The Canadian Studies Program is pleased to award Haikun Liu the 2023 Rita Ross Undergraduate Prize in Canadian Studies. Named in honour of a longtime associate director of the program, the prize is awarded to an undergraduate who has produced an outstanding work of original Canadianist research for a UC Berkeley course or independent study. Haikun's submission, "Altruism of Aid: Analysis of Canadian Official Development Assistance (ODA) into Sub-Saharan Africa", assesses whether Canada's foreign aid displays selfless or self-interested motives.
Haikun is a Chinese-Canadian international student, pursue a dual degree in economics and business administration, alongside minors in politics, philosophy, and law. His family moved to Toronto when he was 12, and he credits his experience of Canadian multiculturalism and open-mindedness with shaping his personal values. Haikun's interest in Canada-Africa relations started in high school, and he volunteered with international development organizations from a young age. However, it was his economics classes at UC Berkeley that showed him the possibilities of research in this discipline. "I want to thank Prof. Edward Miguel for enlightening my understanding of African development and opening my eyes towards translating research into real-world impact," he notes.
Haikun's winning submission is merely the first part of a substantial independent research project, which addresses a long-running debate in political science over whether foreign aid is indeed altruistic, or merely serves covert geopolitical aims. Canada, in particular, has long claimed moral and altruistic motives for its foreign aid. Critics, however, frequently claim that wealthy nations use aid to buy political favours and access to resources from weaker countries. In contrast to great powers such as the United States and China, comparatively little research has been done to assess the efficacy and motives of Canada's aid projects.
Haikun's paper fits Canada's aid program into an empirical standard for "altruism" that can be compared to other global players. By using GDP and ODA statistics from the World Bank, Haikun developed an algorithm that looks for "countercyclical donations", periods where donations from Canada increased while the country's GDP declined - essentially, evidencing a lack of financial return on the aid investment. Under this model, only about half of the recipient countries could be considered "altruistic" cases. Additionally, nearly 3/4 of the 21 countries receiving altruistic aid were coastal - perhaps hinting at larger strategic goals in Canada's funding.
Still, this paper is only the beginning of Haikun's work. In addition to his Ross Prize, Haikun has applied for a pilot undergraduate research grant to travel to Canada to do archival research over the summer. He plans to examine the rhetoric of official government ODA reports, to provide a holistic, rhetorical complement to his empirical analysis. And after graduating, he hopes to grow this project into a dissertation when he pursues a graduate degree in development economics.
"The Rita Ross Prize represents the culmination of my time here at Berkeley," says Haikun. "As a Canadian student with minimal funding opportunities, the prize has encouraged me to further pursue research in an area that I am genuinely passionate about."
Dennis Song Awarded Honourable Mention for Paper on How Tibetan Refugees Paved the Way for a Multicultural Canada
Canadian Studies awarded an honourable mention to Ross Prize applicant Dennis Song, for his research into the history of a Cold War-era Tibetan refugee resettlement program and its impact on Canada's immigration system.
Dennis is a Chinese-Canadian international student, majoring in conservation studies. His submission, "Cold War & Tibetan Resettlement Program: A Canadian Perspective", addresses the 1971-75 Canadian Tibetan Resettlement Program, which resettled 228 Tibetan exiles in the country. This project was the first major resettlement of non-Europeans in Canada, but has traditionally been viewed as a token gesture of moral leadership and independence from US foreign policy. However, Dennis argues that it played a notable role in setting the stage for Canada's future refugee policies, and was a significant milestone on Canada's transformation into a multicultural, immigrant society.
The resettlement issue brought together several sometimes-contradictory strands of Canada's Cold War geopolitics; it balanced a desire for moral leadership, independence from US foreign policy, and the realities of international relations. Dennis charts how throughout the development of the program, leaders from Pearson to Trudeau shuffled between these priorities in a way that makes it difficult to speak of a unified Canadian approach to the geopolitics during the era. While the program demonstrated real initiative, the project was delayed several years, and its scope limited to about 10% of the initial number of refugees, due to fears of Chinese or US diplomatic reprisals.
The small number of Tibetans accepted was also a consequence of fears among Canadian leadership about integrating the refugees. With immigration laws having recently been liberalized, the government viewed the program as a test for how well immigrants from non-Western societies could assimilate. Many Canadian politicians saw Tibetan society as archaic, and were concerned that their pastoralist background and cultural isolation would severely hamper their ability to become self-sufficient citizens. But the speed with which the refugees integrated themselves into the workforce convinced officials that culturally-distinct migrants could successfully adapt to life in Canada. Concrete naturalization strategies gained from the program would go on to inform later, and significantly larger, refugee resettlements. Without this precedent, Dennis argues, we may not have seen the increased willingness for the country to accept more diverse groups of refugees and immigrants over the next decades.
And how did Dennis get interested in this project? "Taking (Canadian Studies Director, Professor Irene) Bloemraad’s course on immigration made me wonder, why did Canada learn to be more accepting of immigrants? I was surprised to find an answer in my Tibetan history class with Professor Van Vleet." Dennis hopes to expand his paper further into an undergraduate honors thesis. "Receiving the honorable mention really made me feel the Canadian presence on campus! It feels strange to not have more campus academic engagement with the northern neighbor. The presence of this program will promote me further to do research about Canada."