THE RISING ‘CHINA MODEL’ 1 TINGTING YUAN THE RISING ‘CHINA MODEL’ OF EDUCATIONAL COOPERATION WITH AFRICA: FEATURES, DISCOURSES AND PERCEPTIONS A NEW LOGIC OF ‘AID’? Challenging The Orthodox ‘Aid’ Globalisation and the economic growth of some developing countries are not new issues. Moreover, when globalisation takes the form of a knowledge-based economy, education is increasingly becoming a crucial factor in the contemporary neo-liberal market of the world (Robertson, 2007: 19). Educational practice is embedded in economic activities as well as political competition and is also present within the complexity of international relations. ‘Aid’ is an international concept that emerged in the West towards the end o f the Second World War and was first seen with the establishment of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, more commonly known as the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1944. These organisations were designed to provide a more stable economic situation and create freer trading conditions throughout the world (Garrett, 1994: 1). From this emergence of these institutions it is not hard to understand why ‘aid’ is also called development assistance, and this demonstrates that aid means ‘help’ with respect to economic development. This leads to several questions that should be considered: is ‘development’ a normative term and if yes, who set this norm? Is there a model of development? Traditionally aid mechanisms are mainly based on the Western oriented modernisation process. The fundamental logic of aid is based on the logic of ‘catching up’, which has set a paternal and hierarchical donor -recipient relationship since the 1950s. The American economist Walt Whitman Rostow (1960) introduced five stages of economic growth experienced by countries with investment, consumption and social trends at each stage, during the process of modernisation; he argued that the most important stage is centred upon the ‘taking off’ stage when the norms of economic growth are well established and ready for regular growth. 1 Modernisation theory explains how ‘low-income countries could improve the living condition of their populations by a set of prescriptive policies to encourage economic “taking off”’ (Robertson et al., 2007: 11). Although it is hard to define the Western model of aid, as ‘aid’ has taken various forms during the past six decades, the underlying logic associated with Western donors has been quite consistent. It assumes that developing countries need ‘help’ to ‘catch up’ with the developed countries that represent the model to be attained, where the process is ‘developing’ to ‘developed’, and this goal is supported by aid. Within this process, education plays the role of creating ‘modern’ individuals, and ‘unlocks the door to