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Begin New Search Topic Development Political Geography China Content Type Policy Brief

1. Potential and Pitfalls for African Industrialization in Chinese-built Standard Gauge Railways

Author:
Yunnan Chen
Publication Date:
04-2023
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Centre for Business and Development Studies (CBDS), Copenhagen Business School
Abstract:
Railway development has been a key feature of transport infrastructure investments in several African economies, with several new standard gauge railways (SGR) built in the last ten years in Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Kenya. These planned projects have also entailed substantial Chinese involvement through construction contractors, in financing, and in the operations and management, becoming part of the wider Chinese discourse of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). They also have significant potential in supporting the industrialization plans of African states, and in some cases, have been explicitly linked to plans for a green transformation. This brief draws from case studies across Africa with a focus on Ethiopia, to highlight the significant potential of railway investments as a low-cost, low-carbon transport for green industrialization, but also its pitfalls and challenges as an infrastructure for governance, and local technology transfer.
Topic:
Development, Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Industrialization, and Railways
Political Geography:
China and Africa

2. ASEAN's medium- to long-term trade strategies and the direction of RoK-ASEAN cooperation

Author:
Sungil Kwak, Seungjin Cho, Jaewan Cheong, Jaeho Lee, Mingeum Shin, Nayoun Park, and So Eun Kim
Publication Date:
03-2023
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Korea Institute for International Economic Policy (KIEP)
Abstract:
In recent years, the U.S.-China hegemony competition has intensified, dividing the world into two blocs. ASEAN has long culti-vated its position on the international stage by maintaining a certain distance between the United States and China. In that sense, ASEAN is the best partner for Korea to ef-fectively respond to the divided world. Therefore, this study seeks the directions of cooperation with ASEAN in supply chain, digital trade, climate change response, and health and development cooperation in line with changes in the international order.
Topic:
Climate Change, Development, Economics, International Cooperation, Trade, and ASEAN
Political Geography:
China, Asia, North America, and United States of America

3. Understanding Hainan Free Trade Port: China's Efforts to Explore High-level Opening-up

Author:
Wenfeng Wei
Publication Date:
10-2022
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Korea Institute for International Economic Policy (KIEP)
Abstract:
On 13 April 2018, upon the 30th anniversary of Hainan province, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced to build Hainan into a free trade port. According to the Master Plan for the Construction of the Hainan Free Trade Port released by the State Council on 1 June 2020, China aims to build this southern island province into a high-level free trade port with global influence by the middle of the century. As China's largest special economic zone, Hainan is expected to become the frontline of China's integration into the global economic system. Noting that the world is facing a new round of major development, changes and adjustment, with protectionism and unilateralism on the rise and economic globalization facing greater headwinds, it was also a strategic decision of Chinese authorities based on the domestic and international landscapes. As such, Hainan Free Trade Port (HNFTP) is more than a regional development initiative, and it has a much bigger role to play in China’s reform and opening endeavors.
Topic:
Development, Economics, Special Economic Zones, and Free Trade
Political Geography:
China and Asia

4. China’s Evolving Approach to Foreign Aid

Author:
Jingdong Yuan, Abhishek Andasu, and Xuwan Ouyang
Publication Date:
05-2022
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
Abstract:
China’s role in foreign aid and, more broadly, in development cooperation on the global stage has grown significantly since it began seven decades ago. Particularly in recent years, through such platforms as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China’s profile and engagement in global governance in foreign aid and related areas have been further enhanced. China’s ambition is to take a more proactive approach in foreign aid and move towards a model of international development cooperation by linking with the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and by including the BRI as a major platform to achieve key development goals. This paper provides a timely analysis of the evolution of China’s foreign aid policy in the past seven decades with a particular focus on the developments since 2000. It discusses China’s development finance to Africa and the major sectors receiving Chinese aid. It also analyses recent trends of Chinese foreign aid and identifies some of the challenges that China faces as it becomes a major player in international development financing.
Topic:
Development, Foreign Aid, Infrastructure, Sustainable Development Goals, and Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)
Political Geography:
China and Asia

5. The Development Response to Kleptocracy and Strategic Corruption

Author:
Josh Rudolph
Publication Date:
01-2022
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMFUS)
Abstract:
Kleptocracies do not stop at their own borders. The same actors, networks, tactics, and resources that they wield to prevent democracy and rule of law from sprouting at home are also repurposed for foreign aggression. While cronies, oligarchs, and lesser operatives do get rich in the process, “strategic corruption” is chiefly a geopolitical weapon directed by autocratic regimes to secretly undermine the sovereignty of other countries. The three most common manifestations of strategic corruption vary on a spectrum of how directly and boldly they violate sovereignty and subvert democratic processes. Starting with the most indirect and chronic form of strategic corruption, Russia and China invest “corrosive capital” throughout Eastern Europe and the Belt and Road Initiative, respectively. They use corrupt patronage networks and opaque business dealings to spread their kleptocratic model of authoritarian governance. Those corrupt investments are usually also supported by tactics of “malign influence,” like when a minister or politician receives bribes or economic threats until they censor their political speech, advance a foreign policy initiative, or otherwise subordinate the legitimate sovereign interests entrusted to them by their own people in favor of the interests of a foreign power. Finally, the most direct and acute form of strategic corruption involves financial methods of election interference and other tactics of corrupting democratic processes. Often funded with the proceeds of kleptocracy, election interference through covert political financing has become the bailiwick of Kremlin-directed oligarchs. Separate from those three manifestations of strategic corruption—corrosive capital, malign influence, and election interference—China and Russia try to hide their dirty money and malign activities by pressuring foreign journalists into silence through surveillance, thuggery, and lawsuits. Western foreign assistance has not yet offered a coherent response to kleptocracy and strategic corruption, but that is starting to change under the Biden administration. Building resilience to this transnational threat through foreign aid will require four new approaches that are more political and coordinated than traditional development assistance. First, aid should be informed by local political analysis. More important and less used than technical reviews of laws and institutions, political analysis should center anti-corruption efforts around known corrupt activity. That starts by asking sensitive questions about which individuals, institutions, and sectors are the most corrupt, how extensively their networks of wealth and power span, and which corrupt figures must be held accountable to thoroughly purge grand corruption. Second, aid should be responsive to political shifts, scaling up and down, respectively, in response to windows of opportunity for anti-corruption reform and times of backsliding toward kleptocracy. Third, aid responses to kleptocracy should be coordinated at the regional and global levels, similarly to how grand corruption operates across borders through transnational networks of actors and tools. Fourth, anti-corruption programming should be deeply integrated across the traditional sectors of assistance, particularly health, infrastructure, energy, climate, and security. Some of these new approaches are already being prioritized under the Biden administration’s new strategy to combat corruption, particularly coordinating across tools and sectors to fight transnational corruption. But operationalizing this mission will be no small endeavor, given that anti-corruption assistance is delivered through a notoriously technocratic and apolitical bureaucracy built during the Cold War to aid socioeconomic development in individual countries steadily over decades. But getting this right offers the key to defending democracies from autocratic aggression, showing how democracy can deliver, and even helping bring foreign policy and domestic politics into alignment for the first time in a generation.
Topic:
Corruption, Development, Finance, and Kleptocracy
Political Geography:
Russia, China, Eastern Europe, and Global Focus

6. Development Competition is Heating Up: China’s Global Development Initiative and the G7 Partnership for Infrastructure and Global Alliance on Food Security

Author:
Sarah Cliffe and Karina Gerlach
Publication Date:
07-2022
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Center on International Cooperation
Abstract:
Economic development issues are becoming increasingly geopolitical, as the form and importance of today’s agreement in Turkey on grain exports between Russia and Ukraine demonstrates. While today’s crucial agreement and the war of food security narratives between Russia and the West rightly grab the latest headlines, outside of the media spotlight development competition is also heating up between China and the West.
Topic:
Development, Infrastructure, Food Security, Strategic Competition, and Russia-Ukraine War
Political Geography:
Russia, China, Turkey, and Ukraine

7. Chinese Demographic Signals Bode Ill for Future Development

Author:
Elizabeth Chen
Publication Date:
02-2021
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
The Jamestown Foundation
Abstract:
A new study published February 8 by the Ministry of Public Security of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) (MPS, 中华人民共和国公安部, zhonghua renmin gongheguo gongan bu) reported that there were 10.035 million registered births in 2020, down from 11.79 million in 2019. This represents a 15 percent decrease following the coronavirus pandemic (Guancha.cn, February 8). Althou­gh the number of registered births—that is, newborns recorded in the household registration hukou (户口) system—is not the same as China’s official birth rate, the decline has concerned analysts that a long-forewarned demographic crisis may be approaching faster than expected.National birth and population figures for the previous year are usually released in January but have been delayed until April this year as China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) compiles its decennial census. In the meantime, data released by some provinces and cities in January has appeared to confirm the implications of the MPS study. Data released from the capital city of Guangdong province—which saw the highest number of births per province in 2019—showed that birth rates in Guangzhou were down by 17 percent year-on-year and mirrored broader trends across the rest of the province. In Zhejiang, China’s wealthiest province, the cities of Wenzhou and Taizhou reported that new births in 2020 fell by 19 percent and 33 percent respectively compared to 2019 (SCMP, February 2).
Topic:
Demographics, Development, Aging, and Population Growth
Political Geography:
China and Asia

8. Improving China's participation in resolving developing-country debt problems

Author:
Martin Chorzempa and Adnan Mazarei
Publication Date:
05-2021
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Peterson Institute for International Economics
Abstract:
The COVID-19 shock has exacerbated the struggles of many emerging-market and developing economies (EMDEs) to repay their external debt. One of the most urgent challenges relates to debt owed to China, whose lending spree under its Belt and Road Initiative and other programs has played an outsized role in what amounts to a crisis for many countries. The scope of the problem is striking. China is owed more than $100 billion, or 57 percent of all debt owed to official creditors by the countries that need help the most. China is not a member of the Paris Club of official creditors, which coordinates, within a multilateral framework, the resolution of general sovereign illiquidity or unsustainable external debt of EMDEs. There is an urgent need to put in place more effective, long-term solutions to help durably lower the risks of prolonged debt difficulties in EMDEs. These problems could be partly addressed by creating creditor committees to coordinate debt relief with China. The Group of Twenty (G20) has taken some steps to include creditor committees in the context of the Common Framework for Debt Treatments beyond the Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI), but only for low-income countries that qualify for the DSSI and only for official creditors. To better address debt distress, it needs to extend the approach, especially to middle-income debtor countries.
Topic:
Debt, Development, Emerging Markets, and G20
Political Geography:
China and Asia

9. How difficult is China’s business environment for European and American companies?

Author:
Uri Dadush and Pauline Weil
Publication Date:
05-2021
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Bruegel
Abstract:
Despite tensions over China’s discriminatory business practices, China’s trade continues to thrive, and the country has taken over from the United States as the first destination for foreign investment. American and European businesses continue to be engaged in China’s large and growing market, even amid a trade war between China and the United States. Drawing on surveys of companies and international comparisons, we show that – contrary to the prevailing narrative – China’s business practices have improved significantly in recent years. China’s business environment is today generally more favourable than that in other large countries at similar levels of development and, in some though certainly not all aspects, is in line with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development average. Differences over geopolitics and human rights must be addressed, but it is clear that trade and investment agreements conditioned on accelerated reforms in China would yield substantial dividends. The benefits of such deals would accrue not only to foreign investors in China and exporters to China, but also to consumers and importers in the European Union and, especially, in the US, where punitive tariffs on China remain in effect. Critical aspects in the negotiations would include better access for American and European investors to China’s market for services and improved enforcement of rules and regulations in China. As in many middle-income countries, uneven enforcement of the law (rather than the law itself) remains a critical problem in China.
Topic:
Development, Bilateral Relations, European Union, Business, and Investment
Political Geography:
China, Europe, Asia, North America, and United States of America

10. To Beat China On Tech In Emerging Markets, Learn From It: Competing with China on 5G and future technologies

Author:
Luke Patey
Publication Date:
05-2021
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS)
Abstract:
Recommendations: The US, South Korea, Japan, and the EU can pool resources to level the playing field with China and offer new finance options for developing countries seeking to upgrade their communications and technology infrastructure. The US should look to the India and Vietnam model and help other nations develop domestic capacities that lower dependencies on Huawei and other foreign tech providers over time. Open RAN is no silver bullet to compete with China. Its potential will only be fully realized in the mid and long run, after high integration costs, security gaps, and other problems are worked out.
Topic:
Security, Foreign Policy, Development, Politics, Science and Technology, Power Politics, Economy, and Cyberspace
Political Geography:
Japan, China, Asia, North America, and United States of America