Non-Aligned Architecture: China's Designs on and in Ghana and Guinea, 1955-92 by COLE ROSKAM The current international attention devoted to contemporary Chinese-financed and constructed development in Africa has tended to obscure complex and multivalent histories of the relationships between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and numer- ous African nations; and many of these histories date back decades. 1 The ideological origins behind socialist China's engagement with Africa, and the geopolitical dynamics that continue to propel them forward, trace back to the time of Chairman Mao Zedong, who first coined the term 'intermediate zone' in 1946 to position the vast expanse of contested territories and undecided loyalties existing between the ideological poles of the Soviet Union and the United States after World War II. 2 Nine years later (1955), at the first Non-Aligned Movement conference held in Bandung, Indonesia, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai declared that ever since modern times most of the countries of Asia and Africa in varying degrees have been subjected to colonial plunder and oppression, and have thus been forced to remain in a stagnant state of poverty and backwardness [...]. We need to develop our countries independently with no outside interference and in accordance with the will of the people. 3 Delivered to an audience of participating African countries including Egypt, Ethiopia, Liberia, Libya, Sudan, and the Gold Coast (as colonial Ghana was then known), Zhou's speech reinvigorated Mao's initial vision with ideological urgency. It alluded not only to the exploitative mechanisms behind colonialism but to the archetypal postcolonial model for economic growth rapidly taking its place: the importation of technocratic expertise from the Soviet Union, the United States and their allies, as well as their multilateral armatures (such as the World Bank, UNESCO and the Ford Foundation) to help fund, design, and manage large-scale architectural and urban development projects in other, relatively less developed parts of the world. 4 Recent scholarly efforts to understand these projects, and the economic, political and cultural dynamics at work behind them, have begun to reveal extensive international networks existing both within and between the so-called First, Second and Third Worlds. 5 A rich and varied range of new terms and ideas has emerged in relation to this work, each broadly organised around the central referent of Modernism; and these include, among others, notions such as 'anxious Modernisms', 'alternative Modernities', the 'colonial Modern' and 'Third World Modernism'. 6 Collectively, these efforts have available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0066622X00002653 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 194.26.179.226, on 14 Jun 2019 at 00:47:28, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,