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From China in Africa to global African studies
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From Field Work to Academic Field
Personal reflections on China–Africa research
George T. Yu
Contemporary China–Africa relations began about 60 years ago, during the late 1950s and early 1960s. To date, China’s relations with Africa constitutes one of the most enduring and successful China initiated foreign policy operations. It is a story that denotes the extraordinary evolutionary development of Chinese foreign policy against multiple internal and external challenges, on the one hand, and how China responded and sought to overcome the trials through the adoption of concurrent separate foreign policies and varied foreign policy instruments, on the other. Foremost, it is a tale of China’s global rise, as seen through developing relations with Africa. Globally, China–Africa relations also represents a new pattern in international relations.
China’s relations with Africa were born amidst the Cold War and the Sino-Soviet conflict. Politically and militarily isolated, and surrounded by major powers, China sought to establish and safeguard its independence and security, claim its legitimacy and sovereignty, and establish and enhance its global presence through multiple foreign policy initiatives. One such step was China’s outreach to Africa, to win friends and build alliances to meet varied challenges. Employing a diverse range of foreign policy instruments, linking aid in its infinite variety to national interests, from ideological/political interactions, economic and technical developmental aid, military assistance and other activities, China sought to confront the varied disputes. Africa became a major battleground for China against its adversaries, welcomed by select African countries that utilised China’s international role and resources for their own development and national interests.
At its beginnings, China–Africa academic studies in the West was a solitary field, consisting mainly of a small handful of scholars primarily interested in China and international relations; today, it is a global ‘growth industry’, led by international academics and attracting innovative scholars in a variety of disciplines from a growing number of countries. In the 60 plus years since its birth, China-Africa studies has been transformed from a largely single-issue, foreign policy/international relations, peripheral subject to a multi-disciplinary mainstream academic field of study.
Hindsight is a rare opportunity to both re-examine and question one’s motives and behaviour of the past. This chapter is an attempt to recall and describe the challenging decisions I took concerning my research and the road, academic and personal, I made in pursuing this. It is divided into six primary sections, covering the beginnings of the research project, operationalizing and conducting the research, the Tanzanian ‘laboratory’, persistent research questions and conclusion. While the consequence and results of my decisions are transparent, the research choices were determined both by academic components and the situational-environmental conditions in the field, on the ground.
The beginnings: Africa as a gateway to China
My research into China–Africa relations began at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where I began my academic career, in 1961. Following revision of my dissertation, subsequently published by the University of California Press (Yu 1966), I began searching for a new research subject. In the beginning, I considered continuing research in modern, post-1949 Chinese politics. Given the state of U.S.–China relations, however, fieldwork was impossible. In the 1960s and 1970s, research for American academics on contemporary China was mainly limited to library investigation; the closest one could get to China were Hong Kong and Taiwan, centres for studying China until the opening of China in the early 1980s.
What I sought was a topic and environment where I could conduct field research directly observing Chinese behaviour and attempt to assess and verify developments first hand, on the ground. China’s relations with Africa soon caught my attention, especially media reports of China’s battles with Taiwan in Africa over political issues of diplomatic recognition and sovereignty, namely, what constituted China.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the primary geographic fields for studying China’s foreign policy did not include Africa; the field or sub-field of China–Africa had yet to be recognised. My own sense was that the addition and inclusion of Africa was within the conceptual paradigm of either the Cold War or the Sino-Soviet conflict, which included Taiwan’s struggle with China. Thus, while the field, Africa, was new, a micro study of China–Africa relations fit well into macro research of China’s foreign policy, or into the existing academic disciplinary studies, international relations/foreign policy field of Political Science.
Through the early 1970s, Taiwan conducted an aggressive and successful campaign to win diplomatic recognition of the new African states. Indeed, Taiwan was able to sustain the relationship, through international support and utilization of foreign aid, despite China’s incremental increase in activities on the continent, gaining recognition from the African states between 1949 and 1971. In 1970, for example, 22 out of the 47 independent African states maintained diplomatic relations with Taiwan, with only 15 recognizing China (five African states recognised neither). The tide of African recognition in favour of China only shifted following China’s admission, with African support, to the United Nations in 1971.
My first project on China–Africa relations, based on library research, was published in 1963 (Yu, 1963). Encouraged by the reception of my initial publication, I began to consider how to proceed with the research; it quickly became apparent that the subject was broader in context and scope than following ‘Peking’ and ‘Taipei’. I considered a number of questions. First, the ‘competition’ between China and Taiwan was not merely between the two parties across the Taiwan Straits, nor regional, but global in nature. Africa (and other regions) had become a battleground between the two parties, each seeking to gain and/or retain diplomatic recognition and international legitimacy.1 For China, going global by reaching out to Africa was a new initiative; a new pattern of international relations was being formed, challenging Taiwan and the West, while expanding and enhancing China’s global presence. Second, the ‘competition’ between China and Taiwan was a segment of the larger Cold War, between the West and the Communist world, in this instance, between the United States and China, which sought the latter’s international isolation. The ‘competition’ between China and Taiwan in Africa was an extension of the Cold War by proxies, each representing the larger camps. It was the beginning of a global Chinese foreign policy.
Subsequently, China’s global foreign policy, namely, the use of Africa as a battleground to fight with its adversaries, was not limited to challenging the United States and Taiwan. In the 1970s, following the emergence of open Sino-Soviet discord in the 1960s, Africa also became a combat zone challenging the Soviet Union, as a revolutionary state supporting wars of liberation and accusing it of being an aggressive, expansionist imperialist power, seeking, among others, African natural resources. The combative relationship with the Soviet Union added another conflict front to China’s role in Africa.
Third, would China continue and expand its relations with Africa; how would China meet the multiple varied challenges on each front, and how would Africa respond? Was China’s relation with Africa a subject and environment where I could conduct field research directly observing Chinese behaviour and Africa’s response, and assess and verify developments? How would I operationalise the research, including conducting field research in Africa?
These research considerations, namely the multiple fronts of conflict, China’s foreign policy initiatives and Africa’s responses, and China’s practices of utilizing select foreign policy instruments all led to the basic question of the whys and hows of Chinese foreign policy: namely, what factors contributed to China’s adoption of different foreign policies to meet diverse conflict challenges, and what instruments of foreign policy had China utilised to achieve policy goals? In the language of globalisation, the proposed research would examine the extensity, intensity and impact of China’s relations with Africa and its global reach.
Reflecting upon my choice and selection of the new research project in the early 1960s, I cannot say that I knew what lay ahead, either for my academic career or the success or failure of employing China’s African policy as a measurement for better understanding China’s foreign policy and behaviour, and China’s emerging global role. I knew I was entering uncharted territory, which required an innovative and flexible mind, a knowledge and understanding of both Africa and China and, in the course of the research, a willingness to accept uncertainties, be prepared for setbacks and adapt to varied environments. Was I up for the challenges? Was my choice of research a valid approach to study China? And what future would the research have?
Operationalizing research on China–Africa
I had settled on a new research topic, China’s relations with Africa; I had also changed my focus in Political Science from comparative politics to foreign policy/international relations, and I was also adding a new area studies field, Africa. The next step was operationalizing the research project, including field research in Africa to separate facts of China’s role from fiction. I had begun basic research, including studying contemporary Africa, at Chapel Hill; subsequently, the main body of research was continued at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which offered me a tenured appointment in 1965. Two years following arrival at Illinois, I applied for a year’s leave to conduct field research in Africa during 1967–1968. I was awarded a Social Science Research Council (SSRC) grant, while the University of Illinois granted me research leave and additional funding. In subsequent years, to continue and complete the research, I received additional funding from both.
The initial location choice of my field research was East Africa, including Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda; later, I would expand the geographical area to include Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The selection of East Africa to study China’s relations with Africa was founded upon three primary relevant factors. First, all three African nations had only recently won independence from British colonial rule: Tanzania in 1961, Uganda in 1962, and Kenya in 1963. Each sought to create a new international identity, build a new nation, and sought new nation building models. In short, East Africa was in political flux, each new country seeking to create and control their respective destinies. Second, beginning in the early 1960s, China began an intensive campaign to ‘win friends and influence people’ in East Africa, conducting diplomatic campaigns, securing recognition from Uganda in 1962, followed by Kenya in 1963 and Tanzania in 1964. This provided a fresh ‘laboratory’ to observe and study first-hand China’s foreign policy and practices. Finally, since I planned to conduct field research for nearly a year and a half, there was never any doubt that my family would travel with me. We determined that East Africa possessed a basic social infrastructure system, including communications, housing, public health, schools, and security, which provided assurance that our basic needs and security would be met. In addition, being former British colonies, English was widely spoken.
The selection of East Africa as the primary research site was no problem; the difficulty was securing East African governments’ permission to conduct research. In the 1960s, research by foreign scholars required approval by East African governments; this provided government control of research topics and the number of foreign scholars permitted. I applied for permission six months in advance.
The 1960s was a high tide of the Cold War era. While the new East African nations maintained strong linkages with their former colonial rulers, they sought also to establish separate relationships with all nations, including China, to avoid being identified with any one political bloc. But some nations did not wish to publicise their new relationships with China, since ‘Communist’ China had yet to be accepted and integrated into the global political system. Indeed, in the 1960s, China was perceived by many as the world’s adversary, seen by both the West and the Soviet Union–led Communist world as an uncontainable threat.
Therefore, it was not totally unexpected, though disappointing, that my application for a research visa to Kenya (where I planned to begin my research) was rejected. The year 1967 was an especially trying period in Sino-Kenyan relations, after the outbreak of China’s Cultural Revolution. In October, following an earlier dispute in Beijing between a staff of the Kenyan Embassy and members of the ‘Red Guard’ and the distribution in Kenya of Chinese Cultural Revolution literature (which the Kenya government regarded as interfering in Kenya’s internal affairs), Kenya withdrew its diplomatic staff from China, declared a member of the Nairobi Chinese Embassy ‘persona non grata’, and imposed limits on the distribution of all Chinese literature.
But all was not lost. I secured an appointment as Visiting Lecturer in the Rockefeller Foundation Program to Kenya, teaching American Politics at Nairobi College during the spring quarter of 1968; I was otherwise left to conduct my research. Following Kenya, my family and I would visit Tanzania and Uganda on extended visitor’s visas, applied on site. We encountered no difficulties from East African governments with the arrangements during our nine-month sojourn.
Field research
In the summer of 1967, I left the United States together with my family to begin exploration of my new research project; the first leg of our journey was London. There I was associated with the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS), and interacted with the African Studies faculty. SOAS proved a great beginning for my research, with an abundance of human and material resources relating to Africa. As Africa was a new research area, I gathered much new knowledge in preparation for the upcoming fieldwork. I also contacted British journalists specializing in Africa; Colin Legum, former Commonwealth Editor for The Observer (London), was especially generous, readily introducing me to a select group of East African leaders, which proved extremely helpful upon arrival in Africa. The information gained and the contacts made were of great research benefit later in the field.
Following a productive stay, we departed London in December 1967 for Nairobi, Kenya, the first of three East African nations (the others being Tanzania and Uganda) where I planned to conduct field research. We remained in East Africa through August 1968.
In East Africa, my life soon fell into a routinised pattern. In all three countries, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, I was associated with the three national universities/colleges. I met faculty and students, who in turn introduced me to government officials and local inhabitants. At first, I was looked upon as an anomaly and with suspicion; few had met a Chinese-American academic; some suspected that I might be a spy (I am not certain for which side!). In general, I was well received; I enjoyed many good exchanges with African faculty members and others.
In Kenya, and later in Uganda, I began my field research, seeking to uncover and follow China’s presence and impact, while attempting to construct a conceptual framework to examine and explain China’s foreign policy and behaviour, including use of select foreign policy instruments. This proved to be a trying experience, especially in Kenya. As mentioned, China–Kenya relations were at a low point in 1967, including the imposition of a limit on Ch...
