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China smiles at Africa with two faces
By Bright B Simons, Evans Lartey and Franklin Cudjoe
ACCRA, Ghana - When Chinese President Hu Jintao on November 2 threw open the
doors of the Forbidden City to 48 invited African heads of state and
governments, many people around the globe were for the first time served the
prospect of an intriguing new geopolitical alliance, between the world's
fastest expanding major economy and the most economically challenged continent.
For those with a long-standing interest in China, however, the November 2
Sino-African summit was noteworthy only for its symbol-laden opulence: it
seemed China had had enough of
camouflaging its claim to superpower status. As regards the hard economic and
political realities, November 2 marked no watershed.
China has long been involved in Africa. Throughout the Cold War, Chinese
ideologues insisted that China was together with Africa the backbone of what
Marshal Lin Biao described as the ''world countryside'', or what Marxist
development economists call the ''periphery'', as counterpoised to the Western
''core'' and the Comecon (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance)
''semi-periphery''.
China was for most of this period motivated by two geopolitical imperatives:
rivalry with the Soviet Union and the containment of Taiwan. In the case of the
former, the tussle was over the soul of communism, though as is often the case
with these things, a spattering of nuclear-armed rocketry was also involved.
China's ideological proposition was that the USSR was a ''revisionist'' - not
true communist - imperialistic superpower, while the West, beholden to the USA,
was overtly and decadently imperialistic.
The concern over Taiwan had much more to do with China's domestic pressures.
China may seem ethnically homogenous, but that is only because over the
centuries strong rulers at the center have managed to keep it so, through
force, awe or persuasion. Simmering ethnic tensions are never too far beneath
the surface in China. The Tibetans want the Han out of their homeland and the
Uighurs want an Islamic state in their part of the country. To allow Taiwan to
become independent is in the eyes of China a dangerous policy that might prove
contagious. If other ethnic groups realize that the center can be defied, who
knows what subversions they might dream up?
It was then in Africa, more so than anywhere else, that China found both the
opportunities and contexts most conducive to shaping its foreign policy based
on its "one China" principle. Countries that renounced diplomatic ties with
Taiwan were to be rewarded; those that didn't were to be punished, ostracized
or ignored, depending on their economic or political importance.
So, in the case of South Africa, China patiently waited for the post-apartheid
government to make up its mind, until eventually president Nelson Mandela
decided that, Taiwan's close commercial links with South Africa
notwithstanding, China might well prove the more lucrative ally. Burkina Faso
and The Gambia could not afford this treatment, and so were haughtily
sidelined.
In this, China had perfected its ''Griffin'' image - part graceful bird, part
bully beast, a "brother" of Africa in the face of common subjugation, and a
paternal figure dispensing discipline at the same time. Two-face diplomacy had
proved its merits.
It is interesting that despite the strength, and to a considerable extent the
tenability, of the perception that China's concerns these days have shifted
from the geopolitical to the geo-economic, remnants of these Cold War
orientations still persist.
During the recent Zambian elections, a candidate reported to have expressed an
opinion to the effect that Taiwan was ''a state'' so incensed Chinese diplomats
in the southern African country that, in an unusual breach of protocol, China
threatened to cut ties with Zambia should the offending candidate be elected.
It is also interesting that aside from China, the strongest interest in African
natural resources in recent times has come from Russia.
The implication of these two facts appears therefore to be that China's
contemporary relationship with the continent of Africa ought not to be seen as
an abrupt transition, but rather in the light of general transformations at the
global level that have touched both China and Africa, accentuating some
pre-existing patterns of engagement while attenuating others.
A false dichotomy inspired by 'two Chinas'
It is partly from this perspective that some have expressed concerns over
China's seeming lack of moral inhibition in its pursuit of lucrative contracts
to source African natural riches. Critics recall that it was China, through its
North Korean proxies, that armed Robert Mugabe's Fifth Brigade in an effort to
gain an upper hand over the USSR, which, having backed Mugabe's rival Joshua
Nkomo during the civil war following independence, had lost diplomatic leverage
in mineral-rich Zimbabwe.
When the Fifth Brigade went on to commit what many historians of the period
consider genocide against the minority Matabele ethnic groups, those intimate
with the Chinese role began to subject China's activities on the continent to
greater scrutiny. Consequently, interest in recent Sino-African economic
cooperation in Sudan, Nigeria, Angola and elsewhere is heavily infused with
human-rights concerns.
Justified as such skepticism and suspicions may be, an unintended consequence
has been an overemphasis on the "natural resource" issue. A crude dichotomy has
been planted between opinions that hold China's engagement as positive for
injecting competition into the erstwhile Western-dominated bidding for rights
to develop Africa's mineral wealth, and others that contend this optimistic
view with clear evidence of Chinese arms trading with the murderous Khartoum
regime. In the latter pessimistic frame of analysis, China is following the
well-beaten track of neo-colonial exploitation.
Much objective evidence exists to sustain this dichotomy. It is easy to
conclude that China is in Africa solely to leverage its new "world power"
status for commodities to fuel its massive industrial growth.
China today consumes a third of the world's steel, half of its cement, a
quarter of its fertilizers and more than a quarter of both its copper and
aluminum. Since China is far from self-sufficient in most of these commodities,
it has steadily built up foreign-exchange reserves that have overtaken Japan's
to become the world's largest. By the time you read this tomorrow, the country
will have sold almost a billion dollars' more goods and services to the US than
it will have bought from the latter, lifting another 30,000 of its citizens
from grinding poverty.
The reason China needs to consume these large amounts of commodities is
obviously that despite having raised more people from poverty than any other
economy in world history - 400 million by some accounts - it still has a long
way to go before the remaining 400 million or so are similarly elevated.
Its leaders have to burn much midnight oil - quite literally - to develop
strategies that will keep the price of labor and other factors of production
from rising too high, because more so than anything, it is its low-cost
environment that has made it, according to many credible estimates, the
manufacturer of one-third the world's goods and poised to surpass, by 2050, the
combined production volume of the entire Western Hemisphere.
Clearly, China needs its commodities. But it also needs to keep their cost low.
If it were solely the economic cost that was at issue, the way to go about that
would simply have been to support an increasing sophistication of the global
economy so
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