| dc.description.abstract | China's emergence as a significant actor in Africa's political economy has become a major topic in both academic and popular circles. Precipitated by a confluence of domestic politico-economic factors and an increasingly assertive foreign policy, China's extant expansionist moment has produced a specific form of state-led globalization (termed 'Chinese-inflected globalization' throughout this study) that has had substantial effects on Africa's politico-economic structures. As one of China's principal partners on the continent, South Africa represents an ideal test case to understand how the processes of Chinese-inflected globalization can be leveraged by African actors.
Specifically, this study aims to understand how the practices and processes of Chinese-inflected globalization have been utilized by South African state actors operating across different levels (e.g., national, subnational) in order to realize their politico-ideological objectives, most notably the creation, territorialisation, and legitimization of a 'developmental state' approach which ostensibly attempts to re-insert the state into economic planning with the goal of generating and maintaining labour-intensive industry. Likewise, the study examines how these actions have led to the grounding of China's broad geopolitical/geoeconomic initiatives and have advanced a reconstitution of power relations between the two countries.
In order to achieve these research goals, the study examined three Chinese-backed megaprojects. Megaprojects were chosen as the primary unit of analysis as these projects act as hubs where global flows of capital, expertise, and ideology interface with local circuits of power. As such they represent some of the most significant (and visible) politico-economic instruments of the latest phase of Sino-South African (and more broadly Sino-African) engagement.
The study revealed that South Africa's elite-led leveraging of Chinese firm internationalization (operating within the expansionist framework) has allowed the state to pursue an economic, ideological, and political restructuring away from its previous neoliberal orientation as prescribed by the GEAR (Growth, Employment and Redistribution) suite of macro-economic policies and toward the 'developmental state' concept as put forth by the Jacob Zuma administration. However, the embedding of Chinese actors and capital into strategically important positions within South Africa's socio-technical systems (e.g., productive capacity, energy generation), combined with an increasing reliance on state-led megaproject-sized initiatives and intensifying politico-economic linkages has led to the creation of novel configurations of dependence which ultimately tie the country's political economy to the Chinese state. This study thus contributes to academic understandings of Sino-African relations, African agency, and state-led development models. | en |
