Culture of aid : Chinese aid to Cambodia

Abstract

Cambodia is one of the poorest countries in Southeast Asia. The United Nations Human Development Index ranks Cambodia as 137 out of 182 countries in terms of quality of life. Cambodia is also an aid dependent country, with nearly half its annual budget coming from aid. Since the Paris Peace Accords in 1991 and subsequent United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) period, OECD-DAC (Development Assistance Committee) (or 'traditional') donors have entered Cambodia in large numbers. These traditional donors allocate aid according to the OECDDAC consensus. This consensus is based around international agreements such as the Millennium Development Goals, The Pahs Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and the Monterrey Consensus o f the International Conference on Financing fo r Development. The traditional donors have, since the early 1990s, created and dominated the aid 'culture' in Cambodia. Recently, however, another donor has come to the fore in Cambodia, and that is China. China has strong historical, social and economic links with Cambodia that go back to ancient times. China has been disbursing aid to Cambodia since the 1950s. However, it has only been since 2006 that China has come to the fore as an aid donor, due in part to the large amount of aid it is currently pledging to Cambodia but also to the growing role China is playing on the wider global stage. China is now one of the largest donors to (as well as investors in) Cambodia. China, however, is often considered a 'rogue' donor by the traditional donors both at the global scale and within Cambodia, as China does not conform with DAC policy on aid and development. This leads to certain representations of China that do not always accord with the 'realities' of China's aid program. This thesis explores aid cultures in Cambodia, in particular the encounter between Chinese aid and western aid. Theoretically this thesis situates itself at the intersection between (post)development geography and cultural geography, drawing on ideas such as representation and encounter to understand how Chinese and western aid come together in the context of Cambodia. By doing so, this thesis fills a gap in the existing literature by looking at aid as a culture, and exploring China's aid from a [post]development/cultural geography viewpoint, rather than an economic or international relations stance. Arising from this theoretical stance come three primary research questions: How do those with different cultural sets come together in certain contexts, namely aid; what cultural encounters do we see in this mix between traditional donors and new donors; how do discourses around 'the other' play into aid dialogues in Cambodia? This thesis investigates these research questions through qualitative methods, including interviews, discourse analysis and participant observation. Analysis is undertaken of western aid to Cambodia, with a focus on the history and statistics of aid, aid coordination, development policy and critiques of traditional aid in order to highlight the existing aid culture in Cambodia. An analysis is then undertaken of China's aid to Cambodia, looking at the aid figures and aid structure before investigating representations of China's aid and looking at an indicative case study of one Chinese aid project in Cambodia. Finally the encounter between western aid and Chinese aid is analysed with particular reference to three types of western aid actors in Cambodia and how they encounter and represent China and its aid program. Through the above investigation, three main findings are arrived at: a) that a particularly western aid culture has been created in Cambodia, one which can be seen as a 'site of knowledge' for western aid; b] that Chinese aid is deliberately constructed and represented in certain ways by the West for its own purposes much as Said (1995] outlined in his work Orientalism regarding the relationship between the West and 'the other'; and c) whilst global aid discourses influence the encounter between China and the West in Cambodia, Cambodia itself is not a passive player in this encounter, using it for its own advantage by playing off China and the western donors against one another.