Comparing the Effects of Chinese and Traditional Official Finance on State Repression and Public Demonstrations in Africa
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Date
2020
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Abstract
DO FOREIGN OFFICIAL FINANCE FLOWS FROM CHINA and traditional Western
sources vary in their effects on state repression and public demonstrations in Africa?
While one study by Kishi and Raleigh asserts a distinct, statistically significant
positive association between Chinese official finance and repression, no quantitative
comparative study has been conducted on the effects of Chinese and traditional official
finance on public demonstrations in the form of protests and riots.1 The working paper
on which this policy brief is based reassesses the effects of Chinese and traditional
official finance on repression after rectifying some biases I identified in Kishi and
Raleigh’s study. Notable among the biases is the study’s exclusion of analysis relating to
recent (post-2013) years which have witnessed nascent reforms to Beijing’s foreign aid
policy that, ostensibly, induce checks against misuse of Chinese official finance.2 More
innovatively, the research assesses the effects of Chinese and traditional official finance
on anti-government, public demonstrations. Additionally, the working paper compares
case studies in Cameroon, which mostly receives unconditional Chinese official finance
and Uganda, which receives more conditional traditional finance, to determine how
well the paper’s statistical relationships are borne out.
While Uganda has suffered more protests and riots than Cameroon over the period
between 2001 and 2018, data on demonstrations in the two countries from Armed
Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) suggests that Chinese-funded development
projects have encountered more anti-project protests and riots compared to Western,
particularly World Bank-funded projects. To verify and explain the higher rates of
manifestations against Chinese-funded projects, I undertook fieldwork in Cameroon
involving comparative project interviews on three selected Chinese projects (the Douala-
Yaounde expressway project; the Memve’ele hydropower project; and the Kribi deep
seaport project) and two World Bank-sponsored projects (the Lom Pangar hydropower
project and the Douala road infrastructure project). The fieldwork was guided by the
following research questions:
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Keywords
China Africa Initiative, Public Demonstration, Uganda, Cameroon