China's presence in some of Africa's most conflict-ridden countries is well recognized. Under the banner of non-interference, Beijing has been able to finance resource investments, support Chinese-led infrastructure projects and encourage firms to open up businesses in countries that might otherwise be neglected because of sanctions or through the cautious approach adopted by most traditional donor countries and Western investors.Footnote 1 As a result, China has been able to stake out a significant position in sectors and markets in countries as different as Angola, Ethiopia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Chad, Sudan and South Sudan.
However, these initial successes in achieving gains for both its own economic interests and that of the host government have been tempered in recent years by a series of significant setbacks rooted in that very state fragility that once seemed so accommodating. Renewed conflict in Sudan and South Sudan, for instance, has jeopardized China's attempts to protect its established economic interests and to expand new ones in the two states. Likewise, weak institutions and poor regulatory environments in Angola, Chad and Liberia have undermined Chinese business operations at various times, as has corruption and the arbitrary application of local laws. Moreover, some Chinese firms have themselves engaged in dubious practices in these fluid post-conflict settings, causing diplomatic incidents and reputational damage to the Chinese government's carefully crafted Africa policy.
To date, the problems of African countries emerging out of conflict have not featured with any degree of dedicated significance in Chinese foreign policy towards the continent. This is despite the fact that Chinese investment and commodity-backed loans have played a notable and important role in the economies of post-conflict states, providing rapid outlay of finance and the construction of vital infrastructure at a time when other traditional sources of financing have been slow to respond.Footnote 2 The result is that Chinese involvement in these states is both significant and highly visible and, as a consequence, particularly vulnerable to the problems that accompany state fragility, including weak administrative structures and the contested legitimacy of the host government. From South Sudan to the Democratic Republic of Congo, the pressures on Chinese actors embedded in the local environment have exerted commensurate demands on Beijing to respond effectively to address these difficult circumstances.
The fallout of these inherently unstable conditions in Africa, however, extends beyond narrower Chinese economic concerns: China's position as a permanent UN Security Council member means continual exposure to the management challenges posed by threats to international peace and security that periodically arise from post-conflict states and, as such, China is expected to weigh in constructively to address these problems. Western Security Council members, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Development Assistance Committee (OECD-DAC) donors, leading international financial institutions and non-government organizations all have established (if evolving) approaches towards post-conflict environments and fragile states. African governments and regional institutions give prominence to interventionist-oriented policies aimed at supporting the difficult transition from conflict to peaceful development.Footnote 3 China notably lacks any such post-conflict and fragile state policy.
It is against this background that devising an approach towards post-conflict environments and fragile states has come to preoccupy Chinese policymakers and researchers working on African affairs in recent years. However, engaging with this complex topic has highlighted a number of difficult issues for China that render a simple adaptation to established approaches if not untenable, then certainly unpalatable. Coupled with a distinct ambivalence towards the interventionist character of Western-inspired “liberal peace” approaches, the absence of a post-conflict and fragile states policy sits uneasily with Beijing's commitment to play a greater activist role in international affairs generally and in support of African interests in particular. The result is a conscious effort to move away from ad hoc participation in African post-conflict settings to gradualist forms of engagement that include fomenting common Chinese–African values and re-imagining liberal norms on intervention. In short, China is in the process of becoming a norms maker in Africa.
This article traces the evolution of Chinese policy on post-conflict peacebuilding in Africa from a reactive stance based on the principle of non-interference, to selective engagement in response to particular problems and external pressures and, most recently, the emergence of a conscious effort to influence prevailing norms on post-conflict reconstruction. We argue that the move by Beijing to go beyond adherence to established norms on African security is a process being driven by foreign policy “norms entrepreneurs” within elite circles aimed at partially reconstituting these rules and practices to conform more closely to Chinese needs. With Africa characterized in China's policymaking community as a relatively benign setting for “foreign policy experimentation,” there is an expansiveness to Beijing's approach to handling the myriad problems arising from weak and conflict-ridden African states unseen in other regions. This gives China's Africa policy a qualitative importance beyond its regional expressions, revealing as it does the conundrum surrounding reconciling foreign policy principles and interests with the manifest demands of an enhanced global role in the international system.
Refitting Chinese Foreign Policy for a Global Role
China's evolution from a “norms taker” to that of a more active “norms maker” in the construction of African security matters is part of a wider call within China's policymaking and scholarly circles for a more assertive foreign policy,Footnote 4 and follows China's deeper history of being on the iniquitous downside of the prevailing standards of international politics.Footnote 5 The interest in norms development and promotion on the international stage reflects a growing consensus within the Chinese policymaking and scholarly communities that China, having made substantive and recognized developmental progress towards reinstating its global power over the last four decades, is now in a position to engage more proactively in the international system.Footnote 6 This includes a tacit acceptance of the need to contribute to maintaining systemic stability through the provisions of international public goods in areas that go beyond short-term economic interests. Linked to this is a move to give greater attention to shaping international discourses, a trend which was seen with the onset of the “peaceful rise” debate in the early 2000s and generalized promotion of “soft power,” but which has become more wide-ranging and policy specific in its orientation.Footnote 7 Moreover, Chinese traditional values and practices are increasingly viewed as the bedrock for the exercising of any such influence over the international system and are highlighted by the leadership in those terms.Footnote 8
At the centre of this gradualist policy process is a coterie of foreign policy experts holding positions within the array of government-sponsored research institutions and university-lined research centres that feature across the policy landscape in contemporary China.Footnote 9 Some are linked to, and regularly inform, leading small groups attached to specific ministries, others are brought into the process through commissioned research, while more recently some individuals derive their standing based on public engagement and international recognition. Operating within the relatively more open environment that came to characterize the Hu Jintao 胡锦涛 era, these foreign policy experts form a kind of policy community – albeit one firmly under the watchful eye of the government – whose degree of influence over the actual foreign policy process waxes and wanes in line with the exigencies of politics within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) itself. Within this community is an increasingly vocal group of policy entrepreneurs who, while holding to a core consensus on Chinese foreign policy that coheres with the CCP line, nonetheless differ in their respective prescriptions for China's future foreign policy direction across a number of sectors.Footnote 10 In this respect, their actions resemble at times those of “norms entrepreneurs” based within foreign policy bureaucracies seeking to redefine key areas of foreign policy at critical junctures in a state's policy history.Footnote 11 In the Chinese context, the alignment and discourses between policy entrepreneurs, academics and think tanks, ministries and even factions with the CCP provide insights into evolving positions on foreign policy questions. Academic debates over prospective policies are in this respect very much, in the words of one scholar, a “pillar of the policy making process.”Footnote 12 All in all, their interaction reflects the still opaque world of policymaking within China and can influence the policy discussions on key foreign policy issues confronting the government at a given historical moment.
Viewed from this perspective, the deliberate utilization of Chinese scholars to develop the normative basis for shifts in China's foreign policy towards a region has precedents – for instance, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' approach to local academics to elaborate the case for a “new security concept” that marked the shift towards multilateral engagement in ASEAN in 2003.Footnote 13 Incidents, such as the US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999 or the evacuation of nearly 36,000 Chinese citizens from Libya in 2011, can bring elite debate and popular nationalism to bear on a given foreign policy issue. Other, more generalized manifestations of this phenomenon can be found in the aforementioned “peaceful rise” debate led by Zheng Bijian 郑必坚 in 2003, which sought to respond to Western fears of China's rise to global prominence, but there is no doubt that the contemporary period is seeing an unprecedented degree of public engagement and “heated debate” on foreign policy led by policy entrepreneurs from this community.Footnote 14
For this Chinese foreign policy community, the key challenge facing China in giving tangible expression to an assertive foreign policy is the West's structural power over the international system – manifested as the ideas, institutions and practices that characterize and permeate this prevailing system – and China's own position within it.Footnote 15 As Su Changhe 苏长和 points out, China is both a participant and even a tacit manager of the established Western-dominated international system, lending it credibility while at the same acting as a key player in the emerging international system with its own outlook on inequitable systemic structures and issues. He recommends that China should assume a kind of “bridge-builder” role within a changing international context.Footnote 16 Although coming from a somewhat different tack, Yan Xuetong 阎学通 declares that the principle of intervention is taking hold as a crucial norm that coexists with non-interference in the emerging international system and urges China to keep pace with these developments.Footnote 17
While the international system remains, as acknowledged by China's new leadership and scholars alike, for the time being structurally dominated by the West, there are regions where China's relative position has improved sufficiently to serve as a proving ground for the expression of Chinese foreign policy activism and where, crucially, the conditions are propitious for the rolling out of new foreign policy thinking. Africa in particular is one of these regions. The deepening level of China–Africa engagement, mirrored in the ever burgeoning trade and investment figures that have placed China as the top bilateral economic partner since 2009, is continually enhanced through Beijing's expenditure of financial and political capital on its relationship with African countries.Footnote 18 Furthermore, the palpable weakening of the European and American position, owing in part to the financial crisis and its impact on trade and investment as well as the shrinking enthusiasm within Western societies for development aid, is reducing the traditional reach of those countries across the continent.Footnote 19 Moreover, unlike other developing regions, such as East Asia or Latin America, African elites are genuinely (although not uncritically) enthusiastic about China's growing role, initially as a counterweight to the West but also more recently as a development model.Footnote 20 For Chinese Africanist scholars like He Wenping 贺文萍, the nature of this relationship argues for a special burden of responsibility on China to assist in promoting African development.Footnote 21 In this respect, Africa has become a terrain for demonstrating China's foreign policy activism and its willingness to strike a foreign policy formula integrating its economic interests, regional concerns and provisions for international public goods. As one Chinese scholar put it, “Africa is an experimental zone for future Chinese foreign policy.”Footnote 22 For all of these reasons, Beijing is contemplating going a step further in its approach to Africa, and becoming actively engaged in reshaping the normative frameworks in the region on key questions like systemic stability, security and intervention in ways that align with its emerging vision of a post-Western international system.
Managing African Post-Conflict Environments: Liberal Prescriptions, Chinese Perspectives
With respect to the hoary problem of African security and China's changing position on this question, the reality that Western scripted values dominate normative debates and institutional approaches in this arena is clearly evident. Indeed, an assessment of the trajectory of international involvement in African security over the past two decades is illustrative of the evolution of Chinese foreign policy away from statutory resistance to any form of involvement to grudging acknowledgement of a need for deepening forms of involvement in post-conflict and fragile African states.
The aim of the host of multilateral initiatives on peace and security – whose main terrain of action has been Africa – is to tackle the root causes of conflict by embarking on socio-political and economic transformation through the promotion of democracy and market liberalism, an ambition that set them apart from previous UN operations.Footnote 23 In 1992, the UN secretary general laid out the framework for this deeper form of international engagement in post-conflict states, defining peacebuilding as far “more than the reconstruction of the peace after the cessation of hostilities.”Footnote 24 The launching of the Brahimi Report eight years later paved the way for reform of the UN approach to peace operations that included a diagnosis of the root causes of conflict in poverty and a prescription for its solution through the promotion of “sustainable development and a democratic society with respect for human rights.” The report also called for a more substantive role for the UN in peacebuilding.Footnote 25 In turn, this led to the establishment of the UN Peacebuilding Commission in 2005, with its mandate for selective international intervention.Footnote 26 The Peacebuilding Commission received further attention with the 2011 World Development Report on “Conflict, Peace and Development” and the concomitant work of the OECD-DAC group on “fragile states.”Footnote 27 At the same time that international policy debates on peacebuilding were moving closer to the formal institutionalization of practices, there was a concurrent interest in Western and African scholarly and policymaking circles in rendering state sovereignty conditional on responsible governance, and expanding the scope for humanitarian intervention.Footnote 28 A Canadian-sponsored commission on intervention and state sovereignty was created in 2000 and, coupled to the African Union's (AU) strong endorsement of humanitarian intervention in its constitutive act in 2002, laid the foundation for the 2005 UN World Summit and Responsibility to Protect (R2P). Taken together, all these developments in the first decade of the 21st century contributed to what came to be characterized as the canon of “liberal peacebuilding” and dominated international approaches to handling the complexities of state reconstruction, economic rehabilitation and encouraging societal peace in the aftermath of war.Footnote 29
Until recently, China was mostly a footnote in the burgeoning international attention towards post-conflict reconstruction and peacebuilding, underscoring the comparatively new nature of its more direct policy engagement in this area.Footnote 30 Where cited, China is usually upheld as a political counter-current, resisting the tide of efforts to render state sovereignty conditional on human rights, and turning a blind eye to everything from elite corruption to the violent persecution of oppositional parties on the part of African regimes. This has led critics to characterize Chinese involvement on the continent as narrowly mercantilist at best and devoid of moral content at worst.Footnote 31 This is in contrast to the purported aims of contemporary “liberal peacebuilding.”Footnote 32 Seen from this perspective, China could be said to contribute to “illiberal peacebuilding,” that is, the deliberate encouragement of non-democratic polities and practices anathema to liberal values in Africa's post-conflict settings.Footnote 33 As Wang Xuejun 王学军, a scholar working on African security, explains:
(T)he driving thought of Western countries' involvement in “peacebuilding” is “liberal democracy” through a realization of a democratic political system as a precondition for a country's internal peace and stability. China believes that every country has its own priorities and to promote democratic systems immediately after the end of conflicts is not necessarily an immediate priority.Footnote 34
This position is reflected in the Chinese government's official record on post-conflict reconstruction and peacebuilding more generally, which has played out primarily in the context of its UN diplomacy and policy positions on African issues. Beijing has expressed longstanding rhetorical support for peace and development in Africa as part of its projection of China as a benevolent power engaging in peaceful development.Footnote 35 Beijing publicly affirms support for UN peacebuildingFootnote 36 while offering its own views on how best this should be carried out, underscoring China's intent to enhance its engagement in these areasFootnote 37 and opposing a one size fits all approach.Footnote 38 A salient theme has been an emphasis on economic development as the basis for peace in Africa.Footnote 39
Flowing from these general positions is a shift towards the integration of peacebuilding into China's Africa policy, with post-conflict engagement now becoming an explicit part of Chinese cooperation with Africa on peace and security.Footnote 40 This can be seen in the evolving Forum for China–Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) process.Footnote 41 Post-war reconstruction was first mentioned in the FOCAC III (2006) action plan, which stated that: “China actively supported post-war reconstruction in relevant countries.”Footnote 42 FOCAC V (July 2012) established a China–Africa Cooperative Partnership for Peace and Security, with post-conflict reconstruction one aspect of an expanded spectrum of peace and security-related engagement.Footnote 43 While FOCAC V reiterated a commitment to building a “harmonious world of durable peace and common prosperity,” overall there was little consideration of how this might be realized. Despite this new policy departure, such goals remain vague, largely aspirational, and yet to be substantively realized in terms of an institutionalized form.Footnote 44 In a similar way, the extent and nature of China's engagement with Africa's security and post-conflict peacebuilding institutional architecture still remains unclear. There are ad hoc examples of financing and support for post-conflict reconstruction, but at this point these are primarily bilateral to a specific country like Sudan, or through the UN. Moreover, as yet there is little effort to provide resources to Africa's sub-regional organizations, the designated building blocks of Africa's peace and security architecture, beyond a few token gestures. For example, in 2011, the Chinese government signed a memorandum of understanding with the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), the regional organization for the Horn of Africa, that included US$100,000 for operational costs and a donation in 2012 of US$98 million (600 million yuan) for areas that included “peace and security.”Footnote 45
China's track record of multilateral participation in post-Cold War UN crisis response actions demonstrates that, outside of peacekeeping, it has not been a proactive, substantially involved actor. On its own, or in alliance with the G77 or Africa in the FOCAC setting, Beijing tends to exhort “the international community” to do more to support countries emerging from conflict. At the same time, reiterating its own conception of being a developing country, China emphasizes its willingness to help within its own means; just how convincing this is in the face of growing expectations that it should act in a manner commensurate with its more “developed” status is open to question. Nonetheless, China has had a limited direct role in multilateral post-conflict peacebuilding operations (although indirectly, through its own infrastructure construction in places like Liberia, it has played a role), in contrast to peacekeeping; clearly, substantive policy involvement in peacebuilding is more controversial, whereas peacekeeping is less politically sensitive and an area where China can demonstrate practical support for peace.Footnote 46 This position also shows signs of changing, as evidenced by China's greater participation in debates, its financial contributions to the UN's Peacebuilding Fund (to which China committed some US$6 million between 2006 and 2012),Footnote 47 and its greater efforts to enhance its peacekeeping role beyond “traditional” modalities.Footnote 48 Overall, China's rhetorical support for UN peacebuilding has usually disguised underlying areas of normative disagreement, including non-consensual intervention.
Despite Beijing's recent willingness to expand its participation in post-conflict activities in Africa that were once strictly off-limits, the fact remains that there has been little depth or detail as to Chinese thinking on how the PRC might reconcile the search for African stability with its foreign policy principles and economic interests. To adduce this, one needs to turn to the Chinese policymaking community where debates on intervention, peacebuilding and its impact on the non-interference policy have been gathering momentum in recent years.
China's Emerging Norms on Post-Conflict Intervention in Africa
Substantive differences in Western, African and Chinese involvement in post-conflict peacebuilding produce a striking contrast between their respective policy literature on the challenges these environments pose: Western and African policy literature mostly focuses on how to intervene better and not whether to intervene in the first place; whereas Chinese policy literature has non-interference as its default normative and policy setting. Chinese perspectives tend to proceed from and foreground the reasons why intervention is both normatively questionable and practically counterproductive: principled opposition to “interference” (it makes things worse) is coupled to a practical critique (it does not work in practice).Footnote 49
The Chinese literature on post-conflict reconstruction (chongtuhou chongjian 冲突后重建) in Africa, and peacebuilding (jianshe heping 建设和平) more generally, is comparatively small, reflecting its position as a relatively new subject of research and policy engagement.Footnote 50 It is, however, growing, spurred on in part by the formative debate and process of developing the R2P, the relentless press of events seemingly demanding international responses,Footnote 51 and the multiplying challenges facing China's African engagement as it deepens and expands. The issues raised in the course of devising R2P and securing its international endorsement, framed in a set of debates outside and within the UN system leading up to the 2005 Summit, have been influential in forcing Beijing to grapple with the contradictions and substantive challenges to its traditional approach to sovereignty and intervention.Footnote 52
Within the Chinese scholarly community, Zhao Lei 赵磊 has led the contemporary exploration of peacebuilding itself.Footnote 53 In general, government pronouncements employ the concept of “peace” in a rudimentary way as the absence of war. There is some discussion of the challenges of development after war, and the role of the state.Footnote 54 The thrust of China's official, public presentation of its Africa relations is consistently optimistic, and that peace is almost an historic inevitability.
Peacekeeping is somewhat different and hitherto far more prominent than peacebuilding as an area of research and practical and intentional policy engagement. There is more literature and a new policy research interest in enhancing China's UN peacekeeping role, partly linked to development objectives. To date, the acceptance of Chinese activism in peacekeeping, linked to the management of its global image and growing confidence, has proven to be far easier to reconcile with its traditional foreign policy imperatives. As Zhao Lei recently noted, “Chinese policymakers recognize that peacebuilding is more complex than peacekeeping, but is [sic] favourable to the establishment and enlargement of IPBOs (International Peacebuilding Operations) that seek to consolidate peace and prevent a recurrence of armed confrontation.”Footnote 55 Behind this new willingness to broach the complexities of peacebuilding is mounting pressure on Chinese academic and policy communities to address global responsibility meaningfully in light of interventionist policies like R2P and China's own growing overseas interests, including in conflict-affected parts of Africa.Footnote 56
The deepening engagement with policy theory in peacebuilding within China's research and think tank community is partly being informed by a desire to become a “norm maker”:
(T)here is a subtle but significant shift in Chinese strategic culture from passively following international norms to actively making them … Chinese leaders have begun to focus on China's institutional contribution, placing an emphasis on “discourse power” and the principle that a great power should constructively set agendas, not just follow the rules set by others.Footnote 57
The fundamental importance of peacebuilding to the Chinese state, combined with increasing scholarly and government attention to Africa's strategic environment, the security of Chinese interests there, or efforts to explore ways and means to promote the sustainability of Chinese investments on that continent, suggest that Beijing is in the process of going beyond the accommodationist strategy of norms compliance in Africa seen in other areas of international activism such as peacekeeping. This initial process of norms making can be seen in China's rhetorical steps towards intervention in post-conflict reconstruction, and to a lesser degree, the engagement with fragile states such a process entails, which structure the framework for a Chinese approach to post-conflict peacebuilding. It is clearly evident in efforts to address the matter of such liberal biases in this policy and, as such, is the inspiration for the recent articulation by Ruan Zonghe 阮宗泽 of a Chinese formulation of R2P called “responsible protection.”Footnote 58
Beijing's policy discourse on post-conflict intervention represents an external articulation of domestic values derived from China's own historical experience of Western imperialism.Footnote 59 The formal principles of Chinese foreign policy are adamantly opposed to “meddling” in other people's affairs. This so-called “Chinese tradition of non-intervention in the politics of African countries”Footnote 60 endures in government rhetoric, and pays political dividends. While integral to China's self-ascribed identity and presentational strategy, this official state rhetoric has never cohered comfortably with its historical record of intrusive engagement in African affairs under Mao.Footnote 61 However, recent efforts by Chinese scholars to formulate rationales for more active Chinese diplomacy, as demonstrated well by Wang Yizhou's 王逸舟 call for a more proactive, flexible “creative involvement” (or intervention – chuangzaoxing jieru 创造性介入) in international affairs, including in Africa, demonstrate ongoing efforts to reconcile such previously sacrosanct pillars of Chinese foreign policy with new challenges.Footnote 62
China's efforts to define and develop norms of its own emanate from critiques levelled against the conceptual basis and practical manifestations of “Western” liberal peacebuilding in Africa. Indeed, these are generally stronger as a reactive critique, as opposed to any identifiably self-defined different Chinese approach to peacebuilding, and begin from a rejection of any universal template founded on the universalism of human rights, and prescriptions for democracy and market economics. Given that the essential precepts of liberal peacebuilding combine democratization and market liberalization, it is not surprising that these clash with the emphasis in China's approach of restoring social order – physical reconstruction and a more maximalist state role in directing economic development. For Africa, scholars like Liu Hui 刘辉 assert, “development stability and harmony is more attractive” than “democracy, freedom plus market economics.”Footnote 63 This is a key area where China's approach departs from the liberal peacebuilding mainstream in so far as international policy is concerned: political stability is more important than holding elections, and peace can be an outcome of longer-term development but there are not any necessarily peaceful means to achieve this.Footnote 64
There are four other connected areas of China's approach to post-conflict intervention and peacebuilding, ideas that build upon the underlying norms found in “responsible protection” and, in particular, the admonition that any legitimately authorized intervention should include a commitment to post-conflict reconstruction.Footnote 65 The first is a strong emphasis on indigenous African ownership of, and agency in defining and pursuing, their own solutions according to their own circumstances. Responsibility for resolving conflict or advancing development after conflict is deemed first and foremost to be held by those directly affected.Footnote 66 Furthermore, greater efficacy for long-term solutions is ascribed to indigenous agency; any external assistance ought to respond to this and be tailored to local needs. While coherent in principle, and as a normative ideal, this clearly begs a number of questions, evoking, amongst other things, earlier debates about giving war a chance and the ulterior interests of China's own role in affected contexts.
A second aspect of the Chinese approach is a strong belief in, and support for, the efficacy of economic process to achieve peace, understood to all intents and purposes as the absence of war.Footnote 67 This has even been rendered as “development peace,” a potential alternative to “liberal peace.” Chinese scholars stress that meeting basic needs first and the timely delivery of the material infrastructure on which economic development can proceed is the proper starting point for post-war reconstruction.Footnote 68 In this, China's theoretical ability to disburse rapidly the funds to underwrite such projects and the contractors to implement projects, thereby eliminating the delays often accompanying more cumbersome multilateral funding responses, stands as a crucial distinguishing marker. Such so-called “hard development” can deliver rapid, tangible benefits to affected populations while also establishing an “infrastructure-based economy.”Footnote 69 This aspect is sometimes termed as “development” but without political connotations (such as the descriptive or normative preference for democracy or human rights), and refers to the necessity of economic modernization to overcome structural sources of conflict.Footnote 70 This conception is held to avoid what are regarded as two extremes of Western post-war assistance: an emphasis on aid and political conditionality. It may hypothetically allow for the attainment of political rights, but only as a possible outcome of – but not the means to promote – economic growth.
A third aspect is a general predilection towards enhancing the standing of regional organizations, including the AU, in the global architecture of security management, as witnessed in the debates over UN Security Council authorization of international intervention in Libya and Syria.Footnote 71 While treatments of sovereignty vary across inter-governmental organizations at the regional level, by invoking the principle of subsidiarity in Chapter VIII of the UN Charter, Beijing reinforces structures of decision making on intervention and post-conflict matters such that it ensures that states continue to dominate decision making on security issues (as core members of regional organizations) and (through China's permanent Security Council standing) that its particular interests feature in any proposed action. The AU's centrality in China's approach to peace and security in Africa conforms to this pattern.
Finally, and central to this economic emphasis, China's assertion that the state is the crucial actor in peacebuilding represents an important alternative entry point. China's engagement with state institutions is a normal, established part of regular bilateral relations, covering routine cooperation as well as such areas as human resource development training. “Capacity building” of state institutions, critical to creating the administrative means needed by fragile states, presents dilemmas arising from non-interference commitments. Recent trends suggest a greater receptiveness to the logic of, and need for, Chinese support to enhance African state effectiveness.Footnote 72 However, there remains considerable uncertainty amongst Chinese policymakers as to how to address the need for state building in the context of Africa's fragile states.
Much attention has been directed towards the supposed violation of Beijing's non-interference policy, and its possible evolution to accommodate new challenges better. Such questions largely concern exceptional foreign policy crises, exemplified by Darfur, Libya, or South Sudan. Less considered is the quiet emergence of policy-related discussions about permissible and effective Chinese “capacity building” activities premised on enhancing the effectiveness of African states.Footnote 73 As FOCAC V shows, this appears to be taking Beijing beyond its programme of “human resource development,” implying a more involved role beyond mere facilitation. From China's perspective, it makes sense for this interest in “enhancing Africa's governing capacity” – at state and political party levels – to be undertaken for its own reasons, to maximize potential relations, sustain and expand economic relations, or respond to quotidian challenges that might pose risks to investments.
Over the longer term, however, international pressure to find an acceptable approach to address the prevailing conditions of political instability and fragility that goes beyond crisis management is only going to increase. The decision taken at the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan to put “peacebuilding and state building at the core of engagement in fragile states” beyond the culmination of the Millenium Development Goals and aid effectiveness priorities in 2015 signals that Beijing's actions are likely to be judged in terms of adherence to this new protocol.Footnote 74 This “new deal for fragile states” attempts to secure a compact between donors/partners and the political actors within fragile states that addresses the shortcomings of prevailing practices.
Remaining outside of this process, China's policy towards African states that suffer from forms of weakness, fragility, or even collapse, remains unclear. For instance, on the one hand, donors have, to date, pursued policies that focus on state building at the central level while ignoring second tier institutions of government, which seems to conform to preferred positions held by China. On the other hand, there are numerous cases where donors have sidestepped central government in favour of the direct delivery of resources, services and training to local NGOs and the population. Whether the currently elastic definitions of sovereignty coming out of Beijing would accommodate the latter in an effort to maintain donor/partner conformity, and on what basis, remains to be seen. Similarly, the harmonization of policy support on the part of all donors and/or partners is identified as a critical factor in fostering the conditions for stability.Footnote 75 This would require a degree of coordination of policies and practices that goes well beyond Beijing's cautious embrace of multilateral diplomacy.Footnote 76
Finally, the FOCAC process itself, which includes a formalized arrangement for annual gatherings between Chinese and African researchers, is providing a setting for the cross-fertilization of ideas. These include the China–Africa Joint Research and Exchange Plan, which directly funds academic exchanges in a new knowledge nexus independent of established funding sources in the US or Europe. The China–Africa Think Tank Forum of 2012, for example, focused on security issues and it is in this context that Chinese scholars and policymakers are coming to appreciate the scale of the problems, the depth of knowledge held by African scholars on security matters, and the degree to which ideas of liberal peace permeate the African discourses on security.Footnote 77 Moreover, through this exposure the Chinese policymaking community is beginning to recognize that its own past experiences and the different timeframe Beijing operates in relation to state building in Africa is more conducive to achieving results over the longer term. This contrasts favourably with the imperative to achieve rapid tangible results and the short policy timeframes that characterize much international intervention (albeit, these are mostly owing to donor funding cycles rather than a belief in shock therapy).Footnote 78 Indeed, supporters of the OECD-DAC's New Deal point to the problem of short timeframes in traditional donor conduct and financing towards fragile states and have sought to admonish donors to revise their support accordingly. It might even be argued that China's conception of what state building involves and means in reality is less removed from the historical experience of state development than more abstract, historically unfounded liberal notions premised on achieving a liberal state through liberal means.
Taken collectively, the notion that there is an agenda in the making – African state building with Chinese characteristics – is increasingly plausible. China's emerging post-conflict peacebuilding engagement is linked to development objectives and the prioritizing of the establishment of political order over democracy, thereby supporting a state capable of overseeing incremental reform and enabling wider economic growth. Certainly, some Chinese researchers believe that Africa's openness to lessons from China provides amenable conditions for carrying out innovative measures in foreign policy.Footnote 79 When tied to growing disenchantment with liberal peace within some Western circles, there is fertile ground for the establishment of a revisionist form of peacebuilding drawing on Chinese experiences, insights and interests.
Conclusion
The emerging modalities of China's post-conflict engagement described above amount to an alternative to the prevailing international peacebuilding system in terms of ideas, practical actions and, in different ways, results. This is not an alternative in the sense of direct, purposeful competition, or an emerging challenge to the current structure of the international system. For now, it mostly endeavours to actively complement UN operations, support the AU's crisis response system and evolve a more engaged security partnership under FOCAC auspices.Footnote 80 In this way, Li Dongyan 李东燕, for example, suggests that a possible “development peace” strategy would not only mean the adoption of the Chinese approach, experience and resources, but also entail an innovative combination and integration of the Chinese model and the UN/Western approach; this is because even Chinese-dominated projects and operations would have to rely on the support of other UN member states and host countries. This is a hybrid combination, as part of a gradualist shift away from an adaptation impulse to a more pro-active form of policymaking, and one which notably articulates a more defined Chinese normative alternative.Footnote 81
Rather, China is emerging as an alternative through its different attitude and approach to building peace in post-conflict environments. In places, this approach is being applied to longstanding problems, with the attendant hope that China can be more successful than “liberal peacebuilding.” As China's then-ambassador to the UN declared categorically: “There cannot be a unified standard for peacebuilding endeavours. Different peacebuilding strategies should be formulated in accordance with different conditions of the countries concerned.”Footnote 82
Aligning post-conflict policies in Africa with Chinese economic interests and its concurrent efforts to rein in “mission creep” inspired by proponents of R2P will depend crucially in the first instance on the continental reaction. African sensibilities towards the necessity for multilateral involvement in peacebuilding have already inspired unprecedented shifts in Chinese foreign policy in places like Sudan and South Sudan. The active ongoing attempts to forge a common programme through such initiatives as FOCAC's China–Africa Cooperative Partnership for Peace and Security are likely to produce further changes. At the same time, Chinese contributions can stimulate reconsiderations of how to advance post-conflict objectives beyond current practices and ongoing attempts to devise responses that can promote widely held desirable objectives aimed at achieving a sustainable peace.
China's growing economic dominance and political presence on the African continent, its belief that fundamentally Africans share its convictions about sovereignty and increasingly seek to emulate China's modernization experience, coupled with the diminishing influence of the West over regional development policy, all underscore the fact that Africa is seen by Beijing to have the requisite conditions conducive to the promotion of a China-friendly set of values. Though contentious issues like fragile states remain problematic, the growing and unprecedented confidence that the Chinese policymaking community brings to the theorizing of peacebuilding indicates that a new norms agenda is in the making. It is one which aims to ensure that the shape of post-conflict peacebuilding is in line with its concerns, values and interests, as surely as the West has done through the application of neo-liberalist development in its state-building projects.
How far this goes in terms of further norms making, promotion and dynamics involving uptake by assorted involved African actors is, reflecting what remains for China a comparatively new phase of ideational engagement, concurrent with evolving political and material economic engagements. In the face of a more obviously mainstreaming position of security in China's African role, however, such a work in process only looks likely to continue.
