China and African Parliaments, by Innocent Batsani-Ncube, sets out to provide a nuanced interrogation of two pertinent but contested themes in respect to China–Africa relations: legislative governance and infrastructural aid. Simply put, the author examines the “gifting” dynamics of Chinese-funded parliamentary infrastructure and the underlying foreign policy mechanics. While diverse scholarship exists on inter-parliamentary or party relations between China and Africa within the broader area of governance, the author here literally deals with brick-and-mortar issues, an area which remains largely understudied.
The work itself focuses on what can be referred in China–Africa relations as “the politics of infrastructure,” taking inspiration from Jane C. Loeffler’s Architecture of Diplomacy (Princeton Architectural Press, 2010), which sought to understand the symbolism, design and politics of buildings. It is this intellectual framing that in some way appears to underpin this work. The book is centred around three core case studies of Lesotho, Malawi and Zimbabwe along with broad contextualisation of the debate in respect to significance and impact.
While much of the China–Africa scholarship has focused on Chinese funding in core infrastructure like hospitals, railways, roads and (air)ports, this is the first monograph of its kind to interrogate legislative (governance) infrastructure in Africa. Given that China financed the African Union Headquarters in Addis Ababa in 2012, not much substantive interrogation of related legislative projects exists. It makes this work a standout contribution to China–Africa scholarship. The author’s core argument, that China’s specific investment in parliamentary infrastructure – a kind of build and “operate” (read maintenance) – is intentional and strategic to allow enduring political access to power centres, is indeed a compelling one. The incontestable logic is that while building airports or railways may necessitate maintenance and service, it doesn’t entail routinized encounters and interface with legislative elites like parliaments do.
As such, the book is persuasive in the way it examines not just how China supports the “institutionalization” of legislative capacities through “bricks and mortar” but also the intentional and strategic embeddedness of enduring influence, as the case of Malawi and more acutely that of Lesotho demonstrate. The availability of sites, the choice of design, and the financing and maintenance protocols all provide a complex and enlightening insight into the politics of infrastructure within China’s and its partners’ foreign policy.
Substantively, the author works methodically to trace agency within the parliamentary institutions covered, and to some extent the executive branches that are the “sign off” authorities. The book points to the relationality of agency – a tension between the parties’ exercise of active agency and how this frames their relationship. It is instructive to see nuance here, specifically demonstrating that Zimbabwe, a bigger economy with larger and more historical political clout with Beijing, exercises more agency in comparison to Lesotho and Malawi. Batsani-Ncube makes the case that indeed China is simply alive to the necessity for proximity to the corridors of power that it literally built and is strategic in its interest articulation to adopt an influencing regime therein. This, however, is not new, as Western powers have already exercised varying levels of influence through a more structured governance-support framework since the third wave of democratization in the 1990s.
While the book is without doubt a strong empirical interrogation of the politics of infrastructure development, specifically parliaments, it also promises theoretical innovation in framing the debate through what the author calls “subtle power,” as opposed to soft or sharp power. This is an interesting proposition. However, reading methodically through the book there is more of an implicit allusion to this theory than a systematic and intentional development, and in the end the promise remains unfulfilled.
Context matters. From an ethnographic standpoint, actions or behaviours don’t happen in a vacuum but are informed by social, historical, political, cultural and spatial contexts. What is missing from this research is the ability to draw or reflect upon China’s own domestic socio-political practices and on how those might have informed the ways in which Chinese contractors approached project execution in the three cases. Chinese contractors operate in a specific socio-political frame. They are socialized into certain “ways of doing.” It is this that often creates tensions in the way they relate with various stakeholders in Africa or elsewhere. For instance, is the absence of popular input or consultation about strategic projects surprising? The answer is no. The book would have benefited from providing the context in which the contractors operate.
The book focuses on parliamentary institutionalization as a core theme. While to some degree this is indeed topical, perhaps there would have been more value in examining not simply institutionalization but also adaptation. African parliaments have been around for a long time, even if some are more “mature” or institutionalized than others. The issue is how these have adjusted or tracked (or not) the changing democratic representation and accountability needs. This is the crux of the matter and perhaps the very raison d’être of China’s infrastructural support.
The mixed-methods approach for the book ensured that the findings were both robust and provided solid empirical evidence to the analysis. The key informant interviews alongside focus-group discussions added thick descriptiveness, richness and nuance to the analysis that would ordinarily be missed. Evidently, the ability to mobilize diverse perspectives across the varied geographical spaces faced with same frame of reference brings sophisticated and intimate insight. The author’s access to various elite stakeholders and key primary sources for relevant data not only brings first-hand knowledge and lived experience but also results in rigorous scholarship. Active observation, or what elsewhere is field immersion, during his research residency in the three parliaments couldn’t have provided a better front-row seat to the proceedings and intricacies of these contested sites and the lived world.
Overall, the book itself is written rather candidly and accessibly, providing impressive material to students of African governance, China–Africa relations and development studies. It will be a good read for many students taking survey courses on Africa in general, Africa in international relations, architectural history, and in the international political economy of development. From a practitioner’s standpoint, it would be a good training text for government mandarins, as it shows how China specifically positions governance infrastructure in its foreign policy, not only in Africa but also in the Global South more generally.
