Only a handful of universities around the world teach area studies courses in China-Africa relations. It’s a field that was once quite popular but less so today as interest in studying Chinese affairs more broadly has fallen precipitously.
Student enrollment, for example, in Chinese language classes in U.S. and European universities has plunged by at least 20% over the past ten years and is still largely non-existent in most higher education programs in the Global South.
But if you’re one of the fortunate few to attend Harvard University, you can still study Mandarin and sign up for the class “China and the African Continent.” The course instructor, Daniel Koss, an associate senior lecturer and research scholar in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, joins Eric & Cobus from Cambridge to discuss the key themes that he’s covering in this semester’s class.
Show Notes:
- Lingnan University: Master of Arts in International Affairs (China-Africa Studies)
- Africans on China: africansonchina.com
- The China-Global South Project: Interested in Taking a Graduate-level Class in China-Africa Relations Taught by One of the Leading Scholars in the Field? Here’s What the Course Would Look Like by Eric Olander
About Daniel Koss:
Daniel Koss studies political parties in East Asian politics. His first book, published in 2018, investigates the role of political parties under authoritarianism through the case of the Chinese Communist Party. Asking why the Chinese state is “stronger” in some areas of its realm than in others, his research demonstrates the importance of the party’s rank and file for effective local governance. His second book manuscript studies East Asia’s other super-resilient ruling party, namely the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan. Approaching contemporary outcomes from a long historical perspective, his field of research covers the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961), the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), and even the governance reforms of the Yongzheng Emperor (r. 1722-1735). Koss’s research on Japanese parties adopts a similarly long-term perspective, with one of his ongoing projects studying the emergence of political parties in the early Meiji era. Koss has spent years doing research in mainland China (Beijing, Hubei, Shandong, Zhejiang), Taiwan and Japan (Miyagi, Nagano, Shiga, Tokyo, Toyama). He holds a PhD in political science from Harvard University, worked as an Assistant Research Fellow at the Institute of Political Science at Academia Sinica (Taipei), and since January 2019 serves as a lecturer at the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations.
Transcript:
Eric Olander: Hello, and welcome to another edition of the China in Africa Podcast, a proud member of the Sinica Podcast Network. I’m Eric Olander and, as always, I’m joined by China Global South’s Managing Editor, Cobus van Staden, in Berlin, Germany. A very good afternoon to you, Cobus.
Cobus van Staden: Good afternoon.
Eric: Cobus, one of our themes of this year has been the frustration that we’ve been expressing over and over again about the lack of China literacy in many parts of the global south and some of the disconnects even that we see in places that have a very rich China knowledge database like the United States and Europe, and how, as it moves up the policymaking food chain, people get dumber and dumber on some of these China issues. In places like Africa, one of the things that we’ve been talking about and noticing over and over again is how a lot of the thinking about China, particularly among senior-level policymakers, seems to be, not five years old, not 10 years old, but sometimes 15 years old.
In fact, there was a quote today that we featured in our newsletter from Kenya’s finance minister who was kind of musing to the Africa Report News magazine and news website about whether or not China would fund the extension of the SGR to the Ugandan border. That is the phase three extension that China turned down five, six years ago. And it just kind of speaks to this question as to whether or not the finance minister really understands that the world has changed. Now, he may, I don’t know, maybe he’s playing politics and signaling something else, maybe he knows better, but it does not sound like that the finance minister understands that we are now in the era of small is beautiful. That’s the era of $50 million or less infrastructure projects — that the days of standard gauge railway-size projects, multi-billion dollar railroads are over.
That doesn’t happen anymore. Now, the problem, Cobus, that you’ve pointed out on a number of occasions is that many universities in Africa do not have very robust area studies, do not have very robust language studies. The Confucius Institutes, which are in a number of universities, really only help educate a small number of people in Mandarin language. And at the end of the day, the ability to teach large numbers of people about the changes that are happening in the China-Africa relationship, and what’s going on in China more broadly, just really aren’t there. So, those learning opportunities aren’t there. And at the same time, we’re still seeing decision-makers at the highest level really make decisions not based on knowledge or information or intelligence, but still based on patronage and relationships. And that oftentimes pushes away a lot of good quality information.
So, this is an issue, Cobus, that you’ve been thinking about a lot as a China-Africa scholar for many, many years. In the time that we’ve doing this show, almost 15 years now, what have you seen in terms of the evolution of the teaching of China-Africa studies in Africa and the overall knowledge level on the topic now in policymaking?
Cobus: Well, it’s difficult to comment on the overall knowledge level, for two reasons. One is that one would have to do some kind of survey, and then also that, frequently, policymakers don’t necessarily say what they know, right? They’re not researchers. They’re not necessarily committing to reflecting research as they see it like they’re politicians. So, they speak in code or they speak, like, the discourse is more complicated. That’s a difficult thing to unpack, but in terms of the teaching and the discussion, there’s definitely more, I think, teaching that’s happening around these issues. But I think African institutions, there’s still a lot of bias towards Europe and the West and a lot of pressure for teachers to also particularly provide African perspectives on issues, but which doesn’t necessarily include Africa-Asia relations.
So that tends to be a little bit more niche depending on your institution. But I think there’s definitely a lot more focus on African agency, certainly in the research, and that, I think, is filtering through to the wider conversation as well. It’s like not some eagle-eye kind of perspective on what China’s doing in Africa, but rather perspectives on how Africans can try and get a better deal out of it. But there’s still a lot more work that’s needed there.
Eric: And to be fair, the challenges are not just in Africa. In many global North countries, the interest in studying China and Chinese has fallen precipitously over the past 10 years. Let me just give you some numbers that may surprise you. That in the U.S., the number of students taking Mandarin language courses peaked around 2013. And from 2016 to 2020, enrollment in these courses at major universities fell by 21%. In Britain, the number of students admitted to Chinese studies programs dropped by 31% between 2012 and 2021. And in New Zealand, the number of students studying Mandarin plunged 48% in the decade from 2013 to 2022. Now, part of this might be because there are fewer jobs in China for foreigners to get, the visa restrictions have gone up, the politics have gotten very cold.
Also, China, and this was the problem that I ran into in China, and I speak fluent Chinese, and I’ve been there for a long time, and I have a degree from a local university in China — I couldn’t get a job because the quality of local talent now was so high that there was no need for them to hire foreigners anymore. So, the employment opportunities have gone down for foreigners, and that may have a chilling effect on the number of students who are studying the languages. What it’s led to, though, is this pullback in many universities of both China studies and China area studies, so China-Latin America and China-Africa.
Today, we have the opportunity to talk to somebody who’s teaching an actual China-Africa course in the United States. This is a rare thing. There aren’t that many China-Africa courses around. I know there’s a couple at Georgetown that go on and at George Washington University, but Harvard is also running a course. If you are fortunate enough to be either an undergrad or a grad student at Harvard and you’re in the East Asia Studies Department, and you’re free from Tuesdays to Thursdays from 10:30 to 11:45, you are fortunate enough to sign up for this wonderful class taught by Daniel Koss, who’s an Associate Senior Lecturer and Research Scholar at the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard.
And Daniel joins us on the line for the first time on the show. We’re just so thrilled to have you to talk about your course.
Daniel Koss: Yeah, good afternoon, Eric and Cobus. It’s so great to be here today.
Eric: It’s really wonderful to have you. And I think we’ve been looking forward to this conversation for a long time, ever since you announced on X that you were teaching this course. We’ve known that you’ve taught this course previously and you’ve been gracious enough to use some of our material as some of your teaching materials in the past.
Daniel: Definitely. I need to jump in. I mean, your podcast was really important in getting this started and getting updated. I mean, as you say, a lot of academic publications are sort of behind a few years, and that’s normal because of the cycle of peer review and stuff. So, it was so important. I mean, your podcast was just really, really important in all of this. I just needed to jump in here.
Eric: That is very exciting to hear. But let’s talk about this course — EASTD 199, China and the African Continent. You’re holding it this fall. We’re going to get to the map which provoked a little bit of discussion on Twitter that you put a very interesting graphic up with the course. But let’s talk about the course objectives, reading here from your syllabus, it introduces key topics in international relations beyond the U.S.-China relationship. It provides new perspectives on Africa’s political and economic development, skill building for public policy work, and an overview of the evolving social science field of research at the China-Africa intersection. Let’s start there with the objectives. Tell us a little bit about why you wanted to teach this course and what’s the main mission of it.
Daniel: Yeah, I mean, there’s kind of different objectives that I’m kind of pursuing here. I mean, one is there are so many courses and so much focus on the U.S.-China relationship, but if you ask students where they actually go after they graduate when they get their first job in the Word Bank, State Department, or even in business, I mean, oftentimes, it’s not U.S.-China, but I mean there are so many other bilateral relationships. I mean, there are no courses on the U.S. and Europe or anything like that, and I thought Africa is really an interesting case to study international relations beyond sort of the standard focus on the U.S.-China relationship because dynamics are really very different there. And many students actually are very interested in the international relations aspect of this. But then there’s also other students who come sort of much more to get a social science introduction, are kind of interested in the academic side of it really.
And because it’s now already 10 years that there’s really a focus in research, there’s now a body of literature that is really worth studying methodologically sophisticated and so on. So, there’s actually something to teach as sort of social science as an academic topic as well. But there’s also skill building, and I can talk about this a little more, but it’s kind of an unusual course in that it’s not final papers, writing long academic papers, but a lot of it is interviews, so that brings in African perspectives because students go out, interviewing people in Africa or Chinese who have to do with China-Africa relationship. So, it’s kind of an unusual course in that it has both this very academic focus, but then also a more practical professional skill-building component.
Cobus: Yeah, I was very interested to see that kind of writing policy recommendations or doing this like quite practical policy-focused work is also part of the course. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, like how you decided to pull that aspect into it.
Daniel: Yeah, so without COVID, probably we would never have done this because this is a very academic department. So, this policy assignments really came in during the COVID pandemic when there was sort of a community-building problem. And so bringing together students really offline. But then, for instance, the policy options memo, which is perhaps the most unusual thing at our department right now that there’s a policy options memo. I found it extraordinarily useful for students to kind of put themselves into the shoes of, say, an African government. And one notion that many students come into the classroom with is that African governments have to choose, take sides, either the U.S. or China.
And I mean, that’s just a misconception. And students who are then writing these policy options, memos, almost always come back when they choose to put themselves into the shoe of an African government, they always come back saying, “Well, in fact, you have one of both. You want to navigate the relationship. You don’t just want to take sides in one way or the other.” And I mean, that’s just exercise, but a very sort of big takeaway that if you just be empathetic, you know the context, you research the context, you research the options and the payoffs and the trade-offs, that’s kind of a natural conclusion to walk away with.
Eric: It’s interesting you bring up this question of the misperceptions because it reminds me of a Twitter or X post that was done by a, I forget the name of the professor, but she teaches Chinese politics at an East Coast university in the United States, and she lamented on Twitter how difficult it was to get through to her American students, any kind of different narrative about China than what they already came into the classroom with. They have their heads filled with American media perceptions, the American discourse on China. It’s a very polarized topic today. And she lamented that she just doesn’t make any progress over the course of the semester in chipping away and letting them see China from a different point of view, not even a pro or con China, just a different one from a lot of the misperceptions, as you’ve noticed in some of your students and what they have about China and the world.
Talk to us a little bit about that challenge that you face with your students at Harvard. How many of them come in with an open mind or a more holistic view on China and how many are deeply embedded in some of the American narratives and propaganda?
Daniel: I mean, there’s just a lot of mainstream discourse that I’m running against that is also just factually not right. I mean, there’s just wrong facts out there, and also these narratives that are very deeply ingrained. I’m rolling up my sleeves when I come into the first class and I kind of work on this, but I’m not alone in the classroom. I mean, there are Chinese students oftentimes, or Chinese heritage students, many students from East Asia, so that’s also perhaps something here about Harvard that’s special that you have then also different voices. Also in this class in particular, we get African students, born and raised, gone to a school in Africa. So, you get very different perspectives in the classroom, which means I’m not alone, like there are these misperceptions around, and that I get kind of incredulous eyes when I talk about the debt trap narrative in different ways and so on.
But then you also do have students in the class who have different perspectives and bring this to the table. And so, one thing that usually happens early on in the class is that you get sort of this, you know, the Africans have one opinion, one perspective, and then the Chinese students, Chinese heritage students, American students. But then over the course of the semester, what happens is that somehow that Africans who turn out to be much more critical of China than others, and sort of, it’s no longer the Africans are debating the Chinese and the Americans, but it’s much more mixed. I mean, as soon as we move sort of beyond the surface level, is China good or bad for Africa? I mean, as soon as we go into more specifics, this preconceived perspective on China and Africa is sort of falling apart.
But that takes a few weeks in the semester usually, and there’s definitely a lot of debate that sometimes can also… I mean, especially at the beginning, it’s a little bit ugly at times, but then we try to create a more constructive classroom atmosphere which usually works. So, I’m sort of fortunate enough to have students who, yeah, who I can work with to move beyond these media narratives, but it’s hard work. Definitely.
Cobus: And just following up on that same theme, I was wondering what kind of preset narratives about Africa do students come to the table with, and particularly from Americans, from East Asian students, and from African students. What are their idea of common sense reality about Africa?
Daniel: It’s hardest to say for the African students because every African students comes with a very different perspective, depending which country, which region, and what their own experience and background is. But it’s true that for the Chinese and American students, I think the one big thing about Africa is just the lack of differentiation. I mean, North Africa or the southern region or French-speaking Africa, Kenya, East Africa, I mean, all of this is blurry, and there are these big narratives that don’t make any distinction. And sort of one big thing in the class is it’s not completely transparent in the syllabus, but I try to move like to different regional focus. So, we have a focus on Zambia, we have a focus on Kenya, we have a focus on West Africa, and sort of getting this nuance. I mean, this is the first big preconception that sort of Africa looks, yeah, all the countries sort of look the same, and there’s no differentiation whatsoever. And that’s very sad.
And I think this is something that the course can change to some extent. And the other misperception is, oftentimes, like separating out governments — African governments and African citizens. It seems so fundamental to understanding any government or politics of any country, but that is something… That’s somewhat hard to do for many American students. Like you talk about Cameroon, you don’t talk about the Cameroonians and the Cameroonian government. So that’s something that’s very important that also changes the perspective a lot of the students.
Eric: And what’s their view of the United States? Because for a lot of Americans, there’s still a perception that what we do is the benchmark of good and things are measured against what we do. We are the norm-setters. We’ve been the hyperpower for a long time on the questions of governance, human rights. And we saw this after the Ukraine war when Americans were saying, “The world is with us, the world is with us.” And yet, when you looked at the tally of the votes, the vast majority of humanity was not with the West and the United States in particular. But that self-reflection skill isn’t very strong among many students, particularly elite students. And I’m just curious, when you get into these conversations about the United States, do they have an ability to put a mirror up and to self-reflect?
Daniel: I mean, definitely there’s idealism, and I think partly it’s because Americans are Americans, but also because it’s young students, right? I mean, so there’s a lot of idealism about the word. So, early on in the course, week three, I think, I’m talking a lot about traditional partners of Africa, traditional donors, including the U.S., and just because it’s so important to understand the hopes that people have when they look at China, or that African governments have when they look at China, also has a lot to do with failures of the West. So, if we don’t understand the failures of the West and the cynical attitude by Western…
I mean, there’s also power games, of course, and sort of, there’s a lot of ugly politics. And even when we talk about something like conditionality, which perhaps is well intended. But then, of course, it’s not done very evenly and it’s also problematic in terms of when you talk at the same time about ownership and, on the other hand, you talk about African countries need ownership, but on the other hand, you have conditionality that is like in detail dictating certain behaviors and so on. And so there may be good reasons for this, but you also need to understand that this is a very intrusive sort of politics, and that really uses the position of someone who is stronger to make someone who is not so strong do what you want them to do.
So, these power dynamics, it’s very important for students to understand early on in the course to see how China comes in, sort of sometimes seen as an alternative that’s somehow liberating or freeing up or creating more options. Because if you think that the United States are perfect and the West is just doing the right thing, but it’s also relatively easy to disabuse students of that. I mean, there’s just so many examples of failed projects. You also have American voices like [Denton 0:18:53] or others who talk about development aid and the failure of development aid. I mean, there’s just so much out there. There’s no lack of material to very quickly confront students with the reality that the U.S. has not been a force for good all the time and appreciated by all African governments or citizens. I think that’s something that’s relatively easy to do early on, but it’s important to recognize that contrast.
Cobus: One of the realities that we deal with a lot in Africa-China relations is just how much of it there is, how many areas of life is covered by it. And when we started off the podcast, we thought essentially, well, we’ll go for a year and then see, and then just hundreds of episodes later, there’s still more stuff to talk about. So, I was wondering kind of what you decided to put in and what you decided to leave out of the course in terms of to provide a comprehensive survey of the relationship without overpacking the course.
Daniel: That’s so hard to do. I mean, it really is a lot. I mean, everyone thinks of infrastructure first, and that’s also like the brick-and-mortar construction is what some students in the class have seen, have witnessed. Those are sort of images that students have in mind. I mean, one way to think about this course is like, as I’m starting with history and then I’m looking sort of at the big picture, what sort of the hopeful image, if you are really an optimist, what could you hope for from China? But then we also go more into the weeds and look, benefits to the communities. And there’s this amazing book by [Jing Pong Lee 0:20:26], for instance, that looks at human resources and sort of skill building.
Then we have, on Huawei, there’s good research on that. And then sort of at the very end of the course, we go to bigger questions, how China is also changing institutions like the UN or the World Bank, how these institutions may have to work differently because of China’s presence in Africa and other. So, it’s sort of covering a lot of ground, but what I really like to get across, I mean, an idea of the agency of African governments, but also setting this apart from the agency that African citizens have, I mean, this is one big thing that runs through the course. Also, of course, benefits, like cost-benefit has to be there as one… We need to be able to evaluate. And then it’s also, because there’s so much to cover, I want students to sort of have the skill, whatever topic they’re interested in that they know how to research this in a way that gives them different perspectives.
And that’s why I do, at the very end of the class, the final project is a podcast. And there, students pick whatever topics they fancy. And it’s really large variety, like people have done environmental things that are not very much on the syllabus. So students really have their own ideas what they want to do, but then they have, sort of, the course is giving them the sort of methodology and the sort of critical thinking on the data, what data to use, how to triangulate, also really talk to people on the ground. I mean, there’s Zoom, there’s ways to telephone people in Africa. So, do that to just get a critical sort of approach to whatever topic you study. So, we have, of course, a week on like the debt traps, I call it Eastern versus Western debt traps because I don’t like the term debt traps, and so I want students to think about how a debt crisis that involve Western debts are different or not.
But that’s sort of one topic that then could be… I mean, a similar methodology could be used probably for many other narratives as well, to think about what are the power games that are behind those sort of narratives. I don’t know, this is difficult to answer because there are so many different themes in this class, but it’s really also picking and choosing a little bit by student interest. Basically, I had different, yeah, this is a third time I’m teaching this, so I also asked some students at the end sort of what topics that they want to hear more on. And now students want to know about coups in Africa obviously. So, I kind of need to create a new week that tells us about China’s attitude in coups or what China does or how China… The instability that we see in Mali or other countries is something that’s very high up on student agendas right now.
Eric: You mentioned this is the third time you’re teaching the class. How has the course changed over the three years that you’ve taught it in terms of the students and the topics and the reaction from the students?
Daniel: I think when I started, there was a lot more, even myself, like a lot more expectation that China-Africa was not yet peaking, that this would go on. And now after, I don’t know, l think already the second time I was teaching this class, there were numbers coming in that told us all that investment is going to be smaller and China is going to be more careful, lending money, and is thinking more about how much money it gets back out of the African continent, whether these operations are profitable and things like this. Which, at the beginning, it seemed like there’s no limit to what China is going to do in Africa, whereas the second and third time, it became clear and clear that there’s rescaling of things and different focus.
Daniel: Also, at the beginning, it seemed like there was a very clear vision that China was pursuing very consistently in their operations. We could still say, I mean, there are many different actors on the ground, but there was still a narrative that China sort of had one vision that it was pursuing. Whereas now, it seems clear that domestic, changes domestically in China impact what’s happening in Africa. That’s much easier to show now compared to three or four years ago when this was not yet so well studied and so well understood. So, I think this change in students, just the interest has peaked a little bit as well.
If I just look at the students coming to this class, it’s also, I mean, the size of the class or students who then go on to write final thesis or their projects about China and Africa, it’s, unfortunately, peaked a little bit. When I taught this the first time, there were like four or five people went on to write finer thesis, undergraduate thesis. So that’s a big deal. So their main thing, their main output from college is on China-Africa, I don’t think I have a single student who does this now. So the interest has changed also a little bit because China-Africa doesn’t seem to be the biggest thing on people’s mind anymore. I think it’s extraordinarily important, but yeah, it’s seen less dramatically today as four years ago.
Cobus: So, it was very interesting this question of the peak of the China-Africa relationship or perceptions of the peak of the China-Africa relationship, and with it then this kind of lack of interest in the topic. I was wondering if you got the sense that does this reflect a turning away from China-Africa issues particularly or a wider turning away from African issues more broadly.
Daniel: Yeah, so I’m not teaching at the African Studies Department, but my sense is from colleagues that the interest in Africa really hasn’t changed. I mean, it’s still strong, it’s going strong. What is a little unfortunate, though, I mean, on the one hand, it’s very understandable because students are idealistic, young — Students just out of high school interested in things like poverty, economic development, civil war stability, and there’s this interest in Africa sort of as a case, as a sort of a challenge, a humanitarian challenge. And that’s how many students are becoming interested in Africa. And then, of course, they take courses and they understand that Africa is much more than that and sort of their minds are… They see Africa when they travel there for projects or for internships and so on.
But what is really distinct about the students that are sort of taking the China Africa class it’s I sense a lot more optimism about Africa in general. And sort of there are students who are going much more with a business mind. They take this class and… I had one student for instance, who then took this class and then work for the summer, at least for the Rwandan government. So, in sort of the investment screening or the investment section of the Rwandan government. So that sort of a different path from students who come to study Africa with the idea that they would go into development work, Word Bank or USAID or so, so it was sort of a more business oriented, and perhaps more optimistic group, or it is a more optimistic group, perhaps students who are deciding to study particularly China and Africa.
That may be a difference. Although I’m not actually teaching the courses on Africa. I’m mostly teaching courses in East Asian studies.
Eric: So, if you are part of this class, here are some of the books that you will be assigned to read. There are some classics in there — The Dragon’s Gift by Deborah Brautigam. Everybody has to read that one. That is a foundational reading. Howard French, China’s Second Continent. Again, Cobus, I think the not all academics would agree with that on a syllabus, but I thoroughly enjoyed it, and we had a great conversation with Howard French on that book.
Cobus: It’s a classic in terms of setting a particular narrative, but it’s also very fun to critique, which I think, Daniel, not kind of describing anything to you, but that is why I have, in the past, kind of prescribed it is in order to then discuss it.
Eric: And then one of your favorite books, Cobus, by C. K. Lee, is the book The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa. That is a classic.
Daniel: Oh, it’s my favorite too.
Eric: And then Barry Sautman and Yan Hairong, The “Chinese Debt Trap” and its Sri Lanka Example. Again, Barry and Hairong, we’ve had on the show before. So, these are really some classics. I guess what surprised me a little bit about the reading list was that quite a bit of it is old — five, six, ten years in many cases. Deborah Brautigam’s book is at least 10 years old. And there’s less contemporary, things that were written say in the past one or two years. And I’m looking now at the new book by China’s Relations With Africa by David Shinn and Joshua Eisenman. They did a great book previously on the topic. And they talk a little bit more about the shift away from economic engagement and more towards political-military engagement and this new era of China-Africa relations that we’re going into.
By the way, we’re going to have David and Joshua on the show to talk about this book, so that’ll be very exciting. Can you maybe help us understand how you selected the reading list and why you opted for more of these foundational books that are five, 10 years old rather than some more contemporary titles?
Daniel: Yeah, you know, some of the better best books that are written now, they kind of assume much more knowledge, even with Ching Kwan Lee, which is like one of my favorite books, it does take… I mean, students are not coming in with a lot of understanding of China or Africa. There’s no, you take this class, you don’t have any prerequisites. So taking kind of these older books, I mean something like Howard French, I mean, that’s something that students intuitively can link up with without having read anything before. Whereas some of the newer works, I may consider, include some newer works as well, but it also takes a little more work because these assume, oftentimes, kind of the discussion, the debate that has happened before. And also, I mean, when you look at my syllabus, I am including things that are just really outright propaganda and that are very, very contested.
I mean, I’m including some of the books I don’t agree with at all. I mean, there’s a fundamental difference between China and the West policies toward Africa — People’s Daily. I mean, that is a very problematic text, one of the very problematic texts. But then also, I mean, some of the new texts that really, newer four years old now, [inaudible 0:30:16], I mean, this is one text that really resonates with the students, and I had several students who after reading that piece, were really interested in sort of understanding what Huawei is doing in terms of developing courses and so on. So it really catches on that I hope Maria Repnikova’s work on soft power is also of that quality, sort of not requiring students to sort of know the entire debate. Yeah, as academics, I guess we think 10 years is nothing. It’s just, I mean, this is the debate is sort of moving more slowly. But it’s true that it’s not always using the newest text at all. That’s right.
Cobus: I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about how one structures a course in order to build up the knowledge because there’s this point that you make that a lot of newer scholarship, obviously, because they, they’re talking to an academic audience who’s been, frequently has been immersed in this discussion, there’s a lot of shorthand, there’s a lot of… they can’t restate everything, they can’t re-have the arguments that have already been had. They just have to make their own argument and move along. So I was wondering how you kind of build that bridge for people who haven’t been involved in those conversations to kind of bring them up to speed in a relatively manageable time.
Daniel: Yeah. I mean, my thinking about this is sort of to assign many of the readings, assign sort of more accessible works, and then, in the lecture component and in the course discussion, really bring up sort of the newest up-to-date information on this. But I mean, when students work with data, I mean, just now we are looking at eight database. This is not going to 2023, of course, but it’s sort of going all the way to 2020, ’21, I’m not sure. But it’s relatively recent. So, I try to have like the most updated knowledge, sort of, and most sophisticated arguments in the classroom. But then when students sit at home on their own, they’re kind of reading more of the foundational pieces because we are also moving to new topics. So, if we are looking at the third part of the course, which is looking into human rights and multilateral institutions, that’s almost a different topic.
So, I kind of need to start from scratch there as well. So, we kind of are building up until week eight and it’s getting more complicated and more sophisticated, but then week nine, we sort of have to start new, to think, like, have the fundamental discussion about what are human rights in China? What does China mean when they say democracy or human rights? How’s it different? So, it’s very foundational knowledge that we need to go back to at that point. So, it’s not really building up over the entire course in that sense, but it’s constructed a little differently.
Eric: I’d like to close our conversation on a lighter note, and it’s about the map of Africa that you put on the course cover, and you published that on X and you got some reaction for it. Tell us a little bit about it. Try and describe it to us. It’s a yellow map of Africa with a kind of Chinese pattern background, and a dragon kind of overlayed it. Tell us a little bit about why you decided to do it that way.
Daniel: I mean, first of all, the dragging is just… I mean, if you look at The Economist cover, and so on, I mean, that’s often used. So, it’s just the way that many people would envision that topic to begin with. And also, I mean, the concern for colonialism, on new ways of colonialism, and that’s, of course, a concern that brings many students to the classroom. But I also have this poster sort of as an exercise. When then we start the course, first session of the course, we are looking at this poster, and it’s just a conversation starter because there’s so much to critique about this poster, and I kind of want to have that discussion early on. I mean, one thing is China is a unitary actor. Wait a minute. I mean, is it really this dragon like very coordinated, moving in rational ways with a scheme?
Or is it the 1 million Chinese in Africa that Howard French is talking about? Or do we also have to think about different institutions that are really… Chinese institutions with different institutional interests? So, breaking down China — what is China? Who is China? is China really that dragon? And also the dragon metaphor itself. I mean, if we look at it as a colonial overlord, at the same time, I mean, it’s also in the Chinese sort of culture background, it’s also benevolent rule, right? I mean, the dragon is not associated with exploitation, but with a sort of benevolence on the Chinese understanding of it. And then the most problematic part that students often figure out relatively quickly is like, where’s African agency here? I mean, you just have this map.
I mean, this is just awful. You have no Africans. Africa’s just waiting there and all the agencies with a dragon, and there’s no life whatsoever in Africa. It’s just being taken advantage of by this dragon. So that’s one of the things that students almost always point out after five minutes on the first day. I mean, I just like this poster a conversation starter, and if you put it on X, it’s a more vicious debate than where you have it in the classroom where it tends to be a little bit more constructive. But nevertheless, I think it’s important to start with sort of our preconceptions and start from there and then like push deeper, but understand where we are kind of coming from too, and make this very explicit.
Eric: Well, we will put a link to the map to the Twitter post that provoked this conversation in the show notes. One of the things that we learned very early on in this venture that Cobus and I started back in 2010 is don’t mess with maps. Like, just don’t touch maps. Remember, Cobus, there’s that classic stock photo image of a Chinese, a five star Chinese red flag over Africa, and that’s still used. But somebody wrote us and said, “You know how offensive that is that it just completely washes out all the African side?” And I mean, we did this six months into our venture, and we’re like, “Of course.” And ever since then, we’re like, don’t mess with maps. That’s just the rule of it. Maps are trouble, especially here in Asia, too. I mean, maps are really trouble.
Daniel: I’m teaching a class on political geography of China also, so I have to deal with maps unfortunately. And there’s many questions of how you… even what you put on the map when you show China and so on.
Eric: I mean, I think a lot of people are surprised that maps are still a controversial, contentious thing, but literally, Asia just erupted with fury when China released its national map a few weeks ago, showing borders that very few people agree with. So maps are still very sensitive, and we’ve just learned, again, don’t mess with maps in trying to put maps and flags and colors and things on it that shouldn’t be there. That was our lesson that we learned.
Daniel: Eric, when you come here to Boston sometime, to Cambridge sometime and you walk into our building, this is the East Asian Studies Department, and we have a world map over our door. And it shows the United States in the middle, it shows Africa on the margin, but it doesn’t show China, nor does it show Japan. It was just left out. I mean this the East Asian Studies Department, but China and Japan don’t appear. It used to be a geography department, but yeah, we don’t have-
Eric: That’s even more embarrassing that it was a geography department and they had a crappy map.
Daniel: Yeah, I know. I know. It’s incredible. I mean, there you go with maps. Maps are trouble, that’s right, especially if you put them on-
Eric: Maps are definitely trouble. But if you are fortunate enough, again, to be a Harvard University student and taking East Asian Studies course number 199, China and the African Continent, taught by Daniel Koss, who’s an associate senior lecturer and research scholar at the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, then you will have a very fruitful discussion about maps and everything else to do with China-Africa relations. Daniel, it was a thrill for us to have the chance to speak with you and to learn more about the great course that you’re doing at Harvard. If people want to follow you on social media on Twitter, X, where can they find you?
Daniel: As an academic, I do have an X account, but, really, I have a website, a scholar. I’ll send you the link. A scholar website. Yeah.
Eric: We’ll put a scholarly website link in the show notes. And I think I’ll find your X account as little used as it is. Cobus, academics don’t seem to be too thrilled with social media these days, so it’s just like shelter under a rock, right?
Daniel: Do a little bit of it, yeah.
Eric: It’s exhausting. I mean, it really is exhausting. But Daniel, thank you so much for your time today and, again, for just sharing these fascinating insights with us. We really appreciate it. It
Daniel: It was really a pleasure to talk to both of you. I mean, I learned so much through the show, so it was very special for me to come back sort of yeah, speaking on it. So thanks a lot for the invitation.
Eric: Cobus, what a treat for us to be able to get the inside view of this course and really just what a privilege it is for these students at Harvard to have the chance to do this. But at the same time, I kept thinking to myself throughout the conversation how disappointing it is, almost sad that there aren’t more of these courses available around the world to study China and Africa, or China and Latin America and whatnot. There really does seem to be a dearth of them and there’s not enough. And I guess the question I have is that even if in African universities there were more courses available or there were online courses available, do you think there’s interest? Because as we’ve seen in other countries, the interest in China studies is going down quite a bit, or do you think there’s just not the availability of it, and if it was there, lots of people would take these classes?
Cobus: Well, you know, man has to keep in mind that things don’t necessarily have to be packaged into a course in order to have value in the world. I mean, there’s a lot of China-Africa-related content, like very good content, including, hopefully, some of ours in the air. So, it’s not a situation where there are no resources available. We frequently call for something that’s more rigorous or more formalized, as you say, a full curriculum. And I do think that would be very helpful. But I also think the decline in interest right now, one has to keep in mind that the decline is around the short-term ideas about what careers the need to focus on the moment they graduate, particularly if they happen to be Harvard students, which means that they are so deeply in debt, a lot of them, that they need to start working immediately the moment they get out of college.
I think, at the moment, there is a particular kind of assumption of where China is going or where opportunities around China’s going. And particularly in the U.S., I think there’s a strong feeling that, oh, if one concentrates on China now, then you won’t be able to get a job a year and a half from now. I think in that sense, China obviously, in more realistically speaking, over a slightly longer timeline, China isn’t going away. China’s just getting stronger and stronger, particularly China’s relationship with the wider global south is getting stronger and stronger. I think there’s a dire need for more of this kind of input, particularly aimed at African audiences and particularly tailored to particular issues of interest to African audiences and to update them on how things have changed with China, but to do something that’s maybe a little bit more targeted to them attaining their priorities rather than just simply sketching, “Oh, China’s lending less now.”
I think that’s one thing. I think what is also needed is just a reset around slightly more realistic idea of what China’s world in the world is going to be in, say, five to seven to 10 years rather than what it’s going to be in the next year and a half. That, I think, will reset itself as we move on. I think we need to keep in mind that there’s a particular kind of declinist narrative that’s very dominant in the Western world at the moment, around relations with China, which I think is up for a reset at some stage, right? It’s just as we’ve been saying over and over that decoupling isn’t really going to happen. The China decline narrative isn’t 100% realistic. Things are resetting, but they’re not disappearing. So, I think these kind of interests will rebalance themselves over a little while, but we are in a very kind of doomerous moment at the moment.
Eric: I guess I’m a little confused because you said that there is a lot of information or enough information out there, or alternative information for stakeholders in Africa to learn about China. Are you suggesting that they’re doing that? I mean, I’m trying to understand what are you referring to there? Because one of the things that I’ve noticed over the years in covering this topic is there’s less information today than there was 10 years ago. Stellenbosch University in Cape Town used to have a center for Chinese studies. It doesn’t anymore. There was an emerging powers program that was at one of the major presses and think tanks. That’s not there anymore. I haven’t seen a growth in the knowledge production sector in many African universities and centers related to China, and I’m just wondering if you have.
Cobus: Well, this is what I mean is that there needs to be more work produced specifically for African audiences. The stuff that I was referring to that are in the public domain is stuff, for example, the ongoing research being done by Boston University around Chinese lending to Africa. So, those kind of large-scale resources are being added to as they’re going on. But as you say, there isn’t enough knowledge production from Africa specifically about Africa-China relations. But that has itself been a kind of an ongoing process. The institutions have a lot of funding issues. They kind of wax and wane, so some of them come up and some of them disappear. And overall, it kind of remains roughly at the same level, but there hasn’t been a strong move forward. And to a certain extent, maybe that also reflects, I think, priorities in African institutions. Maybe they feel that they want to put their resources somewhere else, which I think is maybe not necessarily realistic, but then, of course, there’s a lot of pressure on them to do STEM work and so on as well. So, it becomes a big balancing act in the budget formation of these institutions.
Eric: Well, it’s not because they don’t have the people, and this is one of the areas where Africa is very rich in human resources because, up until the pandemic, for almost 10 years, 60,000 plus Africans were going to study in China to get undergraduate degrees, masters, PhDs, often many speaking fluent Chinese would come back to Africa and not find any jobs where they could leverage that experience either in academia, in the public sector, or even the corporate sector. You have a lot of these young people then that are relegated to being translators at Chinese state-owned companies, which is really ridiculous. And this is something we’ve talked about before as well, and it’s just a shame because there should be more initiatives, even like the one that we’re doing.
And I’m surprised, to be honest with you, that there isn’t a China-Africa project done by Africans. And I remember I got into a conversation when I was at Beijing University, this was, what? Seven, eight years ago. And some young African students were kind of a little bit giving me a cold shoulder and just being very cold. And I just was like, “Is everything okay?” And they were just like, “Well, we don’t think you should be doing the China-Africa project.”
Cobus: Well, good point, but…
Eric: And I said, “Okay, interesting.” I said, “Yeah, no, I agree. And I just want to let you know that everything that we’re doing is on free open platforms.” Twitter, at that time we were on blogger, and we’re using podcasting. It wasn’t a money thing. And so I said, “Why aren’t you doing it? Why aren’t your classmates doing it?” I agree that there should be more voices in this space. It was never intended for us to be the only voice in the space. And yet we’ve seen 600,000 plus African students go to China, develop incredible expertise in Chinese affairs, and yet there’s never been really a large platform. There is one out of Ghana, Africans on China, which is excellent, by the way — Africansonchina.net, I think is what it’s called. Relatively small, but still excellent quality, so I highly recommend that. I’ll put the link in the show notes.
That’s a shame to me. That, I think, is disappointing that there isn’t more of this discussion happening in the public space, like what we’re doing. And it shouldn’t necessarily be done by us. It should be done by others. But it hasn’t happened, though.
Cobus: Yeah.
Eric: So that’s where we are.
Cobus: Yeah. That is where we are. I can raise possible kind of factors, including that it has taken much longer for Africans on the continent specifically to get the kind of internet access that they really needed. The social media explosion that’s happening in Africa now took years to build, but these aren’t-
Eric: Yeah, but for elites, they’ve had it, though. Let’s be fair, Cobus. For elites, they’ve had it. The kids who are studying overseas, they’ve had that access for a long time.
Cobus: Well, that was what I’m going to say. Like none of the explanations that I provide is necessarily… they don’t explain anything. the issue I think more is two things, right? One is that one has to be clear that a lot of the English language, kind of China-Africa work, was in the past a project aimed at building global North knowledge, right? That’s just true. And, at the same time, that the narrative of what Africa should be doing for itself is itself a trap. Like, “Oh, Africans should be doing this, Africans should be doing that. Why aren’t they doing this?” That is a trap.
Eric: Why is that a trap? I don’t understand.
Cobus: Because one of Africa’s longest historical roles, in relation to the outside world, is to have ideas projected on them, is to have all kinds of ideas. Africa should be revolutionary, Africa should be developmentalists, Africa should be better at human rights. These are the human rights that Africa should be better at. Why aren’t they? It’s another way in which African decision-making is erased. But what happens at the same time is that there isn’t necessarily enough hard discussions about how African decisions are made and what the priorities are. But one also always has to keep in mind is that that itself is a discursive problem in the way that that Africa is presented in the world is this kind of like this project of understanding what Africans are doing and what they’re not doing and why. That itself leads one down paths that end up disempowering the continent. There’s no winning here. It’s all a mess.
Eric: Well, I guess the point that I’m trying to make is that I think there should just be more discussion about China. It saddens me that there’s less interest in studying Mandarin and less interest in China issues because the less we understand about this place, and the less we can speak their language. Whether you’re in Mexico, Mali, Vietnam, it doesn’t matter. China is one of the megatrends of the 21st century. We’re going to have to understand it. And if your only understanding of it is through AP, Reuters, New York Times, Washington Post, and People’s Daily, you’re going to walk away with highly distorted views. You need to get into these substantive nuance, complicated, confusing, painful questions — the same questions that we try to deal with every week.
And it’s frustrating to me that we’re into this 15 years and there’s fewer people in the space than when we started, and there’s fewer people studying Chinese than when I was coming up. I imagined that when I was in high school studying Chinese, 30 some odd years ago, that by the time I’m in my 50s, as I am today, it would be very common that there would be a lot of Chinese speakers. There aren’t. It’s fewer and fewer. And that’s sad, and it’s troublesome too, because we need to better understand one another, and we’re doing a worse job of that, I would say, overall.
Cobus: Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I mean, I completely agree. I’m working in this space, trying to disseminate knowledge, and that is something that I think is important. But at the same time, kids coming up now that, they’re moving into a capitalist competition hellscape that’s beyond anything that we were entering into when we were their age. And they have to work. And learning Mandarin, if you didn’t come up through the Chinese education system, is not easy. It takes them hundreds of hours of work. And where are you going to make money with it? You won’t be able to work in China. It’s a massive pity, I completely agree. But I can kind of see where people are coming from. I can see why it shakes out that way. I mean, it’s not good, but it’s part of the not good larger landscape of not good stuff.
Eric: Cobus, I always try to end on a positive note, but we have just been Debbie Downers right now at the end of this show. So my apologies to everybody. It wasn’t our intent, after a wonderful conversation with Daniel, to kind of end on such a sober note. But it is true. And it’s one of those things that we hope more people will be interested. We hope that this show will provoke people to be more interested in the topic and to maybe go beyond, again, the simple narratives. And those simple narratives are so insufficient. And again, this is the advice that I give to students when I talk to them, as I said, reject the embedded narratives and the simple narratives on all sides, by the way — the Chinese and the Americans and Africans and others. It’s far more complex than anybody can imagine.
So, hopefully, longtime listeners of the show will appreciate that. So if you love the nuance and complexity, then you would absolutely love the work that we’re doing here. And we hope that you would also support Cobus and the team for all the great work that they’re doing in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and try out a subscription to the China Global South Project. It’s super affordable, very worthwhile. It’s the only type of service of its kind where we provide real-time, kind within 24 hours of every day news analysis on key events. And there’s nobody else that’s doing this with the type of knowledge that our team has. It’s a very specialized knowledge. The ability to write fast and to provide analysis within a 24-hour cycle is something that few people can do. A lot of academics can’t do it because they’re trained to do things over years.
A lot of think tank analysts oftentimes will take months to produce work, whereas we’re doing things in 24 and 48 hours to give that first take. That’s one of the reasons why we have more than 25 governments that subscribe to the China Global South Project. So, if you want to read what they’re reading every day, go ahead and give it a try — chinaglobalsouth.com/subscribe. By the way, if you’re one of Daniel Koss’s students, or any student or faculty anywhere around the world, send me an email, eric@chinaglobalsouth.com, and I’ll send you links for 50% off the subscription rate. It makes it super cheap, just 10 bucks a month. So, if you’re a student or teacher, it is affordable. So, we would love for you to join us. That’ll do it for this edition of the China in Africa Podcast. Cobus and I will be back again next week with another edition. Until then, for Cobus van Statin, I’m Eric Olander — thank you so much for listening.
Outro: The discussion continues online. Tag us on Twitter @ChinaGSProject and visit us at chinaglobalsouth.com. If you speak French, check out our full coverage at projetafriquechine.com and AfrikChine on Twitter. That’s Afrik with a K. And you’ll also find links to our sites and social media channels in Arabic.
