27 June 2006

GPPi fellow to convene conference on "Chinese scramble for Africa"

Ricardo Soares De Oliveira, a fellow of <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge and also a GPPi fellow, will co-convene a conference on "'A Chinese Scramble?' The Politics of Contemporary China-Africa Relations." The conference will be held on 12-13 July 2006 at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. It is being organized in cooperation with Daniel Large (PhD Candidate, SOAS) and Christopher Alden (Senior Lecturer in International Relations, LSE, and Research Associate at the University of Pretoria). <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

 

The conference will examine China's deepening, multi-faceted engagement with the African continent. While the new geopolitical landscape of China-Africa relations has provoked wide media interest, there has been a relative neglect of the subject area in the academic context. This follows a longer pattern: academic literature on post-colonial African politics is marked by a paucity of research on China in Africa. With some exceptions, the literature on socialist China's foreign relations similarly does not engage Chinese-African relations in any great depth, the continent mostly subsumed as a subset of the 'Third World'. Expanding China-Africa relations over the past decade and the implications of these for a number of different government, business, IGO and NGO policy areas (including international relations, political economy and development), make this general lack of attention both conspicuous and surprising.

 

The purpose of the conference is to fill this gap by examining contemporary China-Africa relations. Taking as a starting point the ubiquitous but problematic notion of a "Chinese scramble for Africa", it will investigate different strands of China's post-socialist relations with Africa. By combining insights from specialists in Africa and Chinese politics and foreign relations, and bridging these hitherto largely separate areas of study, it will produce an analytically rich and empirically grounded assessment of contemporary China-Africa relations and scenarios for how these might develop.

 

Papers will focus on the following themes:

 

·                 relations in international, regional and domestic contexts;

·                 political and economic aspects;

·                 African country case-studies.

 

 

Speakers will include:

 

• He Wenping (Institute of West Asian and African Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)
• Bates Gill and Chin-Hao Huang (CSIS)
• Nicolas Pinaud (OECD)
• Daniel Large (SOAS)
• Elisabeth Hsu (Oxford University)

 

For a full list of speakers and conference program, please click here.

 

Conference Fees (this includes coffee and refreshments throughout the day):

 

Students: £15 (£20 on the day)

 

Waged: £30 (£40 on the day) Corporate: £120 (£150 on the day)

 

To register, please send an email to:

chinaafricaconference2006@googlemail.com

 

Cheques payable to Ricardo Soares de Oliveira should be sent to:

Sidney Sussex College, Sidney Street, CB2 3HU, Cambridge.

 

For further information, please contact Ricardo Soares De Oliveira at:

rsoaresdeoliveira@gppi.net

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