Abstract
This book has examined one of the significant but overlooked chapters in the history of foreign assistance: China’s foreign aid. While foreign policy specialists have explored the reasons China gives foreign aid and offered broad descriptions of China’s foreign aid program, detailed analyses of China’s actual assistance efforts, their outcomes, and the reasons for those outcomes are almost nonexistent. One aim of this book has been to close that gap, providing an historical account of one major aspect of China’s aid: the effort to export its green revolution to Africa. Another aim has been to generate insights into one of the central problems in the study of foreign aid: why is aid in Africa so often ineffective? What influences the outcome of foreign aid efforts?
There are two different attitudes toward learning from others. One is the dogmatic attitude of transplanting everything, whether or not it is suited to our conditions. This is no good. The other attitude is to use our heads and learn those things which suit our conditions; that is, to absorb whatever experience is useful to us. That is the attitude we should adopt.
Mao Zedong, 19681
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Benedict Stavis, The Politics of Agricultural Mechanization in China (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978) p. 180
Eighth Ministry of Machine Building, Revolutionary Great Alliance Headquarters and Revolutionary Great Criticism and Repudiation Group of Organizations, ‘Two Diametrically Opposite Lines in Agricultural Mechanization,’ Nung-ueh Chi-hsieh Chi-shu, no. 9, 1968 (Summary of Chinese Mainland Media (SCMM) 633, p. 42.).
World Bank, SubSaharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 1989) p. 60.
Some of the more prominent of these writers are Judith Tendier, Inside Foreign Aid (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975)
Robert Chambers, Rural Development: Putting the Last First (London: Longman, 1983)
Roger Riddell, Foreign Aid Reconsidered (London: James Currey Ltd, 1987) p. 198.
David Halloran Lumsdaine, Moral Vision in International Politics: The Foreign Aid Regime, 1949-1989 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
For a recent study of foreign aid and self-reliance in West Africa (which, incidentally, gives a brief mention to a single Chinese aid project, Magbass in Sierra Leone, p. 62) see R. Omotayo Olaniyan, Foreign Aid, Self-Reliance, and Economic Development in West Africa (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996).
Constance Anthony, Mechanization and Maize: The Politics of Technology Transfer in East Africa (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
Robert Cassen and Associates, Does Aid Work?, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) p. 97.
Gene Ellis, ‘Development Planning and Appropriate Technology: A Dilemma and a Proposal,’ World Development 9 (March 1981) p. 256. Given the poor information available on many, if not most projects, presumably the same audacity could also be demonstrated by the ex-post evaluation team!
Jerker Carlsson, Gunnar Köhlin, and Anders Ekbom, The Political Economy of Evaluation: International Aid Agencies and the Effectiveness of Aid (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994) p. 3.
Robert Bates, Markets and States in Tropical Africa: The Political Basis of Agricultural Policies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).
See Christopher Delgado, ‘Agricultural Transformation: The Key to Broad-Based Growth and Poverty Alleviation in Africa,’ in Benno Ndulu and Nicolas van de Walle (eds), Agenda for Africa’s Economic Renewal (Washington, DC: Overseas Development Council, 1996).
The widespread acceptance of the role of institutions is best exemplified in the widely-cited book by Douglass North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Anne O. Kruegar, Constantine Michalopoulos, and Vernon W. Ruttan, Aid and Development (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989)
Deborah Bräutigam, ‘State Capacity and Effective Governance,’ in Benno Ndulu and Nicolas van de Walle, Agenda for Africa’s Economic Renewal (Washington, DC: Overseas Development Council, 1996).
Arthur Goldsmith, ‘Demand, Supply and Institutional Development in Africa,’ Canadian Journal of Development Studies 14, 3, (1993) p. 413.
For an interesting parallel case, see Jennifer Clapp, Adjustment and Agriculture in Africa: Farmers, the State, and the World Bank in Guinea (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997).
Anne O. Krueger and Vernon W. Ruttan, The Development Impact of Economic Assistance to LDCs, vols. I and II (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota for the Agency for International Development and the Department of State, 1983), pp. 10-37.
James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: ‘Development,’ Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
From a paper written by Adam Smith in 1755, quoted in Edward Canan, ‘Editor’s Introduction’ to Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: Methuen, 1950), p. xxxv
Robert Bates, Beyond the Miracle of the Market, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 3.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1998 Deborah Bräutigam
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bräutigam, D. (1998). Conclusion. In: Chinese Aid and African Development. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374300_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374300_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-40299-1
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-37430-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Economics & Finance CollectionEconomics and Finance (R0)