is representative of the postmodernist critique. The central premise of Escobar’s book is that international discourse on development after World War II represents the exercise of power over the Third World, and that international development agencies such as the World Bank are instruments for achieving that aim. “Development,” according to Escobar, “has relied exclusively on one knowledge system, the modern Western one.” Focusing on three defining characteristics of the global development discourse – the process of knowledge production, which relate to and informs development; the wider power relations which shape development practice; and the types of subjectivity facilitated by development discourse – Escobar observes that “most people in the West…have great difficulty thinking about Third World situations in terms other than those provided by the dominant development discourse.” DISCOURSE IS A TEMPORARY COLLECTION OF MEANINGS Maria Eriksson Baaz, Goteborg University-Department of Peace and Development-Researcher, 2005, The Paternalism of Partnership: a postcolonial reading of identity in development aid, p. 11-2 A discourse may be conceptualized as a partial, temporary closure of meaning, a reduction and exclusion of other possible meanings. The discursive structure should be seen as a system of differences in which the identity of the elements is purely relational. Language is a system of signs, where the signs are provided with meaning through their relations to, and difference from, other signs. A discourse is a temporary fixation of meaning, a particular way of establishing relations between specific elements. These fixations are merely temporal, however; the relationship is never permanently fixed. Discourses are not closed systems but open-ended, incomplete and related to the other discourses. Meaning is thereby produced in ways that cannot be determined or predicted beforehand. As Laclau (1990: 109-10) contends: “if all identity is differential, it is enough that the system of differences is not closed, that it suffers from the action of external discursive structures, for any identity … to be unstable.” At the same time, a discourse in which meaning cannot possibly be fixed is nothing else “but the discourse of the psychotic” (90-92). Therefore there are always attempts to fix “to limit that play, to domesticate infinitude, to embrace it within the finitude of an order” through the institution of “nodal points.” It is these partial fixations of meaning that constitute particularly discourses, what I initially defined as “a historically, socially, and institutionally specific structure of representations or articulations.” In this sense, then, it is possible to talk about, as I do here, different discourses, such as the partnership discourse, the aid dependence discourse or the sustainability discourse. In doing so, however, it is important to acknowledge that these discourses are open-ended and overlapping. As Lynn Doty puts it: “To refer to a discourse as a ‘structured totality’ is not meant to suggest that it is closed, stable, and fixed once and for all. On the contrary, a discourse is inherently open-ended and incomplete. Its exterior limits are constituted by other discourses that are themselves also open, inherently unstable, and always in the process of being articulated. This understanding of discourse implies an overlapping quality to different discourses. Any fixing of a discourse and the identities that are constructed by it, then, can only ever be of a partial nature. It is the overflowing and incomplete nature of discourses that opens up spaces for change, discontinuity, and variation.” (1996: 6). DISCOURSE AND REPRESENTATIONS INFLUENCE ACTION Maria Eriksson Baaz, Goteborg University-Department of Peace and Development-Researcher, 2005, The Paternalism of Partnership: a postcolonial reading of identity in development aid, p. 12-3 To return to the quotations on page 10, we can thus contend that to incarnate and confine “the very real interventions of development” within discourse and within the written or spoken text are two different things. To do the former is to situate them within the discursive in which meanings are constructed and social practices organized. A conceptualization of development as discourse does not mean, therefore, that development has no “effects.” On the contrary, a central idea is that discourses and representations are institutionalized and materialized through different practices. To “incarnate or confine the very real interventions of development within discourse” entails an acknowledgement that social practices are meaningful, that practices are constituted within different discourses and, therefore that all social practices have a discursive aspect. Just as discourses define and restrict the ways in which a phenomenon can be understood, so they also define a certain type of practice. What is important, then, is to examine not only how discourse and representations provide identities and events with meaning, but also how they make various courses of action possible. As indicated above, this book not only deals with the meanings attached to the Self as “donor”/development worker and to the Tanzanian “partners;” it also examines how these meanings inform the practices of development work.
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