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Abstract
It has been widely held that China’s development was forged from a unique pathway to that of Western countries. As a result, it has been assumed that China’s historical experience of modernization contains important lessons for other developing states. However, as we show, modernization in China can be seen as sharing many of the same assumptions of development as the West. Using insights from Cox’s work on civilizations—particularly the notion of ‘Business Civilization’ (adapted from Susan Strange)—our paper examines how modernization theoretic assumptions underpin both Chinese and World Bank perspectives on agricultural development not only within China but also across their engagements, policies, and practices of development throughout Africa. We argue that development constitutes a political project historically inseparable from La mission civilisatrice of Business Civilization, extending a form of intersubjectivity and materiality, power and rationality, based on a specific civilizational worldview. This process retains a number of contradictions and points of conflict and we focus on the resistances of traditional forms of civilization in contestations around the imposition of commercialized agriculture.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
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Notes on contributors
George Karavas
George Karavas is a PhD candidate interested in the politics of development and globalization. His thesis focuses on Chinese and Western engagement in agriculture in Africa. He currently tutors in development and global political economy and has been an editor of Dialogue e-journal.
Shannon Brincat
Shannon Brincat is a Research Fellow at Griffith University. His research focuses on recognition theory and cosmopolitanism; dialectics; tyrannicide; climate change justice; and critical theory. He has been the editor of a number of collections, most recently Dialectics and world politics; Recognition, conflict and the problems of ethical community; and the three volume series Communism in the twenty-first century. He is also the co-founder and co-editor of the journal Global discourse.