Development Experience Emnbeddedness:Narratives Of Aid Practice

China’s foreign aid presents many differences with the traditional western aid. In order to understand the difference, based on micro-level ethnographic fieldwork of a Chinese agricultural aid projects, this research regards China’s aid practice as a process of reproduction and localization of China’s domestic development experience in different culture and circumstance. From the perspective of culture, this research analyzes cultural process of aid vertically and horizontally, based on the practice theory which beyond the binary opposition of structure and agency. Vertical analysis, employing historical consideration, explores the process of China’s domestic development experience embeddedness in aid practice, which achieves the flow on space and inheritance on time. Horizontal analysis presents the process of reproduction and localization of experience and knowledge in the interaction between the active agent from different cultures. Aid practice mainly includes three parts:experience, institution and knowledge. These three part is the path of China’s development experience embedding in aid practice, but also the process of reproduced and localization of experience under agents’s actions.China’s development experience of government-market relationship embedded in aid project in the form of institutional arrangement that government manages and enterprise implements. This experience reproduced in recipient country by interests coupling of government and enterprise, and government’s control on enterprise through fomal and informal mechanisms. The enterprise’s strategy was forced to adjust itself after encountered with local culture to continue to maintain the project operation.Under the friendly relations between China and African Countries and enbeddedness of China’s government-led development experience, this aid project desighed and used China and the recipient country "cooperative management" operation mode. After it’s encounter with recipient country’s weak government and absence of counterpart organation, Chinese experts chose to built a loose partnership with local by informal reciprocal relationship.Aid practice is Chinese agricultural knowledge’s "cross time and space sharing" mechanism. Under the embeddedness of China’s agricultural knowledge and culture, the project technically constructed recipient country’s development issue, and then reproduced Chins’a agricultural knowledge in recipient country through symbolic mechanism and expert team. The localization process of China’s agricultural knowledge is a process of cognitive construction on "technology" and power construction on "high yeild" by Chinese experts. After encountering with local knowledge, China’s agricultural knowledge adjusted to survive according to the local needs.The differences of Chinese aid and traditional western aid are mainly from the way of construction of the aid logic and knowledge. Western aid is theoretical construction, while China’s aid is experiential construction, which allow China’s domestic development experience automatically embedded into aid projects, and reproduce in the recipient country through aid practice. Active agents from China and recipient country together formed the process of reproduction and localization of China’s development experience in the interactive practice according to their own political and economic interests. China’s development experience could not maintain its original form of culture integrity in its localization process, it continued modified by the local culture and needs, and ultimately to exist in recipient country in the variant form.