Search

China has evolved into an important provider of resources for developing countries, encompassing capital, know-how and expertise. China has also actively worked to strengthen diplomatic ties with developing regions since the early 2000s. Against this backdrop, the governments in many developing countries have moved to incorporate China as a significant factor in their geopolitical and geoeconomic considerations. Under the rule of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP), Turkey has also sought to foster relations with China, particularly since the early 2010s. This pursuit has been further triggered by Ankara's strained relations with the United States and the European Union. Turkish political leadership envisions China as a potentially crucial partner that could enhance the country's autonomy in relation to the West. While this expectation has not entirely materialized so far, there is an ongoing debate regarding the extent to which China can potentially be a transformative actor in Turkey's position within the international order. This paper contributes to this debate by locating Turkey-China engagement within a broader context of China's power and influence in the developing world. The paper suggests that the potential for Turkey's cooperation with China is likely to remain relatively limited for the foreseeable future. This is not only due to Turkey's deeply rooted ties with the West, but also because of the nature of China's global power, which is more partial and not as deep as commonly assumed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely agreed that recent decades have witnessed a power shift towards the emerging economies. Yet the magnitude of the power shift and its implications for the global economic order are much contested. For some, the diffusion of power has been changing the power relations between the global North and global South as well as within the global South. For others, the emerging economies do not pose a significant challenge to the global North's dominance in the global political economy as the latter continues to hold structural power advantages in technology, finance, and institutional capacity. This paper contributes to this debate by analysing the changing power relations in the field of development cooperation. As shown by recent work, Chinese development finance, combining a massive scale, global reach, and distinctive modalities, has reshaped the global landscape of development finance. This paper offers an interpretation of this transformation with a focus on power relations. It argues that Chinese development finance has not only decreased the ability of Western development finance institutions to influence policy agendas and preferences in the developing world, but also eroded the latter's power to shape the governance, norms, and modalities of development cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interpretations of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) mostly agree that it is a policy opening that offers some remedies for China's economic and security challenges, as well as reflects China's increasing regional and global ambitions. This paper argues that the multiple drivers characterizing the BRI result from the multiple identities of China as a developing country struggling with several sources of instability and macroeconomic problems and, simultaneously, a regional and an emerging power, and finally a major global power with significant economic capacity to shape the global economic order. The paper aims to substantiate the entanglement of the defensive and ambitious motivations behind the BRI by examining the background against which the Chinese Communist Party leadership has suggested it. In so doing, it draws on Chinese official policy documents and statistics, speeches from Chinese leaders and existing social-scientific research on the transformation of China's economic and political landscape in recent years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]