CIAO DATE: 06/2013
Volume: 42, Issue: 1
April 2013
Chinese Impacts and Impacting China (PDF)
Karsten Giese
The economic and political rise of the People's Republic of China has stirred widespread debates on China's potential and actual impact on both the international system and individual countries. At the same time, however, individual countries and global systems alike have always impacted developments in China, although these processes previously attracted much less scholarly attention. This issue of the Journal of Current Chinese Affairs presents a selection of exemplary cases relating to both phenomena that cover different areas of research. This collection of research articles demonstrates that increasing integration within the world system can never be regarded as a one-way street and involves impacting and being impacted simultaneously.
Aid Donor Meets Strategic Partner? The European Union's and China's Relations with Ethiopia (PDF)
Christine Hackenesch
The motives, instruments and effects of China’s Africa policy have spurred a lively debate in European development policy circles. This paper assesses the “competitive pressure” that China’s growing presence in Africa exerts on the European development policy regime. Drawing on a large number of interviews conducted in China, Ethiopia and Europe between 2008 and 2011, the paper analyses Ethiopia as a case study. Ethiopia has emerged as one of the most important countries in Chinese as well as European cooperation with Africa. Yet, Chinese and European policies toward Ethiopia differ greatly. The EU mainly engages Ethiopia as an aid recipient, whereas China has developed a comprehensive political and economic partnership with the East African state. China has thereby become an alternative partner to the Ethiopian government, a development that both sheds light on the gap between European rhetoric and policy practice and puts pressure on the EU to make more efforts to reform its development policy system.
China–Europe Relations in the Mitigation of Climate Change: A Conceptual Framework (PDF)
Axel Berger, Doris Fischer, Rasmus Lema, Hubert Schmitz, Frauke Urban
Despite the large-scale investments of both China and the EU in climate-change mitigation and renewable-energy promotion, the prevailing view on China–EU relations is one of conflict rather than cooperation. In order to evaluate the prospects of cooperation between China and the EU in these policy fields, empirical research has to go beyond simplistic narratives. This paper suggests a conceptual apparatus that will help researchers better understand the complexities of the real world. The relevant actors operate at different levels and in the public and private sectors. The main message of the paper is that combining the multi-level governance and value-chain approaches helps clarify the multiple relationships between these actors.
Chinese Economic Statecraft: A Comparative Study of China's Oil-backed Loans in Angola and Brazil (PDF)
Ana Cristina Alves
Africa’s and South America’s rich endowments of resources and great need for infrastructure development make them perfect candidates for China’s “infrastructure-for-resources” loans. Over the past decade, such an arrangement for pursuing China’s resource-security goals overseas – namely, securing long-term supply contracts and accessing exploration rights – has proved more effective in Africa than in South America. This article discusses the reasons for this regional variation by providing a comparative study of China’s economic statecraft in Angola and Brazil, focusing on the deployment of infrastructure-for-oil deals. It argues that the variation in China’s energy-security outcomes (long-term supply and access to oil equity) in Angola and Brazil can be attributed mostly to fundamental differences between the institutional structures of each country’s oil industry. Although this foreign policy instrument has worked well for the centralised structure encountered in Angola, it has been less suitable for the far more liberalised and regulated environment that characterises Brazil’s oil sector.
Learning from Failure: China's Overseas Oil Investments (PDF)
Susana Moreira
Thirsty for oil and other raw materials needed to fuel its breakneck development, China is funnelling money and manpower into an expanding number of countries in order to secure access to natural resources. This effort has successfully increased Chinese oil assets overseas but it has also exposed Beijing and Chinese national oil companies (NOCs) to significant risks. The present paper focuses on one type of risk – political risk – and how it has affected China’s global quest for oil since 1993. It starts with a brief overview of political risk. It then looks at political risk management as applied to the oil industry in general. The paper continues with a discussion of the political risk management of Chinese national oil companies over time. This includes a concise exam-ination of several instances in which the interests of Chinese NOCs have been undermined due to political risk and the shortcomings in the approaches of Chinese NOCs to political risk. Recent developments suggest that Chinese NOCs are learning from these mistakes and adjusting their strategies accordingly. Although progress toward these readjust-ments has been made, China’s own socio-political context is still hampering the ability of Chinese NOCs to deal with on-the-ground realities that are clearly much more unstable than China’s own.
Duanyong Wang
In recent years, the security risk to Chinese citizens overseas has become an increasingly prominent issue owing to a rapid increase in the number of Chinese citizens moving and travelling abroad. Protecting the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese citizens abroad has become a key priority within the overall field of protecting China’s overseas interests. This article uses an alternative sample analysis to perform a quantitative interpretation of the “Special Notices for Chinese Citizens Abroad” issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China from 2008 to 2010. It analyses the distribution characteristics of the risks posed to Chinese citizens overseas in terms of geographical distribution, various risk categories. Based on the results, the article concludes with a summation of the main features and causes of security risks to Chinese citizens overseas.
Bringing the Low-Carbon Agenda to China: A Study in Transnational Policy Diffusion (PDF)
Andreas Hofem, Sebastian Heilmann
This study traces the transnational interactions that contributed to introducing the low-carbon economy agenda into Chinese policymaking. A microprocessual two-level analysis (outside-in as well as inside-access) is employed to analyse transnational and domestic exchanges. The study provides evidence that low-carbon agenda-setting – introduced by transnational actors, backed by foreign funding, promoted by policy entrepreneurs from domestic research institutes, propelled by top-level attention, but only gradually and cautiously adopted by the government bureaucracy – can be considered a case of effective transnational diffusion based on converging perceptions of novel policy challenges and options. Opinion leaders and policy-brokers from the government-linked scientific community functioned as effective access points to the Chinese government’s policy agenda.