The run-up to the triennial Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) is traditionally a moment when new Africa-China rhetoric is road-tested. The regular China-Africa Think Tank Forum is one of those testing grounds, where researchers, many of whom directly advise governments, sit down to articulate the relationship anew.
This year’s (thirteenth) forum, which took place in Tanzania in early March, shows how the Africa-China story is expanding towards a more global narrative — one that positions China as the lodestar for the entire developing world.
The Forum’s Dar es Salaam Consensus will strike many as just another platitude-filled call for “people-centered development” (our era’s version of the Christian Kingdom of Heaven — a nice idea, but good luck getting in.)
However, for all its boilerplate, I found the Dar es Salaam Consensus (in the version I encountered it, anyway — different takes on the document are floating around the internet) provided a few interesting clues to how China’s influence is shifting global development thinking.
Globalization: The document’s call for “universally beneficial and inclusive economic globalization” is hardly breaking new ground. However, it makes clear that the concept of “globalization” contains significant slippage. A term that used to imply pulling the world to Western-infused ‘global’ ways of doing business while smoothing the road for Western multinationals (not exclusively, but significantly,) now means something completely different.
It’s one of the ironies of our moment that a China-developing world grouping are the ones calling for the end of trade barriers, smoothing supply chains and universalized global economic governance — all well-trodden Western talking points from the past. That raises the question: if the West isn’t the author of globalization anymore, what is its global role, exactly?
Bretton Woods Institutions: This issue reaches comedic levels once you get to the Consensus’ take on global development financing. On the one hand, it places the World Bank and International Monetary Fund at the heart of international development (instead of, say, calling for a more diversified field by foregrounding non-Western institutions like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.)
However, it also (of course) calls for the recapitalization of the World Bank, which would diminish U.S. and European voting share. In other words, the document implies that the Bretton Woods institutions will only really fulfil their global development role once the mix of capital coursing through their veins becomes less Western. Just spitballing here, but that’s probably not how U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen sees it.
Multipolarity and Development: The Consensus includes a deft conflation of two issues that usually live in separate silos: the huge development backlog threatening many Global South societies, and political multipolarity: “We call for promoting the building of an equal and orderly multipolar world to facilitate common development.”
This essentially marries China’s frequent call for each country to follow its own road to development with its positioning of itself among many other rising global powers. Both fundamentally question Western claims to universal leadership – its claim that it offers a uniquely successful developmental and governance model to the world.
This conflation raises many questions, not least what such an orderly multipolar world would look like, and what the limits are of China’s own conception of itself as a Global South country.
But maybe the most important take on the Dar es Salaam Consensus is also the most obvious. As easy as it is to dismiss it as another community-of-shared-future yawnfest, this isn’t only a Chinese document, and these are not only Chinese talking points.
Certain developing countries will take issue with China’s assumed leadership role, but at a fundamental level the Dar es Salaam Consensus’ message that the current global system isn’t working makes sense — to Africa (54 votes at the UN) but also further afield.
In fact, that message is resonating pretty much everywhere outside the few lily-pads of wealth calling themselves “the international community.”
