The BRICS and global governance: China’s contradictory role

The impact of rising powers generally and the BRICS - Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa - in particular on the existing global order has become controversial and contested. Donald Trump’s nationalist foreign policy agenda has raised questions about the BRICS willingness and capacity to provide leadership in place on an American administration that is increasingly inward looking. As a result, the rise of BRICS poses potential normative and structural challenges to the existing liberal international order. Given its geoeconomic significance, China also poses a potential problem for the other BRICS, as well as the governance of the existing order more generally. Consequently, we argue that it will be difficult for the BRICS to maintain a unified position amongst themselves, let alone play a constructive role in preserving the foundations of ‘global governance’.     

From the New International Economic Order to the G20: how the ‘global South’ is restructuring world capitalism from within

Abstract

In the early 1970s the G77 and the Non Aligned Movement ( nam ) challenged the material and intellectual pillars of the postwar liberal capitalist system through collective action at the UN to establish a New International Economic Order ( nieo ). The aim was to complete the ‘emancipation’ of the ‘global South’ by creating binding institutional frameworks, legal regimes and redistributive mechanisms correcting historically constructed core–periphery disparities. That ambitious effort failed in the face of ‘Northern’ resistance and national segmentation within the nam . Today re-emerging states of the global South are engaged in a more successful effort to gain voice and alter international hierarchy by claiming a central place in the world capitalist system and restructuring it from within. The vertical late-modern world system centred in the Atlantic and ordered by the ‘West’ is thus gradually giving way to a polycentric international structure in which new regional and transnational ‘South–South’ linkages are being formed. This paper critically reviews the transformation and argues that, while it is creating long sought-for conditions of relative international equality, it has also dampened the emancipatory promise of the anti-colonial struggle.     

China’s ‘New Silk Roads’: sub-national regions and networks of global political economy

This paper argues that the Chinese government’s ‘belt and road’ initiative – the Silk Roads vision of land and maritime logistics and communications networks connecting Asia, Europe and Africa – has its roots in sub-national ideas and practices, and that it reflects their elevation to the national level more than the creation of substantially new policy content. Further, the spatial paradigms inherent in the Silk Roads vision reveal the reproduction of capitalist developmental ideas expressed particularly in the form of networks, which themselves have become a feature of contemporary global political economy. In other words, the Silk Roads vision is more of a ‘spatial fix’ than a geopolitical manoeuvre.     

ASEAN At 50: the global political economy’s contribution to durability

Why has the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) proved so durable as a regional organisation given the many challenges it has faced since its inception in 1967? This analysis makes use of an historical institutionalist approach. It shows how the global political economy, through the injection of aid and investment and the development of production networks and increased trade, generated a generally positive regional economic environment that encouraged cooperation. It also provided the resources for the gradual institutionalisation of ASEAN and the expansion of its reach through the establishment of associated regional organisations. The result was that these factors, in combination, contributed to ASEAN’s staying power.     

Learning from your comrade’s mistakes: the impact of the Soviet past on China’s future

While the Soviet Union imploded in the midst of its attempt to reform itself, more than a decade later China stands as a testament to the resilience of Communist rule. I suggest that one reason China has been able to stave off a regime collapse is that Chinese leaders have sought to learn from the collapse of the Soviet Union and are seeking to adjust their policies to buttress their political power. I present evidence in support of this position including statements of political leaders and party insiders, internal government documents, and Chinese scholarship on the Soviet collapse.     

How stalled global reform is fueling regionalism: China’s engagement with the G20

In the Chinese view, the architecture of contemporary global governance – especially that of the Bretton Woods institutions – is flawed and in need of reform. Developing nations (like China), the argument runs, need to be given a role proportionate to their global economic influence. Since the Group of Twenty (G20) became a leaders’ summit in 2008, China has used the forum to push for such reform. But today, despite some supposed progress, reform has stalled. Recognising this fact, China is increasingly emphasising regional integration in its strategy for overcoming the middle-income trap. Global reform has not been abandoned, but – given its infeasibility – is no longer a short-term priority.     

China’s Public Relations and Soft-power

China’s foreign strategy and foreign policy have changed tremendously. China began to build up soft-power of national culture and embark on public diplomacy, which aimed at: 1, increasingly exposing China to the world in terms of the state of affairs, policies and values, 2, creating a more objective and amicable milieu of opinions and 3, enhancing China’s international image. The author offers her personal perspectives on how to handle relations between pursuing public relations and building up national soft-power, how to advance national soft-power by public relations and the need to obviate ideological barriers.     

Anti-Corruption Policy: China’s Tiger Hunt and India’s Demonetization

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the different styles of anti-corruption strategy, particularly at the local level in China and India. In China there has been a central push with a role of anti-corruption agencies that have law-enforcement power. In India there has been a focus on institutional building together with a visible role of the civil society. China has had a top-down approach while India has more of a bottom-up approach combined with top-down initiatives such as demonetization. Interviews with 44 mid-career and senior officials investigate the two approaches and the impacts of anti-corruption measures in China and India. Interviewees support the approaches adopted by China and India but doubt their effectiveness and sustainability. The way forward, they suggest, is to reduce the influence of political parties especially in India and to enhance e-governance in both countries. Experiences of the two countries have significant implications especially on capacity building, institutional development, and law enforcement.     

China’s Aid to Africa:Characteristics,Its Role and Challenges ahead

Started from 1956,China’s aid to Africa has been playing a very significant role for strengthening Sino-African ties as a whole.Generally speaking,take the reform and opening-up policy started from late 1970s as a line of demarcation,China’s aid policy to Africa can be divided into two periods in the half century.The driving force of China’s aid policy before the line was to strengthen the diplomatic and political ties with African countries.The focus of China’s aid policy after the line is to seek mutual economic cooperation and common development.Comparing with the Western approaches,the major characteristics of China’s aid policy to Africa are mainly three:the aid is provided with no strings attached,and emphasizing on bilateral aid projects rather than multilateral system,strong focus on hardware projects such as physical infrastructure construction rather than software projects like research and capacity building.In general,China’s aid to Africa has generated effective results and helped a lot for China’s involvement in Africa.However,it is also facing new challenges at the moment and future.     

Policy Experimentation in China’s Economic Rise

Policy experimentation is frequently highlighted as a potent means to facilitate institutional innovation, and avoid reformist leaps in the dark by injecting bottom-up initiative and local knowledge into the national policy process. Yet experimentation remains a surprisingly vague concept in the debate over variants of economic governance. This article contributes to the study of experiment-based policymaking by examining the distinctive tools, processes, and effects of experimental programs in major domains of China’s economic reform. China’s experience attests to the potency of experimentation in bringing about transformative change, even in a rigid authoritarian, bureaucratic environment, and regardless of strong political opposition. Large-scale experimentation stimulated policy learning and economic expansion effectively in those sectors in which political elites could benefit from supporting new types of private and transnational entrepreneurial activity. Conversely, experimental programs largely failed in generating an effective provision of social goods which would require a combination of active societal supervision and strict central government enforcement to make it work. Though the impact of reform experiments varies between policy domains, China’s experimentation-based policy process has been essential to redefining basic policy parameters. At the heart of this process, we find a pattern of central–local interaction in generating policy—“experimentation under hierarchy”—which constitutes a notable addition to the repertoires of governance that have been tried for achieving economic transformation. The research for this article was supported by the German National Research Foundation and the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University. The author is especially indebted to Elizabeth Perry, Steven Goldstein, Rolf Langhammer, Dani Rodrik, Victor Shih, Ezra Vogel, and Rudolf Wagner for their encouragement and comments. Nancy Hearst made a crucial contribution by bringing precious sources from the Fairbank Center’s library to my attention that I otherwise would have overlooked.

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Bureaucratic socialism in reform mode: the changing politics of Cuba’s post-Fidel era

Standard wisdom explains Cuba’s current transformation as one of economic change but political immobility. However, Cuban politics have also undergone a major change since the handing over of power from Fidel to Raúl Castro – even if the rhetoric used has been one of continuity. This article traces this process by looking at four areas: the depersonalisation and re-institutionalisation of the political structures; the diversification of the public sphere, particularly through the use of digital media; the liberalisation of travel and migration, with its transformative impact on state–citizen relations; and the turn to a moderate foreign policy, as highlighted by the rapprochement with the USA, with its implications for legitimising the underpinnings of Cuban socialism. Although the shift has been well below the threshold of a transition to multiparty democracy, Cuba has evolved from the charismatic model of the past to what can be understood as bureaucratic socialism in reform mode.     

FUBAI: differing Chinese views of corruption since Tiananmen: does a road paved with corruption lead to socialism?

Corruption, particularly in the public official based definition which is dominant in reform China, involves the violation of administrative ethics and responsibilities for private gain. Corruption has long been a key factor in analyzing and understanding modernization in Communist and Third World countries. Corruption has the potential to undermine a regime's legitimacy and power as well as a nation's economy. Moreover, by contributing to both economic and political polarization, it also has the potential to significantly influence the social stratification and overall social structure of societies in the midst of significant political, economic and social transformation; in other words, how they ‘modernize’. While the majority of Chinese analyses of corruption recognize the threat posed by corruption, they disagree on the sources and consequences of such corruption, and thus on the means for controlling and/or eliminating it.

The success of any anti-corruption process is determined by a) the causes and consequences of corruption and the ways in which they are perceived or blocked out by the regime's analytical framework; b) regime goals, including the degree to which, by promoting the transformation of the forms of legitimate economic intercourse, it encourages changing what is defined as corruption and c) the degree to which it is capable of accomplishing its goals once set. However, inasmuch as the dominant Chinese analysis tend2 to exclude certain key factors, frequently including the regime's goals in ‘modernizing’ Chinese society, the present anti-corruption policies are not likely to be successful.