An abridged version of this review essay, also discussing Paul Collier’s new book The Plundered Planet, appears on the Nation Media Group (Kenya)’s Africa Review website.

‘The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa’
by Deborah Brautigam, OUP (2009), 397 pp

Part of the Western world’s emotional response to China’s ‘rise’ has been a general alarm lest the Yellow Peril swarm across Africa in search of loot. It is as if there were a kind of Monroe Doctrine etched upon Western European and American hearts and minds: Africa is the proper sphere of influence of the white-majority Powers, ours alone to lecture, structurally adjust and bless with charity. No sooner does a Chinaman appear upon the savannah (actually, they’ve been around for decades, but few Westerners noticed them before) than we conclude that his ‘insatiable appetite for resources’ has brought him to strip-mine the continent, encouraging dictatorship, rampant corruption and exploitation along the way. Despite its unpromising title—how much longer must we endure Dragon, Tiger and Great Wall clichés?—Deborah Brautigam’s book is a useful antidote to such hysteria, correcting not just inherent bias but gross factual errors circulated by a string of prestigious media houses, international financial institutions, private think tanks and NGOs.

‘The Case for God: What Religion Really Means’
by Karen Armstrong, Bodley Head 2009, 376 pp

Visiting the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence half a dozen years ago my daughter, whose eight years of life had been spent in China, asked her mother who the guy hanging on the cross was. To the brief explanation that followed Tian Tian reacted with the genuine shock of one from whose eyes the scales have fallen, revealing the banality of the world: “God was a man!!!???” We took this at the time as intuitive, pre-teen feminism (Why not a woman, an Earth Mother figure?) Recently recalling the event, Tian Tian clarified that, on the contrary, her remark was ungendered: what boggled her mind was the thought that God could begin to resemble, let alone be, anything so idiotic as a human being. Before she could read more than a handful of English sentences, she had grasped an essential thread of Karen Armstrong’s theology; and, as we shall see, that almost certainly had much to do with growing up in China—and not just because of the relative dearth of Christian icons there.

Forthcoming in the June 2009 issue of New Internationalist (under the title ‘The Cultural Crusades’), this essay was commissioned as a discussion of the question whether, and how, China’s overseas Confucius Institutes are a manifestation of ‘soft power.’ It starts, however, by considering the changing fortunes of Confucianism within China.

Half way through my twelve years in China I discovered that an office manager I had just taken on spent his every free moment reading ancient Buddhist texts. At first I connected this to the trauma of a close shave with death in a car crash that had left him permanently disabled. But when I looked further I realized that the personal quest for meaning was widespread in our small office.

The following article was commissioned as an entry for the forthcoming Berkshire Encyclopedia of China.

Over the last 30 years, and with steadily gathering pace, an autonomous NGO community has developed in China. This has much in common with NGO communities elsewhere and seems to be a significant feature of China’s internationalization under ‘reform and opening’ policies introduced in the late 1970s. Yet in order to answer even so simple a question as how many NGOs there are in China today, it is necessary to note differences between international discourse and Chinese administrative taxonomy, and to know something of the evolution of China’s nonprofit sector.

In June 2008 I was invited by the pressure group, Human Rights in China (HRIC), to serve as guest editor for an issue of their quarterly journal, China Rights Forum. The piece below is an introductory article, discussing the role of human rights organizations like HRIC, that I contributed in my capacity as invited editor. HRIC declined to publish the article, offering instead to publish a truncated version comprising the first four paragraphs followed by one or two sentences selected from the subsequent text. I did not consent to this arrangement so the article sees the light for the first time here.

Various Western commentators have noted a resurgence of ‘Confuciansim’ in China. But will Chinese youngsters buy into it? This essay, which appears in China Rights Forum (2008, No. 3), discusses other influences at work on younger generations: smaller family size; increased access to education; wider exposure to culturally demotic media; increased personal freedom and responsibility. It concludes that 21st century Chinese will certainly differ from their ancestors substantially (although in ways that are not easily predictable); and that a neo-Confucian discourse need not imply either loss of cultural diversity and experimentation or reversion to cultural type. (This was written in my capacity as guest editor of the journal. Unlike my ‘guest editor intro’ piece, which the journal’s publisher, Human Rights In China, declined to use, this was published with only minor modifications.)

China’s economic renaissance and renewed cultural confidence have not yet been matched by a creative re-awakening. So argues this review essay, which considers the comparative globalisation of ‘Eng Lit,’ departing from an unpretentious detective story set in Shanghai.

This April 2008 e-interview with the US-based Grantmakers without Borders provided an opportunity to offer detailed answers to very frequently asked questions: what is the nature of civil society in China, the growth trajectory and challenges facing NGOs, the influence of foreign organisations—and what part in this was China Development Brief trying to play?

Reflexive sinophobia may be self-fulfilling for it risks strengthening the forces within China that are opposed to political reform. So argues the essay that follows, which was written in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics and published, with the title ‘Altered Images’ in Index on Censorship (Volume 37 No. 2, 2008).

The following paper was commissioned by the Asia Pacific Philanthropy Consortium for a conference in Vietnam in May, 2008. [Endnote 1]. It serves as an update for—but does not need to be read in conjunction with—an earlier book chapter also distributed at the conference: Philanthropic Links Between the Chinese Diaspora and the People's Republic of China, co-authored by June Shih, which appeared in Diaspora Philanthropy and Equitable Development in China and India (Geithner P F, Chen L C, Johnson PD eds., 2005, Harvard University Press.)