Africa and China: How it all began

This is the first of a series of articles looking at one of the most talked about issues in Africa right now – China’s ever-burgeoning investment in the continent. In this post, LSE’s Dr Chris Alden looks at how China’s interest in Africa was born

Understanding debt and diplomacy: China, 'debt traps' and development in the Global South

China, held up as an unabashed supporter of non-conditional finance for rapid development in the Global South, is accused by the US government and other Western leaders of using massive loans to saddle developing economies with unsustainable debt, seemingly playing to Beijing’s foreign policy goals. Citing examples as wideranging as Sri Lanka and Kenya, critics contend that unrestricted borrowing—the keystone of Chinese influence in many parts of low-income developing and emerging countries—undermines prospects for sustainable development and even is a deliberate policy tool to acquire strategic assets in these countries. The use of development assistance in the form of loans, grants, and other forms of economic engagement with another country is characterised by International Relations scholars as ‘economic statecraft’. Understanding the general use of debt as an instrument of economic statecraft, as well as its appropriation and application by China in the emblematic cases in Global South, is crucial to any assessment of its significance for Latin America and the Caribbean. This policy brief, therefore, explores the historical and contemporary context of debt-trap diplomacy, its application as part of China’s economic statecraft and, finally, assesses the significance of development finance and debt for the region

Temporal articulatory stability, phonological variation, and lexical contrast preservation in diaspora Tibetan

This dissertation examines how lexical tone can be represented with articulatory gestures, and the ways a gestural perspective can inform synchronic and diachronic analysis of the phonology and phonetics of a language. Tibetan is chosen an example of a language with interacting laryngeal and tonal phonology, a history of tonogenesis and dialect diversification, and recent contact-induced realignment of the tonal and consonantal systems. Despite variation in voice onset time (VOT) and presence/absence of the lexical tone contrast, speakers retain a consistent relative timing of consonant and vowel gestures. Recent research has attempted to integrate tone into the framework of Articulatory Phonology through the addition of tone gestures. Unlike other theories of phonetics-phonology, Articulatory Phonology uniquely incorporates relative timing as a key parameter. This allows the system to represent contrasts instantiated not just in the presence or absence of gestures, but also in how gestures are timed with each other. Building on the different predictions of various timing relations, along with the historical developments in the language, hypotheses are generated and tested with acoustic and articulatory experiments. Following an overview of relevant theory, the second chapter surveys past literature on the history of sound change and present phonological diversity of Tibetic dialects. Whereas Old Tibetan lacked lexical tone, contrasted voiced and voiceless obstruents, and exhibited complex clusters, a series of overlapping sound changes have led to some modern varieties that are tone, lack clusters, and vary in the expression of voicing and aspiration. Furthermore, speakers in the Tibetan diaspora use a variety that has grown out of the contact between diverse Tibetic dialects. The state of the language and the dynamics of diaspora have created a situation ripe for sound change, including the recombination of elements from different dialects and, potentially, the loss of tone contrasts. The nature of the diaspora Tibetan is investigated through an acoustic corpus study. Recordings made in Kathmandu, Nepal, are being transcribed and forced-aligned into a useful audio corpus. Speakers in the corpus come from diverse backgrounds across and outside traditional Tibetan-speaking regions, but the analysis presented here focuses on speakers who grew up in diaspora, with a mixed input of Standard Tibetan (spyi skad) and other Tibetan varieties. Especially notable among these speakers is the high variability of voice onset time (VOT) and its interaction with tone. An analysis of this data in terms of the relative timing of oral, laryngeal, and tone gestures leads to the generation of hypotheses for testing using articulatory data. The articulatory study is conducted using electromagnetic articulography (EMA), and six Tibetan-speaking participants. The key finding is that the relative timing of consonant and vowel gestures is consistent across phonological categories and across speakers who do and do not contrast tone. This result leads to the conclusion that the relative timing of speech gestures is conserved and acquired independently. Speakers acquire and generalize a limited inventory of timing patterns, and can use timing patterns even when the conditioning environment for the development of those patterns, namely tone, has been lost

Comparative study of Costa Rica, Argentina, Malaysia, Djibouti and their complex relationship with China: advantages, disadvantages and lessons learned

This study provides a cross-country comparative analysis of China’s development finance policies and foreign policy practices to identify patterns of conduct within the sector and across regions as well as of differences in this conduct. Using both primary and secondary sources, we analyze the cases of Costa Rica, Argentina, Malaysia, and Djibouti and their complex relationship with Beijing. We find that China’s modus operandi in these countries has some telling similarities that help us understand how Beijing operates in the global South

Twitter and digital diplomacy: China and COVID-19

This Strategic Update explores how official Chinese foreign policy entities have used Twitter as a public diplomacy platform during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the nature of their Twitter activity, and what this means for Chinese Twitter Diplomacy in the future

Chinese investment in North Africa should be viewed as an opportunity not a threat

LSE’s Chris Alden and Faten Aggard Clerx of ECDPM urge North African leaders to think of a smart solution that would allow them to derive the full benefit from Chinese investments

Enhancing efforts at global digital governance: recommendations to the G20

This policy brief highlights the challenges in attaining effective global digital governance. These include uncertainty regarding the ethical, operational, and strategic implications of digital technologies, and limited avenues for private sector expertise. The G20 is well-placed to effect meaningful change in global digital governance. The brief proposes three recommendations: (1) the establishment of a scientific advisory committee, which is intended to be an honest (knowledge) broker and fill gaps in subject matter expertise; (2) the formation of a public-private partnership task force to stuck and provide recommendations based on previous experiences with multilateralism and global governance that have successfully incorporated private sector expertise; and (3) the launch of a new Sherpa Track initiative that will serve as a platform for senior leaders to discuss global digital governance topics. By adopting these recommendations, the G20 can effectively enhance global digital governance efforts and contribute to a more stable and secure world

Africa and China: Will Africa be affected by the slowdown in China’s economic growth?

As China’s economic growth continues to slow down, should Africa be worried? LSE’s China-Africa expert, Dr Chris Alden gives his point of view

Simulation of Creep in Micron Scale Crystalline Materials for High Temperature Thermal Protection Systems

The use of thermal barrier coatings over the past few decades has significantly improved the performance of gas turbine engines by reducing the operating temper-ature of engine components. However, these multilayer systems are not able to be used to their full potential due to the difficulty of accurately modeling the complex interplay of physical phenomena, such as creep and oxidation, that contribute to failure. In order to address this issue, more physics-based failure prediction models need to be developed. One potential way to do this is through the use of dislocation dynamics (DD) models. A DD framework was recently developed which incorporates high temperature effects such as vacancy diffusion assisted dislocation climb in ad-dition to dislocation glide. However, the effects of certain parameters on simulations of dislocation creep had been unexplored. In particular, the effect of the distance required for a dislocation to climb to a new slip plane, the critical climb distance, was not evaluated and the vacancy relaxation volume was set at zero, negating its effect on the calculation of vacancy diffusion. The present work aims to address this by studying the effect of the critical climb distance and the vacancy relaxation volume on the creep response of micron scale single crystals. The critical climb distance was found to have an approximately inversely proportional effect on the steady state creep rate, but did not affect the stress dependence of the creep rate, while the use of a nonzero vacancy relaxation volume was found to have a slight effect on both the steady state creep rate and the stress dependence of the creep rate. Furthermore, the use of a nonzero vacancy relaxation volume introduced the effect of the pressure gradient into the vacancy diffusion simulation