At the same time, another important aspect of the current concern is the influence of China’s increasing presence in African peace and security affairs on the security situation of the African continent. In July 2012, the Fifth Ministerial Meeting of the Forum of China Africa Cooperation was held in Beijing. In this meeting China proposed to launch a “China-Africa Peace and Security Cooperation Partnership Initiative” to further strengthen China’s cooperation with Africa in the areas of peace and security. This new initiative, raising high expectations from the international community of China’s role in Africa’s peace and security affairs made the trend of Chinese policy towards Africa’s peace and security in the future become a new topic.

There are two kinds of representative opinions among scholars responding to the topic. One is that China will maintain a conservative stance in African security affairs and will largely adapt to the unstable situation in Africa rather than try to reshape it.[②] The other is that China will construct a new paradigm of peace building and play an increasingly active role in peace and security affairs in Africa.[③] In the view of the author, in order to grasp the trend of China’s policy towards African peace and security affairs, it is necessary to understand the structural logic of China’s policy. The author proposes domestic perspective of understanding foreign policy to understand and analyze China’s Africa policy in peace and security. China’s basic experience of maintaining internal stability is putting development the first priority, so China’s idea on attaining peace can be summarized as “developmental peace”, which is different from the liberal peace idea based on western countries’ experience. Influenced by this concept, China’s policy towards Africa in peace and security assumes some distinctive features, which can be termed the “sovereignty plus development” model. The trend of China’s policy towards African peace and security is expanding and deepening the Sino-African cooperation under the structure of this model.

This paper is divided into five sections. The next section discusses the international sources of developmental peace concept; the following section reviews and summarizes China’s experiences in maintaining the internal order and stability of society, then puts forward the Chinese concept of developmental peace to summarize these experiences. The fourth section analyzes the nature and characteristics of China’s Africa policy in peace and security guided by the “developmental peace” concept. The final section predicts the future trend of China’s policy.

I. International Background and Sources of Developmental Peace Concept

Currently, the international practice of peace operations through which outsiders are involved in one country’s internal conflict is an important composite of global security governance. This kind of peace operations are usually led by the UN or some regional organizations, taking on various forms including peace-enforcing, peacekeeping, peace building and post-conflict reconstruction. Because of Western countries’ dominating position, the liberal peace model has long dominated the peace operations practice. One important feature of liberal peacekeeping is placing emphasis on the use of military means. Early UN peace missions were essentially focused on military factors such as the inter-positioning of peacekeepers between warring factions. Gueli argue that, as a rule, this entailed separating warring factions from each other and assisting the withdrawal and assembly of opposing factions from cease-fire lines, without effectively addressing long-term development and peace building activities.[④]

The post-Cold War history has proven that this traditional UN approach to peace interventions has generally attained limited success and that conflict often breaks out as soon as peacekeeping forces withdraw. The chances of successful peace interventions have proven to be even lower when warring parties fight for the control over valuable natural resources. The UN conducted research in this regard and the results indicated that 60% of African countries emerging from conflict stand to relapse into conflict. It has become evident that the traditional process of focusing on establishing security first, and then addressing developmental issues, proves to be inadequate to effectively address modern complex emergencies.[⑤] In response to this, the UN introduced some changes in terms of approaches to peacekeeping operations with the aim of addressing some of the underlying causes of conflict during the early stages of a mission. These changes were introduced following the findings of the Report of the Panel on UN Peace Operations in 2000 – also known as the Brahimi Report.

The Brahimi Report encouraged the UN to update its peacekeeping doctrine and strategies to lay the foundations for peace-building. It also emphasized the need for a more integrated post-conflict peace-building strategy. The report prescribed that the revised strategies for peacekeeping and peace-building need to combine in the field to produce more effective complex peace operations. By expanding the concept of peacekeeping beyond conventional military operations, the Brahimi Report gives some recognition to the underplayed role and untapped potential that initial development work can bring to address the causes of conflict and to prevent the recurrence of conflict. As part of the transformation that took place in the UN system, following the recommendations of the Brahimi Report, the UN made several structural changes to its organizational framework in order to play a more coordinating role in peace-building activities. In December 2005, the UN established the Peace-building Commission (PBC) as an inter-governmental body. The establishment of the PBC was based on the fact that nearly 50% of the countries in which the UN had intervened, had slid back into conflict within five years of signing the peace agreement. This phenomenon has primarily been ascribed to the lack of effective coordination of activities, the lack of sustained commitment, poor financing and funding gaps and poor coordination of peace-building activities.[⑥] Consequently, as part of the development in terms of UN peace missions, the so-called complex peace operations came up. The term is used by the UN to denote the inclusion of peace-building mandates into peacekeeping operations. Apart from the monitored ceasefire agreement and patrolled buffer zones, complex UN peace operations were expanded to include the organization of election, the disarmament and demobilization of combatants and especially assisting in post-conflict reconstruction.

Complex peace operations highlight systematic thinking and integrated approach. In comparison with traditional peace operations, the critical change in the current complex peace mission model or the integrated missions model is increasingly focused on the development-security nexus. The international community has realized that social and economic development are fundamental to internal order and stability. Realizing the significance of development in peace operations, some scholars try to put forward another important concept, developmental peace missions (DPMs). The concept of DPMs is defined as a post-conflict reconstruction intervention that aims to achieve sustainable levels of human security through a combination of interventions aimed at accelerating capacity-building and socio-economic development, which would ultimately result in the dismantling of war economies and conflict systems, and replacing them with globally competitive peace economies.[⑦] According to Gueli, the application of a systems-approach to address conflict will enable decision-makers to effectively identify the most important activities and relationships in a manner that is useful for the development of policy to ensure sustainable development and peace on the African continent.[⑧] Essentially, the concept of DPMs is rooted in the following assumptions: speed and momentum do matter in peace missions; effective peace missions require integrated efforts; security and development are intimately linked (however, the one is not necessarily a precursor for the other); launching development and reconstruction work as soon as possible (even when conflict is continuing) can be a major incentive for peace; the window of opportunity to avert a return to conflict is very narrow; and effective targeting of this “window” or “reconstruction gap” requires that civilian reconstruction experts deploy alongside security forces.[⑨] DPMs should therefore be defined not only as peace interventions, but also in effect, as “reconstruction interventions” that aim to achieve sustainable levels of human security through a combination of initiatives by the military and civilian components that are aimed at accelerating capacity-building and socio-economic development.

II. Experiences of Achieving Internal Order and Stability in China

Through briefly reviewing the history of the UN peace operations, we can easily see that international peace missions are shifting from putting most of attention and resources into military and political sectors to assisting host country emerging from the internal conflict with social and economic development. Developmental factors are becoming more and more significant and outstanding in the agenda of current peace operations. As the result of the trend, the theory of developmental peace mission is proposed by some western scholars. It is very interesting that this direction is coinciding with China’s experience of maintaining internal order and stability in China.  The following part will review and summarize China’s experiences so as to understand China’s policy towards Africa in peace and security.

The basic premise of understanding China’s role in Africa's peace and security affairs from the domestic perspective is that one country’s international peace intervention policy is a kind of projection of domestic peace experience onto foreign countries. Based on this assumption, not only can we explain and understand Chinese policy towards Africa in security and peace, but we can also better understand international peace intervention policy led by the West and the differences between China and the West in peace intervention policies. Obviously, according to this perspective plus other interactive factors in the Sino-African relationship, we can also make reasonable analysis and forecast about recent trends of Chinese policy. This section discusses China’s experiences in achieving social stability since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, especially since the starting of political and economic reform and opening-up policy. There are at least four pieces of experiences.

The first one is promoting stability through development. In the era of Mao Zedong, although the new China established the independent national economic system, the national economic development had been interfered by the political factors. The politicization of national development, from the “counter-insurgency” campaign (sufan yundong) to the anti rightist movement (fan you yundong) initiated at the Mount Lu Meeting and the ten-years-long "Cultural Revolution” (wenhua sa geming), had seriously impeded China's national economy development process, resulting in unfavorable situation that the country was in the predicament and crisis. Deng Xiaoping initiated the new era of China's reform and opening up, established the basic route of the party that takes economic construction as the center of Communist Party of China’s (CPC) work, beginning to shift the focus of the CPC onto economic development. Consequently, China began gradually to step onto the track of fast development. After that China continued the political legacy of the Deng Xiaoping era that takes development as the most important task. In the Jiang Zemin era, development was regarded as the key to solve all problems in China, designated as the first important task of the Communist Party. In the Hu Jintao era, he invented the scientific development concept, which stressed development was still the most important task of China.[⑩] “The Chinese Dream” proposed by Xi Jinping is actually a rich, strong and prosperous blueprint, which insists taking economic development as the core task. Reviewing from the founding of new China to the era of reform and opening up, and still to date, both the positive facts and the negative ones convince China of a piece of fundamental experience that development is the most important task and development can bring about peace and stability. Since the political reform such as the democratic process and so on made relatively little progress, the development has become the most basic means to maintain and consolidate the regime legitimacy of the Communist Party of China.

The second experience of China in achieving security and stability is subordinating the political democratic reform to national stability. China believes that hasty democratization, particularly radical western-style democracy, is not suitable for China because it could produce a destructive effect on peace and stability in China. This experience is mainly drawn from the domestic and international experience in the early 1990s. China believes that, the reason why it can largely maintain domestic political stability in the post-Cold War era is that it stood upright in the third democratization wave impelled by the West immediately after the Cold War. On the contrary, due to the new thinking of liberalism the Soviet Union and East European countries’ Communist regimes collapsed. Consequently, these countries fell into political turmoil and economic difficulties which lasted more than 10 years. Based on the experience of the two sides, China insists that democracy should be a kind of gradual process while radical democracy is likely to lead China into unpredictable turmoil. Based on aforementioned perceptions, China adopted gradual and conservative political reform measures, including inner-party democracy, political decentralization, and the rule of law, etc. Among them, the most important policy measure is absorbing the emerging economic and intellectual elites into government’s decision-making system. Some scholars summarized political reform in China as “democracy of governance techniques” (zhidao mingzhu).[11] some scholars summarized China’s experiences of political development ever since the Deng Xiaoping era as “administrative arrangement instead of political reform” (xingzheng xina zhengzhi) or “administranization of politics”, thinking that it is a set of deliberate system arrangement in which the increasing need of new elites is met while necessary consideration is pay to vulnerable groups.[12] So far, at least, China's gradual reform of authoritarian political system has achieved considerable success, which not only consolidated the state power, but also generally maintained the peace and stability of the society.

The third important experience is strengthening the power of the state while weakening social forces. Since the 1980s, the basic line of the Communist Party of China is usually summarized as “one center plus two basic points”. Among them, one very important point is to uphold and strengthen the leadership of the Communist party of China. The Chinese government under the leadership of the CPC controls vast political and economical resources and has strong capacity for action. Meanwhile, the strategy of the Chinese government to treat social groups is rigid control. Under this kind of control, dependent non-government organizations are permitted to exist and develop, while all independent NGOs are not permitted to grow freely no matter whether they have assumed the tendency of rebellion against the government or whether they have committed the act of rebellion. In this environment, the social forces absolutely independent of government do not exist.[13] This ruling strategy cast the state-society relationship in China into a kind of “strong state-weak society” model.

China’s fourth experience in maintaining prosperity and stability is to uphold sovereignty and in the process of national development. This point is reflected in China’s strong sense of sovereignty and the principle on safeguarding sovereignty and being self-reliant. In the early years of new China, China followed two basic principles, including “constructing a new kitchen” (ling qi luzhao), “clean the room before treat the guest” to established new diplomatic relations, which were intended to eliminate the legacy of imperialism and establish and develop new diplomatic relations with other countries on the basis of sovereignty principle. In the Mao Zedong era Chinese diplomacy insisted on maintaining the autonomy and avoiding to be dominated by two external powers including the US and the Soviet Union regardless of the cost of “striking two enemies with two fists” (liangge quantou daren). After the reform and opening up, China began to integrate into the international system in the process of modernization. China always adheres to national autonomy.[14] In the process of reform and opening, state sovereignty and security are always put in the first place and become one important precondition of all other reform measures.

III. Developmental Peace Thesis and China’s Policy Towards Africa in Peace and Security

Based on the experiences in maintaining social order and domestic stability in the past 60 years, especially during the past 35 years in implementing the reform and opening policy, China constructed its own perception of domestic peace, which was different from the liberal peace thesis. It can be termed developmental peace or peace through development. As a kind of distinctive idea, the developmental peace thesis believes that social and economic development is the fundamental way to sustainable domestic peace. Meanwhile, it also places emphasis on gradual political and social reform and strengthening of national sovereignty in the process of advancing political and economic development. China’s developmental peace idea is different from the liberal peace thesis based on the Western experiences. Western countries’ experiences in attaining internal peace and stability are generally summarized as the liberal model which includes two central things, democratization plus marketization. In international peace intervention operations, the West usually extends their experiences into those African countries emerging from internal conflict and war. As a consequence, the West’s peace intervention policy always emphasizes immediate democratization and institution-building in post-conflict environment. However, directed by the developmental peace idea, China’s policy towards Africa in peace and security is very different from the West’s policy. It put special emphasis on effect of autonomy and social economy development on conflict resolutions and post-conflict reconstruction, so it can be termed the sovereignty plus development model. This kind of policy model has some distinctive features.

First, it highlights African ownership and sovereignty in conflict management and post-conflict reconstructions on the continent. Not only is this point embodied in China’s policy discourse in many international multilateral conferences and forums, but it is also reflected in China’s practice of participating in peacekeeping and post-conflict reconstruction in Africa. On April 26, 2013, Amb. Li Baodong, then China’s permanent representative to the UN, made the remarks at a thematic debate of the UN General Assembly entitled “the peaceful resolution of conflicts in Africa” to urge active support for Africa’s peace endeavor. He stated that “African people understand more deeply the issues existing on their own continent, African parties involved in local conflict are inclined to accept mediation and peace proposal conducted by the mediators from their own continent. The international community should have faith in the wisdom and experience of the African people, fully listen to their voices, respect Africa’s will and comprehensively and actively support Africa’s endeavor to resolve the African problems in the African way”.[15] In the practice of participating in peacekeeping in Africa, China insists on sovereignty and non-intervention principle. However, this seemingly conservative position does not mean that China never engages with African countries or other actors in internal peace and conflicts issues in Africa. On the contrary, China often participates in peace operations on the continent including peacekeeping and peace-building led by the African Union or the United Nations. Furthermore, with the expanding interests in recent years, it is playing a larger role in African conflict management.[16] Admittedly, while taking part in peace operations in Africa, China pursues multi-literalism principle in most of peace-support operations, which is reflected in the attitude of respecting AU’s position. Sometimes, China also pursues bilateralism principle to exert influence on some African countries’ domestic politics. China’s role in Darfur’s conflict resolution in the early ten years of the new century is a case to the point. Either in the former situation or the latter, China always holds a consistent attitude of mutual equality and respect towards African countries or regional organizations.

Secondly, China highlights the concept of peace through development, while holding prudent position on institution-building and hasty democratic election in post-conflict countries in Africa. China’s developmental peace thesis insists that social economic development is the most important precondition of sustainable internal peace, so it prefers helping African countries with national development rather than hasty democratization so as to build the basis of long and stable peace. The distinctiveness of the “peace through development” strategy is not only embodied in the fact that China places development cooperation at the heart of its strategy towards Africa, but it is also reflected in the fact that it focuses most of its resources on basic areas in the activities of peacekeeping and peace-building in Africa, which is termed the infrastructure-constructing model. This model invests most of political and economic resource in building roads, bridges and hospitals while channels few resource to superstructure area such as institution-building, urging hurried democratic election, etc.[17]

Thirdly, as far as conflict resolution approach is concerned, China insists on maintaining national unity and territorial integrity, highlights equal negotiation to resolve conflict peacefully, opposes the use of coercive means and making prescription from outside to settle dispute and build peace in conflict-suffering African countries. On the contrary, western countries, dominated by the liberal peace thesis, are inclined to coercive and divisive means to contain violence and make peace. Those differences are reflected in many cases including Eritrea issue, Kosovo issue and South Sudan issue. Currently, the West also suggests divisive policy to resolve conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Fourthly, China places emphasis on cooperation with host governments of African countries and the African Union, while relatively neglecting interactions with Civil Society Organizations. This point is a kind of projection of China’s traditional thinking model based on the reality of “strong state - wake society” in China onto the African continent. By doing so, China expects that this kind of cooperation between the Chinese government and African authority agents can bring peace to the continent. However, notably, the state-society relations in most of African countries are very different from the ones in China. “Strong society - weak state” model features most of African countries. Many societal organizations including non-governmental organizations, trade unions, tribe groups, even anti-government forces, are the same important actors as the government which can shape the situation of peace or conflict in relevant African countries. Therefore, China’s government-to-government cooperation model is not well-suited to the local environment in African countries.[18]

IV. Developmental Peace and Future of China’s Security Policy Towards Africa

Obviously, there is a big difference between China’s security policy towards Africa under the guidance of the developmental peace concept and the West’s peace intervention policy in Africa under the guidance of the liberal peace concept. Currently, the liberal peace thesis based on Western countries’ experience largely dominated the international peace intervention practices including preventive diplomacy, peacekeeping and peace-building in Africa. Despite the dominative influence of the Western liberal peace thesis, China’s increasing involvement in African peace and security affairs begins to make some difference. Some scholars suggest that China is starting to construct a new paradigm for international peace intervention practices in Africa.[19] In fact, the two peace intervention paradigms have already begun to interact and exerted influence on each other. More importantly, because of poor performance of international peace-building dominated by the liberal peace thesis in Africa, the international community and Africa begin to emphasize the autonomy of Africa, African indigenous tradition and resource of conflict management. The trend of China’s policy towards Africa in peace and security in future is an important issue to be considered against the background of multiple interactions between the internal factor of the continent and the external factor, between the West and China. The West expects China to be more deeply involved in African conflict management including conflict mediation, peacekeeping and peace-building, to play a greater role in African peace and security affairs on the premise of accepting Western norms. Africa appreciates China’s security policy for its respecting African autonomy and ownership in conflict resolution operations; meanwhile they also hope China to participate more deeply in the internal affairs of African continent and provide more constructive assistance to promote peace, development, good governance in Africa. Under the pressure of two kinds of expectation, what is the trend of China’s peace and security policy towards Africa?

This paper argues that the trend of China’s policy towards Africa in peace and security are primarily shaped by China’s developmental peace concept, China’s expanding and deepening interests in Africa, and the complicated interaction between the three sides including the West, Africa and China. First, in order to protect its expanding interests in Africa, China will be more widely and deeply involved in African continent in peace and security affairs. In addition to participation in peacekeeping operations in Africa, China will more often and more extensively engage in conflict mediation, conflict resolution, and post-conflict reconstruction, for currently African countries’ internal conflict, coups or civil war has tied tightly up with Chinese economic security and personnel security. Just as Chen Jian, the former Chinese Ambassador to the UN , said, “In the past, unrest, civil war, military coups and so on, which took place far in the other side of the earth, have no direct association with Chinese interest, China can hold detached attitude towards them. However, from now on, the situation has changed greatly”.[20] In the end of 2008, China actively pushed the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda to resolve the conflict in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.[21]Two Chinese Special Representatives for African Affairs, Liu Guijin and Zhong Jianhua, respectively conduct fruitful mediation in the former Darfur issue and current two Sudanese relations issue. Those reflect that China has begun to play an active and constructive role in African conflict prevention and mediation. China’s successful experience in those areas will encourage China to continue to play a more constructive role in African conflict prevention and mediation by the means of special envoy diplomacy or others alike. In the area of peace-building, China will expand the scope of participation, go beyond the previous “road construction, hospital and bridge building” mode, participate in more extensive activities such as peace and security professionals training, youth profession training, helping repatriate combatants, providing opportunities of employment, etc. For China, these activities are feasible for China’s capability and resource. Meanwhile, those social works are in the domain of low politics so they will not risk breaking the principle of non-intervention to sovereignty of African countries. It should be noted that some Western scholars argue that China holds a completely detached attitude towards military coups and conflict in Africa, regards military coup as a normal phenomenon of African politics and try to accept and adapt to it rather than strive to create African political stability. This opinion, if not completely wrong, is at least partly wrong. In fact, China has begun to take coping with African countries’ internal political instability into consideration in recent years.

As far as the peace concept is concerned, China’s policy towards African peace and security affairs will still be subject to the developmental peace concept. On the other hand, since peacekeeping and peace-building operations on African continent, which is dominated by Western liberal peace concept, contribute not too much to conflict resolution in Africa, so China will not simply and blindly engage in those kinds of international peace operations which prioritize liberal project, but continue to focus on the part of economic and social development projects in peacekeeping and peace-building industry. China will continue holding cautious attitude to institution-building, legality construction and democratic elections in emerging post-conflict countries. In other words, China will not abandon the philosophy of its own characteristics to accept the Western concept of liberal peace. It means that the principle of non-intervention will be retained in China’s policy towards Africa, meanwhile China’s attitude towards African peace and security affairs will be more positive; its policy will be more flexible, assuming initiative, creativity and constructiveness.[22] In the year of 2012, the Chinese government cooperated with Angolan police to jointly crack down on Chinese criminal gangs in Angola, which created a new mode of cooperation in domestic security affairs. However, it is nearly unimaginable that China sets up military bases in Africa or conduct unilateral military interference with African countries.

From the perspective of the interaction between China, Africa and the West, China will be more respectful of African ownership and indigenous culture of conflict management, rather than simply accept or reject the liberal peace concept of Western countries and international institutions. In this respect, China seems to be like a materialist or realist, the West seems to be like arrogant idealist, while Africa is like a pragmatist. The future of peace in Africa will be a result of interaction of all variety of external forces. In the light of the strength of the Western hegemony, it is difficult for China to replace the liberal peace thesis with the developmental peace concept to dominate African conflict management process, while the proportion of development factor in African conflict management will increase in the future.

Source of documents：Global Review