The Myth of China's No Strings Attached Development Assistance: A Caribbean Case Study by Theodor Tudoroiu with Amanda R. Ramlogan (review)

Several scholars have enthusiastically defined China's emergence as an alternative donor as a "silent revolution" in the international development cooperation landscape, predominantly because Chinese development assistance lacks the political and economic conditionality that characterizes "traditional" donors' foreign aid. Due to its unconditional nature, they claim, Chinese development assistance offers an alternative to recipient countries, which is enabling them to avoid the pressure for economic and political reform from Western donors and, ultimately, empowers them to establish their own development agenda. Nevertheless, the idea that Chinese foreign aid to developing countries is totally unconditional is often assumed as an undisputed fact, and it is uncritically replicated in several influential works among the literature on "alternative" or "emerging" donors.

Is the often-quoted claim that China provides unconditional aid backed up by empirical data? Does it simply uncritically mirror official Chinese rhetoric? The book The Myth of China's No Strings Attached Development Assistance is written with the explicit intent of refuting the claim that Chinese development aid comes with "no strings attached," an important task that surprisingly few previous studies have undertaken. With this work, Dr. Tudoroiu aims at debunking the "myth" that Chinese foreign assistance comes with no conditions; furthermore, he intends to describe the type of conditionality that guides Chinese development aid allocation strategy, using Chinese aid to the Caribbean (and especially to Trinidad and Tobago) as a case study. The author develops the case study in support of the thesis that Chinese aid comes indeed with several well-defined political, economic, and social conditionalities. Using a constructivist theoretical approach, he arrives at the conclusion that China, using development aid as a foreign policy instrument, aims at preparing a "cognitive and normative space" (p. 199) in the Caribbean, which will ultimately conduce to a new regional order more favorable to China, an order based on political friendliness, economic profitability, and social openness to Chinese government, enterprises, and citizens.

The introduction of the book clarifies in detail the research objectives, justifies the author's methodological choices, and summarizes the conclusions. Regarding the justification for the case selection, the author considers the choice of the English-speaking Caribbean countries as a point of strength for his research. Since Chinese presence in the region is still relatively low and thus political commercial relations are still relatively low, the development assistance agenda is the main channel of bilateral interaction between China and Caribbean countries, and conditionalities "can be studied here in their purest form" (p. 4). Since development cooperation is not overshadowed by political or commercial considerations, the reader is allowed to clearly see how China is imposing its conditionalities over the infrastructure projects financed by Chinese loans.

While most empirical evidence produced by the author with the help of Amanda Ramlogan (in the form of thirty structured interviews with personalities well informed about Chinese-related issues) only refers to respondents from the island of Trinidad, Tudoroiu nevertheless asserts that Trinidad and Tobago can be considered as representative for the entire region. Likewise, the author provides examples from literature and media to show that the same considerations can be applied to other countries in the Caribbean as well.

Chapter 2 is dedicated to the theoretical aspect of the concept of socialization through conditionality. China's use of conditionalities in its international development cooperation can be explained through constructivist theory, which is used as a theoretical framework for this study. In particular, Tudoriou refers to the change of aid recipient's identities through repeated interaction with China, in a way that favors Beijing's interests both globally and in the Caribbean (p. 17). In this process, a particularly important role as a mechanism of socialization is ascribed to China's influence over the state and over local elites in the Caribbean and especially in Trinidad and Tobago...