THE DEVELOPMENT RELATIONS BETWEEN CHINA AND AFRICA IN AN AGE OF GLOBAL INTERDEPENDENCE: PROGRESS, CHALLENGES AND PROSPECTS

China is one of a number of significant emerging powers or developing countries in the world system that are deepening their economic connections with Africa. However, China is the largest and most powerful member of this group. China has explored closer ties with other developing country regions and continents, such as Latin America and Central Asia, but it has developed the closest commercial ties with Africa, the continent with more developing countries than any other. This paper explores whether China-Africa interactions provide a new framework for "development relations" within the global system. It makes a number of important contextual issues and claims. First, China's growth and new role in the global system are discussed, taking into account its status as a major developing country power in ascendancy and how its increasing involvement with Africa might be interpreted as a component of a broader trend of China's expanding worldwide influence in general. Next, the historical development of Africa-China relations is examined, with particular attention to the 1955 Bandung Conference, which brought together growing Asian and African nations and played a crucial role in influencing these relations in the decades that followed. The new, more assertive Africa policy and approach that China adopted in the late 1990s and early 2000s is briefly described here. This paper examines how the expanding Africa-China relationship can be seen through the prism of important economic security elements, the most important of which are those pertaining to various supply security, finance-credit security, and techno-industrial capacities security objectives. In light of competing development philosophies, the investigation also looks at whether China's interactions with Africa are eroding Western standards on development assistance policy and practice. The issue surrounding the "Beijing Consensus" on global development and international relations management in general—which might be seen as a counter-paradigm to the (post-)Washington Consensus—is then examined. This paper examines how China's new Africa Policy, which has been in place since 2000, has sparked a variety of debates, chief among them being one about competing development models that reject Western governance conditionality and the Chinese non-interference concept. It considers how China portrays itself as a potential leader in the search for a new international order among developing nations and how collaboration between China and Africa is presented as an essential part of this search. Later on, it examines how China's Africa policy is both a new alternative to the well-established Northern model of development and governance and an expression of the long-standing South-South collaboration. This paper makes the case that, in the absence of strong international organisations that "fairly" represented all parties involved, groups of countries may effectively collaborate in certain problem areas to address challenges related to global development. It specifically looks at China's bilateral and state-centric approach to dealing with African partners, the continent's evolving historical position within Beijing's foreign policy agenda, and its perception of the evolving world political order. This paper argues that the concept of "development" as a distinct policy domain, akin to that which emerged among Western nations beginning in the 1950s, is disturbing and novel to Chinese practice. It implies that rather than concentrating on a single facet of Chinese relations with African states, like aid or governance, it is vital to critically analyse the larger geopolitics of China-Africa relations, both past and present, in order to understand how China is making new "choices" and altering the landscape for African development. This paper also provides a generalised conceptual framework of "development relations" in order to better understand the possible new directions of the Africa-China relationship and, more generally, inter-developing nation economic diplomacy. The core principle of development relations is that enhancing development capacities should be the main objective of economic interactions with developing countries, such those in Africa. This paper argues that this is a departure from conventional neo-liberal thinking, especially the notion that encouraging economic exchange between development partners is sufficient to achieve the greatest welfare outcomes. Six interrelated categories of development capacity are presented in the theoretical framework of development relations: technical, institutional, industrial, human capital, infrastructure, and sustainable development. This paper argues that certain functional parts of the development relationship must align with one another in order to achieve development capacity goals. These include having congruent development-related policy concepts and objectives, addressing balance of power challenges, and exchanging best practices for domestic development. It discusses the prospects for the latter, pointing out among other things the connections between domestic-level factors in both China and Africa and how this relates to their international development relationship. It also highlights areas where development relations between China and Africa have made good progress but also where there is still room for improvement.