China has maintained strong relationships with many African countries, and Ghana is one such country. While the two countries have normally enjoyed good friendly relations, concerns over the involvement of Chinese citizens in small-scale mining in Ghana threaten the cordial relationship between the two countries. There is evidence of a cultural evolution and a gradual shift from a culture of enthusiastic reception of local people to the Chinese in the area of mining to one of cold reception to Chinese interests in mining communities. There is also evidence that this cold reception to Chinese miners is stimulated by non-state actors led by the media and inspires in Ghana a new paradigm of more rational engagement with China at the political level, although challenges still remain.
The sustainability of China’s urban social security financing system has recently been seriously questioned. This article divides the financing system’s development into two periods (before and after reform). It compares the capital collection and the distribution and circulation structures and reviews the financing system before and after reform. In this study, we also discuss and explain the ‘empty account’ phenomenon, which severely undermines the financing system’s sustainability. We allege that the money accumulation system adopted after reform, which correlates personal accounts with the social pool, is not running as designed but as a ‘pay-as-you-go’ system. After evaluating the efficiency and cost performance of both periods, testing the financing system’s sustainability and correlating the system during both time periods with economic and social development, we find that the financing systems’ operation after reform corresponds with theories proved by case studies in other advanced states.
Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World (Hardie Grant Books, 2020), pp. xiii+418, $22.26. ISBN 9780861540167.
Jingyan Fu and Artie W. Ng, Sustainable Energy and Green Finance for a Low Carbon Economy: Perspectives from Greater Bay Area of China (Springer, 2020), pp. 285. ISBN 978-3-030-35410-7.
Pradumna B. Rana and Xianbai Ji, China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Impacts on Asia and Policy Agenda. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, xx + 186 pp., 51, €99 (Hardcover).
Deepening globalisation and worldwide availability of free information and ideas raise concerns of the communist China’s political leadership about the stability of the regime and the sustainability of the state ideological orthodoxy. Therefore, the state’s tightening control of the public communication to curtail the domestic criticism and occasional public discontent is becoming framed and legitimised in terms of cultural security as a non-traditional security concern. This study argues that the restrictive impacts of the politicisation of culture in the centralised agenda of President Xi Jinping reinvigorate China’s anti-Western narratives and attitudes. The research focuses on the state’s cultural security-related and applicable strategy in the political and institutional agenda and media. Moreover, the study also traces the state cultural security policy in the field of the civic and non-governmental sector, religious and ethnic minorities policy, literature, film and audiovisual sectors. The findings assess the concern that the intellectually anachronistic, self-restraining and internationally hostile policy devaluates China’s cultural potential and complexity.
