PIIE Briefing 16-5

China and India's new-found interest in trade and investment with Africa - home to 300 million of the globe's poorest people and the world's most formidable development challenge - presents a significant opportunity for growth and integration of theSub-Saharan continent into the global economy. Africa's Silk Road finds that China and India's South-South commerce with Africa isabout far more than natural resources, opening the way for Africato become a processor of commodities and a competitive supplier of goods and services to these countries - a major departure from its long established relations with the North. A growing number of Chinese and Indian businesses active in Africa operate on a global scale, work with world-class technologies, produce products and services according to the most demanding standards, and foster the integration of African businesses into advanced markets.There are significant imbalances, however, in these emerging commercial relationships. These can be addressed through a series of reforms in all countries: 'At-the-border' reforms, such as elimination of China and India's escalating tariffs on Africa's leading exports, and elimination ofAfrica's tariffs on certain inputs that make exports uncompetitive 'Behind-the-border' reforms in Africa, to unleash competitive market forces and strengthen its basic market institutions 'Between-the-border' improvements in trade facilitation mechanisms to decrease transactions costs Reforms that leverage linkages between investment and trade, toallow African businesses to participate in global productionnetworks that investments by Chinese and Indian firms can generate.

China has emerged as a dominant power in Eurasian affairs that not only exercises significant political and economic power, but increasingly, ideational power too. Since the founding of the People’s Republic, Chinese Communist Party leaders have sought to increase state capacity and exercise more effective control over their western frontier through a series of state-building initiatives. Although these initiatives have always incorporated an international component, the collapse of the USSR, increasing globalization, and the party’s professed concerns about terrorism, separatism, and extremism have led to a region-building project in Eurasia. Garcia traces how domestic elite-led narratives about security and development generate state-building initiatives, and then region-building projects. He also assesses how region-building projects are promoted through narratives of the historicity of China’s engagement in Eurasia, the promotion of norms of non-interference, and appeals to mutual development. Finally, he traces the construction of regions through formal and informal institutions as well as integrative infrastructure. By presenting three phases of Chinese domestic state-building and region-building from 1988-present, Garcia shows how region-building projects have enabled China to increase state capacity, control, and development in its western frontier. Recommended for scholars of China’s international relations and development policy.

Much of the Chinese history involves the absorption of frontier areas. The processes of Chinese state and social formation are therefore closely intertwined with the formation and transformation of China's many frontiers. This book examines one such frontier: the Southwest, specifically the present-day provinces of Yunnan and Guizhou. Beginning with the Yuan conquest of the area in 1253, James Lee traces the development of an integrated regional economy by 1750 by concentrating on the major periods of Chinese expansion in the 15th and 18th centuries and the major components of growth (land, labour, and capital). Arguing that the imperial policies had a major impact on the local economy, he focuses on the role of the Chinese state in the economic development of the Southwest.

This edited volume is based on original essays first presented at seminars in complexity economics, Sichuan University, China, in November 2018 and May 2019, and at the 12th International Conference on the Chinese Economy, University of Clermont-Ferrand, France, in October 2019. It also includes three contributions written especially for this volume. This research benefited from three French grants 'Hubert Curien Research Fellowship' (Program Campus France 2019, 2020, 2021). All chapters assess the recent take-off of the Chinese economy from a historical perspective, enlarging the economic evidence that China's capitalism is a matter of institutional revolution.Institutional Change and China Capitalism aims to provide a radically new view of the rise of Chinese capitalism by drawing on recent developments in cliometrics and complexity economics, macroeconomic dynamics, network analysis and behavioral finance to illustrate the various facets of China's transition to capitalism. The chapters within innovate the study of China's take-off using the frontier of research in institutional cliometrics and complexity economics. Thus, the book is structured in three sections that seek to address — empirically, theoretically, and in terms of network structure, the profound institutional change that led China to progressively adopt capitalism.Together these papers attest to the vitality of current research in cliometrics and complexity economics.

This book stands as a rebuke to any who would attempt to forward simplistic interpretations of China's rise. In place of parsimonious arguments, or an endorsement of any singular set of images (whether pacific or confrontational), it repeatedly calls attention to the remarkable complexity of China's emerging international profile. More specifically, the leading Chinese and American scholars working in the fields of Chinese foreign policy, international political economy, and national security, who contributed to this volume argue that while China appears to be entering a new era in its relationship with the outside world, such a development encompasses disparate, even contradictory, policies, and, as a result, there is a great deal of fluidity within China's place in world politics.

In The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier, Benno Weiner provides the first in-depth study of an ethnic minority region during the first decade of the People's Republic of China: the Amdo region in the Sino-Tibetan borderland. Employing previously inaccessible local archives as well as other rare primary sources, he demonstrates that the Communist Party's goal in 1950s Amdo was not just state-building but also nation-building. Such an objective required the construction of narratives and policies capable of convincing Tibetans of their membership in a wider political community. As Weiner shows, however, early efforts to gradually and organically transform a vast multiethnic empire into a singular nation-state lost out to a revolutionary impatience, demanding more immediate paths to national integration and socialist transformation. This led in 1958 to communization, then to large-scale rebellion and its brutal pacification. Rather than joining voluntarily, Amdo was integrated through the widespread, often indiscriminate use of violence, a violence that lingers in the living memory of Amdo Tibetans and others.