China, the West and the Global Development Finance Regime by Skidmore, David;

Long description:

This compelling book examines how the rise of an illiberal China has affected the stability of the Western-dominated order through the lens of global development finance. David Skidmore demonstrates how China’s growing impact on the global development finance regime has produced competitive convergence rather than divergence, emphasizing the resilience of the liberal international order.

Skidmore discusses China’s emergence as a major source of development finance through strategies such as the Belt and Road initiative, the Asian Infrastructure Bank and the New Development Bank. Analysing measures at both bilateral and multilateral level, he investigates claims that China is exporting an economic model to the developing world and considers the successes and failures of such efforts. The book further explores Western responses to China’s growth, including the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment. It illustrates how competitive convergence has narrowed the gap between Western and Chinese practices, with emulation rather than differentiation resulting in a pattern of two-way socialization between East and West.

Students and scholars of political science, international relations, political economy, Asian politics and economics, and Chinese foreign policy will greatly benefit from the innovative insights of this book. It is also a vital resource for policymakers and practitioners working in aid and development.

This compelling book examines how the rise of an illiberal China has affected the stability of the Western-dominated order through the lens of global development finance. David Skidmore demonstrates how China’s growing impact on the global development finance regime has produced competitive convergence rather than divergence, emphasizing the resilience of the liberal international order.

‘Skidmore’s book provides a carefully researched corrective to those commentators that continue to characterise development competition as a Manichaean contest between an unchanging democratic West and an authoritarian China, with neither side learning nor adapting its approach. It also provides a useful background to China’s transition from a revolutionary power — whose aid program in the 1950s and 1960s was arguably a more genuine expression of its solidarity with countries in Africa and Asia — to the developing world’s largest bilateral creditor with a significant stake in many (but not all) elements of the existing order, not least being repaid. The section dealing with what China has learned and applied from its experience as one of Japan’s largest aid recipients during the 1970s and 1980s is particularly interesting.’

Table of Contents:

Contents
Acronyms
1 Divergence or convergence in the global development finance
regime?
2 The China challenge and the evolution of the global
development finance regime
3 The Belt and Road Initiative: A “China model” for the
developing world?
4 The Asian Infrastructure Bank and the New Development
Bank: China’s multilateral moves
5 Western responses to the China challenge
6 Competitive convergence and the future of the liberal
international order
References