In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • South-South Transfer: A Study of Sino-African Exchanges
  • James Gao (bio)
Sandra Gillespie. South-South Transfer: A Study of Sino-African Exchanges. New York: Routledge, 2001. xiv, 263 pp. Hardcover $70.00, ISBN 0-8153-3870-8.

Sandra Gillespie's South-South Transfer is a welcome contribution to the understanding of the South-South dimension of international transfer of knowledge, which has largely been overlooked in the literature. Drawing on individual and group interviews, Gillespie presents the first detailed description and interpretation of the African student experience in China.

Gillespie structures her study around twelve chapters, discussing two major themes. The first is the goals and motivation of the South-South transfer. The author begins her examination of the Chinese initiative toward academic exchanges with Africa by reviewing the literature on Mao Zedong's Third World policy. Unfortunately, most works on Chinese foreign policy focus on China's relations with the superpowers, and there is not enough research on the author's subject specialty that can offer in-depth analyses of change and continuity in Sino-African relations in different periods. Actually, the author's division of Mao's African policy into three phases—the Peaceful Coexistence of the 1950s, the Revolution of the 1960s, and the Grand Alliance of the 1970s (pp. 8-22)—is subject to challenge. Although it is right to say that the focus of China's African policy shifted from time to time, from place to place, and from actor to actor, the author also emphasizes [End Page 419] that China's unchanging goal in Africa was to create a united "coalition among new independent countries [so as to] manoeuvre China out of isolation and secure its position in the world" (p. 10). Despite some failures and setbacks caused by China's simplistic tactics and misinterpretation of world trends as well as its own inability to pursue its goals in several periods, China was, overall, successful in forming and implementing its policy toward African countries, winning itself much-needed friends. African support was vital to China in regaining its seat at the United Nations, for example. From this policy standpoint, we can understand China's objectives and the motivation of its "intellectual aid program in Africa."

Gillespie investigates the personal motivations of the African students who went to China to study. The often-cited factors include obtaining a scholarship, getting a chance to see the world, and enjoying China's facilities and course offerings (p. 90). The author also discusses the employment motivation of the students, for employment prospects were usually related to academic achievement. Nevertheless, other sources reported that the degrees offered at Chinese institutions of higher learning were not, as were the degrees offered by Western countries, always fully recognized in Africa. The reader may be curious to know whether opportunities to go to China and the West were equally available and whether the African students would have chosen China if they had had an alternative. Gillespie's discussion of the proposed strategy of international knowledge transfer for the Third World (the "peripheral" areas) by Ali Mazrui explains the general motivation of many governments and scholars in Africa to seek South-South intellectual exchanges: "The peripheral universities [in Africa] counter the domination of knowledge from the center [the West] by the following three strategies: domestication, diversification, and counter penetration" (p. 36).

The second major theme of this book is to evaluate China's training program for African students according to the framework of the World Order Models Project by Galtung and Mazrui. Since 1949, China has admitted approximately 4, 570 African exchange students. Gillespie examines the lives of 133 of these students from twenty-nine African nations, pursuing degrees in more than twelve disciplines at fourteen Chinese universities in four cities. Her findings are largely informed by the voices of the African students.

Most African students, undergraduate and graduate, spoke about racial discrimination as the very first "essential element" in their "daily frustrations." In China, they felt alienated, shunned, and sometimes insulted. According to Gillespie, they experienced this kind of pressure at all levels of Chinese society, "from the rural village to the urban campus, from the street digger to...

pdf