What
China really wants in Africa By
Cedric Muhammad
While a cottage industry
of "China-in-Africa" experts has emerged over the
past five years, on balance their explanations of
why a magnetic like pull exists between the two
continents is unsatisfactory. Certainly no one
denies an array of state-to-state economic and
geopolitical incentives recognized by both sides.
After all, the simplified
resources-for-infrastructure win-win is rather
obvious.
Yet and still neither of those
benefits - Africa's gain of badly needed dams,
roads, pipelines and bridges and China's receipt
of desperately needed oil and minerals - is as
compelling as the widely rumored and highly
plausible determination that China's mainland can
only sustain 700 million persons. Therefore at
least 300 million to 500 million of its current
1.2 billion population must go elsewhere. The
"elsewhere" is Africa if we are to believe
French authors Serge
Michel and Michel Beuret, who quote an anonymous
Chinese scientist in their book China
Safari.
I am among those who accept
the only 700 million can stay/300 million must
leave hypothesis, but I find the explanation for
this sorely inadequate. The reason provided for
the necessary exodus of 300 million out of China
is environmental degradation and in particular
water scarcity - so many rivers have been polluted
in China that the resource no longer exists in
ample supply to satisfy the needs of a desperate
Chinese population.
While lack of water is
certainly a major issue (see California;
Syria-Turkey; and Darfur disputes for proof) the
Earth is still a very large place. Why Africa
would be the destination of choice for hundreds of
millions of persons fleeing a country plagued by
simultaneous drought and flood, is not answered by
the environmental degradation theory.
As
serious as China's population pressures and
environmental woes are, there must still be a more
compelling internal and external force driving
individuals out of China. There must exist an
irresistible motivation shaped by circumstance
that draws and drives an enormous mass of Chinese
into Africa.
We believe that force can be
found coming from an unsuspecting source - the
Chinese "one-child" policy.
Though Mao
Zedong did state that "revolution plus production
can solve the problem of feeding the population"
and thought that China's large population was more
asset than liability, that thinking was replaced
by efforts at social engineering that the Chinese
government now credits with preventing 400 million
births, thus keeping the Chinese population from
otherwise reaching a level of 1.7 million today.
But people don't neatly fit into the
cardinal or ordinal nature of numbers, nor does
their dynamism accept the rigid confines of static
public policy. There have been real and
unpredictable consequences on the thinking of
generations of Chinese families and children
living under these regulations - consequences that
are now spilling over into Africa.
The
pattern of history shows that people vote with
their feet as much as they do by ballot and there
are many illustrative examples which shed light on
the Chinese "one-child" experience. One of the
best available is the analogy painted by McGill
University professor and economist Reuven Brenner,
who years ago likened the experience of Jews
living in Europe with what Chinese endure today,
writing in an article "China: A Neurotic
Prosperity":
"What can be the point of reference
to predict consequences of China's current
childbearing pattern, adjusted over the last
decades to one-kid or
you're-out-of-your-apartment policy? To make any
reliable analyses, one needs at least two
points, so as to draw a straight line as a first
approximation.
Fortunately for
observers, though unfortunately for those who
had to adjust to such social engineering, there
is not much new under the sun. There has been a
government in the past who passed similar
regulations. The year was 1726. The place,
Austria.
The Viennese court, under
anti-Semitic pressures, fearing a large increase
in Jewish population - a fear that by itself
suggests that the Jewish birth rate at the time
was relatively high - introduced a regulation.
Only the eldest son of a Jewish family could
marry. The younger boys could not. This
regulation introduced into the Austrian empire,
including Bohemia, Moravia, parts of what became
later Germany, and Alsace, led to the instant
migration of young Jewish generation to Eastern
Europe, to Poland, to Rumania. Whereas within
the Austrian Empire the Jewish birth rates
dropped, in Eastern Europe they did not.
How did Jewish parents, who stayed,
adapt to the regulation? As one would expect:
they had less children, invested more in their
education and health, and probably spoiled them
much more than would have been otherwise the
case. One can speculate that this regulation was
the origins of the myth of the neurotic Jewish
mothers, and the by now tradition of driving
Jewish kids to excellence - true, occasionally,
to neurotic excellence.
Will Chinese
mothers and kids react in a similar fashion? At
least this point of reference suggests a
positive answer. Thus one unintended consequence
of the one-child regulation will be prosperity
driven by kids who will grow up to be very
ambitious entrepreneurs."
There are
two intriguing features in this portion of
Brenner's thesis that resonate with us. The first
is a comparison of regulatory 18th-century Europe
with family planning policies of 20th-century
China. The second is the possibility that
entrepreneurship may be a more pronounced tendency
of children living under such policies.
The regulations on the Jewish birth rate
are not a perfect analogy but useful to our
understanding of the Chinese experience under
"one-child" policy, because they illustrate an
incentive for Chinese to migrate elsewhere in
pursuit of a greater quality of life and in order
to broaden their personal and professional network
which has been confined - in a familial context.
Africa represents a land of opportunity
for the Chinese migrant. And history shows it is
often strong kinship-based ethnic groups whose
economic opportunities are more limited at "home"
who become the "stranger-traders" abroad, for
better or worse. This has certainly happened in
parts of Africa where the Chinese represent a
valuable link to manufactured goods and novel
services unavailable in agrarian and peasant-like
societies in Africa.
It is a link that the
Jewish community played not only when they
migrated into Eastern Europe as Brenner describes
but also by the thousands who migrated from Alsace
into the American South servicing the Mississippi
Delta plantation economy as dry goods peddlers.
Far more important than the quality of the
state-to-state negotiation between China and
African governments covered ad nauseum by the
chattering class, is the on the ground navigation
of a swarm of Chinese entrepreneurs - running away
from an old reality as much as they are chasing a
new one.
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