Going West and Going Out: discourses, migrants, and models in Chinese development

Abstract

In 1999 China announced the launching of the Open up the West campaign, sometimes called “Going West,” to help western China finally catch up to the much wealthier eastern, coastal areas after several decades of lagging behind. The same year, China also announced a “Going Out” strategy to encourage Chinese investment abroad. The 15 years since then have witnessed dramatic Chinese government investment in various development activities in western regions of China, as well as around the world. Though rarely considered together, we argue that there are significant parallels in development discourse, the centrality of physical infrastructure, the characteristics of Chinese labor migration and the nature of migrant-local relations, and the application of “models from elsewhere” in Going West and Going Out. Considering these parallels can help shed light on Chinese development discourse and practice, as China becomes increasingly important in the field of development once dominated by Western countries. Finally, we also consider direct connections and convergences between the two strategies in China’s neighboring countries of Asia and in the One Belt One Road initiative.

Keywords:

• China
• development
• Open up the West
• Going Out
• migration
• One Belt One Road

Acknowledgments

We are grateful for the insightful comments by two anonymous reviewers on an earlier draft of this article. All mistakes are our own.

Notes

1. For example, see the official Western Development Strategy website, www.chinawest.gov.cn.

2. The third was the Agricultural Development Bank. As Sanderson and Forsythe (2013) have documented, China Development Bank has also been a source of finance for infrastructure development in China’s western provinces through its model of lending to local government financing vehicles. Yunnan, Sichuan, and Chongqing have also been home to some of its more troubled creditors.

3. Neither Exim nor CDB publish detailed figures on their lending. Despite this lack of transparency researchers on the Chinese role in both Africa and Latin America have in recent years been able to assemble detailed and credible overviews of lending statistics. Here we are drawing on the two sources we assessed to be most credible in this regard, avoiding common pitfalls such as double counting or continuing to count loan announcements that did not materialize. For additional statistics, see the China-Latin American Finance Database (http://www.thedialogue.org/map_list/) and the China-Africa Research Initiative (http://www.sais-cari.org/data-chinese-loans-and-aid-to-africa).