Institute of Development Studies

Alternative Ideas from China

Are the people who work in international development studies running out of good ideas? Is their work at risk of becoming irrelevant? IDS is working with partners around the world to organise a series of roundtables exploring what social innovation means in the Twenty first Century and how development could benefit. The most recent was held on 19 March 2009 at Beijing Normal University, Beijing China, following previous roundtables in Bangladesh and Kenya.

Over the past thirty years China has made dramatic progress. But one speaker argued that often development approaches have been one dimensional – thinking about economic, environment or health development as separate issues rather than integrated as one development process. China needs the right people to create ideas and make development sustainable. Beijing Normal University has recently started an undergraduate course on development studies from a Chinese perspective, which is taking practitioners from the field and supplying them with the methodology and theory to do develop these new social innovations.

There is an opportunity for China to reflect on the development progress it has made and how this can be shared with rest of world. A major difficulty identified during the roundtable was how to translate the language of development into Chinese and how China's development can be translated into other languages. Collaboration between researchers at IDS and Beijing Normal University has already shown that common concepts like 'entitlement' are almost impossible to translate. Researchers in both countries have work to do in this area.

Development studies and the idea of 'international development' originated in 'developed' countries and for many in China it is still viewed as being very euro-, or Western-centric. The question of institutional reform in organisations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is very important. Some attendees saw the financial crisis as a real opportunity to make this happen while others were sceptical. One comment was that development studies needs to ask what kind of structure and world order could really have the interests of developing countries at heart.

Does China have a model for development?

In asking what developing countries can learn from China this question raised much debate. Some argued no, that China's development has been a responsive process with each new problem needing a new solution and that China never followed a blueprint but developed reactively.

Others argued that China has a model for development but one that is very fluid and constantly changing. One person commented that this model has followed four principles:

• firstly to seek truth from the facts and understand your own side first
• secondly that you must own your own development – in China this means the government, businesses and others have taken responsibility and contributed to growth
• thirdly you must learn from others – China studied the Western experience but also looked at other experiences such as Yugoslavia's
• finally actions have been more important than words.

China and Social Innovation

China has only just begun to explore the trend of social enterprise so this is an opportune moment to explore how to understand social innovation and its contribution to development. It is crossing sectors from civil society, governments and businesses, which is giving it more momentum. However there will be a challenge to keep a balance because the idea of social innovation is very different between sectors and there is tension. However these new ideas are coming to China as donors are leaving and questions were raised about where the funding for them will come from.

Conclusions

In summarising the day IDS Fellow John Humphrey commented that he would need to make two summaries: one from a development context and one from a Chinese context. It used to be simple to define what development studies was but new complexities and a rapidly changing world mean that it is now difficult to define and this makes it difficult to discuss with others.

People talk about the Chinese perspective, but in reality this doesn’t exist. As in every country, different people have very different opinions. To reach a common view about how knowledge can be shared first the knowledge has to be co-produced but even in this process some people's views will be excluded. 

China is having an increasing impact on the rest of the world, sometimes deliberately and sometimes not, and it cannot ignore this. Countries will start to make demands on China about how its economy and political position affects them – Chinese scholars will need the capacity to respond to this.

Image: Wentao Li from China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations speaks at the roundtable in Beijing