From Chinese dam building in Africa to the Belt and Road Initiative: Assembling infrastructure projects and their linkages

Abstract

This paper aims to build a political economic geography of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). We draw on assemblage thinking and the notion of the Chinese Water Machine to examine Chinese practices and business-related outcomes of building a dam in Africa, stressing the complicated interactions between different actors. Based on fieldwork in China and Ghana, as well as documentary data, this paper argues that Chinese engagement with Africa is a global enterprise, in which players come from China, the recipient, and other countries; and that project-level organisation and implementation under BRI umbrella will also likely be a joint production by all such players, elaborated in a path dependent way but subject to the spatial embeddedness of specific projects. Yet whether BRI-related projects can advance the specific geopolitical and economic interests of China is uncertain: not only have Chinese players been co-constructing such infrastructure projects with non-Chinese players, but also Beijing's role in forging the expansion of Chinese corporations' business abroad is not clear.

Introduction

The Chinese government's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013 instigated an infrastructure construction program in Asia, Europe and Africa (Nordin & Weissmann, 2018). China has created new financial institutions and promised to invest USD 1 trillion in foreign infrastructure projects (Aoyama, 2016), and BRI is now taking shape at the project level: in 2015, China's Silk Road Fund made its first investment in large dam construction as a shareholder of a subsidiary of the Three Gorges Corporation. The first project sponsored by the Fund, the Karot Dam on the Jhelum River in Pakistan, is currently being built (Karot Power, n.d.). From 2013 to 2018, the value of contracts completed by Chinese companies in countries along the BRI is reportedly USD 400 billion (Steering Group for The Belt and Road Initiative, 2019).

China's official and scholarly rhetoric describes BRI as an inclusive scheme embedded in China's economic rise (Liu, 2017). Five priorities are proposed to help connect places: policy coordination, infrastructure connectivity, trade, finance and people-to-people relations (State Council, 2015). The key idea of the ‘Silk Road Spirit’, BRI's ‘inclusiveness’, has three dimensions: ‘community of common interests’; respect for the development paths of different countries; and openness to all countries and international/regional organisations (Zeng, 2016; Zhang, 2018). Framing ‘inclusive globalisation’ as central to BRI, Liu and Dunford (2016) posit specific infrastructure projects and new multilateral investment mechanisms to promote poverty reduction and inclusive growth. Other analysts, however, interpret BRI as a global project that manifests Beijing's grand economic and geopolitical ambitions to challenge existing regional and world orders (Mendes, 2018) – a kind of Sinocentric project that builds on and beyond China's ‘going out’ strategy (Yu, 2018), itself a “spatial fix” to address China's overcapacity problem (Sum, 2018).

Infrastructures, like big dams, are “one of the ways in which the state actualises power over its territory” (Menga & Swyngedouw, 2018) or attempts to extend power over other states (Sneddon, 2015). Yet most BRI-themed studies focus on discursive macroeconomic and political issues, rather than on-the-ground practices (Liu et al., 2018), so the project-level implications of China's BRI practices remain unclear. This paper, therefore, asks: what can we learn from past Chinese infrastructure projects (financing and building a foreign dam) about how BRI projects will likely take shape?

Assemblage thinking offers a mode of inquiry that is sensitive to on-the-ground practices, especially the “unusual suspects involved”, and to processes of becoming (Ranganathan, 2015, p. 1315). Assemblage thinking originated from Deleuze and Guattari (1988), who proposed an ontological framework in which “relations are external to their terms” (Deleuze & Parnet, 2002, p. 55). Adopting the notion of the Chinese Water Machine (CWM) – a loosely-defined network of actors managing water in China (Webber & Han, 2017) – the paper frames some CWM members as actors cooperating with multiple actors outside China to co-construct a foreign dam. Particularly, we trace the “becoming-being” of CWM-related assemblages operating outside China that are linked through the participation of CWM members. We disentangle the configuration of different actors in a dam project and show how one project spawns a diverse array of business opportunities. Thus the paper explains how CWM members join and hold together other assemblages, using the concept of “assemblages of assemblages” (Delanda, 2016, p. 3) to derive broader implications for BRI. In other words, the paper explores how one assemblage spawns other assemblages.

We argue that Chinese engagement with Africa is a global enterprise, in which players come from China, the recipient, and other countries; and that projects implemented under the BRI umbrella will likely also be jointly produced by all such players, organised in a path dependent way but subject to their embeddedness in different places. Yet whether BRI-related Chinese investment in foreign infrastructure construction can advance the Chinese government's geopolitical and economic interests is not clear: not only do Chinese builders co-construct projects with non-Chinese players, but Beijing's role in forging Chinese firms' business expansion overseas is limited. Tracing project-based networks, the paper shows the intersections of network assemblages that inform how projects play out on the ground, and their geography.

The paper selects a Chinese-involved dam project in Ghana, for two main reasons. First, dam projects are central to understanding China's overseas investment: the Silk Road Fund launched its operations with a dam project; in 2010–20, Chinese companies added 8,134 MW hydro-capacity in Sub-Saharan Africa, over half the continent's total added hydro capacity (Benazeraf & Yan, 2019). Chinese involvement in dams in Africa and Asia has attracted attention over development finance (Brautigam, Hwang, & Wang, 2015), geopolitics (Mohan & Tan-Mullins, 2018; Power, 2019), impacts and sustainability (Siciliano & Urban, 2018). Generally interpreted as being about China's domestic overcapacity problems and the need for resource security (Gleick, 2012; Lee, 2017), or the export of China's ‘development experience’ (Bosshard, 2009), little is known about how Chinese actors actually participate in projects and how they discover a market through project-based networks, despite their significance for China's geo-economic strategy in Africa (Carmody & Owusu, 2007).

Second, West African countries are rarely the focus of BRI studies, which typically highlight Europe, Central Asia and Southeast Asia (see, for example, Bhavna & Yuka, 2018; Foggin, 2018; Karim & Islam, 2018). While Africa is sometimes discussed in reports about BRI, the examples are typically East African, such as Kenya and Ethiopia (Zhu, 2018). Yet there are active BRI-related discussions between Chinese and West African officials, including in Ghana (Sun, 2017) and Nigeria (Saliu, 2018). During the 2018 Beijing Summit of the Forum on China–Africa Cooperation, the Chinese government announced that 37 African countries had signed Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs) to jointly advance the BRI (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2018). Ghana signed eight cooperation agreements with China including a “One Belt One Road MOU” (Ghana News Agency, 2018).

The case studied here is the Bui dam in Ghana. Other major Chinese-involved dam projects in Africa include Merowe (Sudan), Imboulou (Republic of the Congo), Gibe III (Ethiopia), and Memve'ele (Cameroon) (Chen & Landry, 2018). Officially commissioned at the end of 2013, the Bui dam was built by Sinohydro as an Engineering-Procurement-Construction (EPC) turnkey contract beginning in 2007 with finance from China Exim Bank (Hensengerth, 2014). The 2013 completion date permitted us to document the project's organisation and implementation, as well as Chinese dam players' subsequent business in Ghana. Information about the dam and its construction in Ghana was relatively open.

The analysis relies on fieldwork in China and Ghana, supplemented by open-source data. Personal communications and 28 semi-structured interviews with Chinese officials and employees in dam companies (including Sinohydro, Gezhouba, and Three Gorges Corporation), as well as delegates from recipient countries, universities, and non-government organisations (NGOs), were conducted during and after the World Hydropower Congress in Beijing in May 2015 (Table 1). The Bui Power Authority and Bui construction and resettlement sites were visited from July to October 2015. Interviews and personal communications were also conducted with Ghanaian officials and researchers, Chinese embassy officials, Sinohydro employees at Bui, and international NGOs and researchers in Accra. Secondary information was collected from media reports, yearbooks, and official websites of governments, corporations, and related organisations. The 2014 Ghana Chinese Business Directory,¹ provided by the Chinese Embassy in Ghana, identifies Chinese players operating in Ghana and guides research into their business there.

The remainder of the paper has four sections. We first outline the paper's conceptual approach, which understands networks as assemblages We then examine the Bui case, describing the membership and formation of the Bui assemblage (second section), and tracing the businesses of Sinohydro and of other CWM members in Ghana, during and after Bui (third section). Here we reveal the linkages between the Bui assemblage and the CWM. The paper concludes by discussing theoretical issues and its implications for BRI.