‘Not Soft, not Sharp’: the subtext of China’s subtle power through and in African parliament buildings

Summary

In recent years, the term ‘sharp power’ has been promoted in scholarly and democracy promotion policy circles as the best descriptor of China’s expanding political engagement in the Global South. This emerged from the quest to find an appropriate nomenclature for China’s growing and apparently influential engagements in the Global South. Given that soft power is perceived in positive light and thus claimed as Western, a China specific taxonomy needed to be found. According to its promoters, the essence of sharp power is malevolent. It entails the use of manipulation to directly weaken or undermine the political institutions of targeted countries. While acknowledging China self-interested objectives, this paper challenges this characterisation. Using evidence from China’s construction and maintenance of parliament buildings in Southern Africa, I argue that sharp power has limited explanatory capacity to capture the nuances of China’s engagement in democracy enabling institutions in Africa. It isn’t soft…