More than two decades after obtaining the Paris Peace Agreement in 1991, Cambodia has enjoyed steady growth and invited numerous presence of development partners and NGOs to help reduce the poverty burden and thus assist a democratic development in Cambodia. A developing, recipient country, Cambodia has experienced receiving development assistance from both traditional or OECD/DAC countries and non-traditional donors including China, which has been a reiterated debate topic over decades of foreign aid in Cambodia. Particularly the rise of China and its arising presence in Cambodia to a certain degree produce a lot of controversial debates among conventional development practitioners and commentators, warning China’s increasing involvement may hinder Cambodia’s democratic development agenda wherein the traditional donors have been investing through their ODA programs for decades.
Focusing merely on social conflict framework, this paper intends to examine the relationship between social conflict and China’s aid in Cambodia with regard to the government capacity question. It deploys social conflict definitions from prominent sociologists and quantifies social conflict in Cambodia through a number of protests or demonstrations on streets. From such methodological approach, this paper specifically draws the sensitive land grabbing case in Cambodia as the most appropriate mean to scrutinize the nexus between OECD/DAC’s and China’s assistance and their engagements in relation to social conflict. Employing in-depth, comprehensively comparative analysis on the land grabbing involving both OECD/DAC donor countries and China, this paper finds no convincing result that aid from traditional donors is relevant to social conflict but is convinced that China’s aid to Cambodia is most likely plausible. As a result, this paper presents an argument that goes against the prevailing orthodox backdrop on China’s engagement in Cambodia. This paper convincingly argues that: “China’s aid reduces rather than increases social conflict due to its positive and direct impact on the Cambodian government capabilities.”