Neo-Colonialism in South–South Relations? The Case of China and North Korea

Jong-Woon Lee and Kevin Gray

Development and Change, 2016, vol. 47, issue 2, 293-316

Abstract: type="main">

The past decade has seen the rapid expansion of economic ties between China and North Korea, leading to questions of whether this emerging relationship resembles neo-colonialism or a more positive form of South–South cooperation. This article argues that China's engagement is driven in the first instance by strategic considerations, namely the maintenance of the geopolitical status quo on the Korean peninsula. However, North Korea has also become increasingly important in terms of Beijing's aims of revitalizing its north-eastern region, and as such, economic relations are becoming increasingly market-led. Although this mode of engagement bears similarities with China's engagement elsewhere in the developing world, North Korea's catastrophic economic decline in the 1990s largely preceded the more recent revival of relations with China. We argue therefore that bilateral relations between the two countries cannot usefully be regarded as ‘neo-colonial’ since North Korea is receiving much needed trade and investment from China within the context of broader international isolation. As such, we suggest that more attention needs to be paid to how geopolitical specificities influence the manner in which South–South cooperation shapes the possibilities of development, and that the dichotomous terrain of the existing debate between optimistic and pessimistic viewpoints is unhelpful.

Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/dech.12223 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:devchg:v:47:y:2016:i:2:p:293-316

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0012-155X

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Development and Change from International Institute of Social Studies
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().