China's veto just part of business
By Peter Navarro
China last week once again demonstrated its willingness to opportunistically
trade diplomatic favors for access to African riches. Joining with Russia, the
People's Republic vetoed a UN Security Council resolution that would have
imposed tough sanctions on Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe and other members
of his illegitimate regime for rigging the country's presidential election.
China has in the past "sold" its UN veto power to protect Sudan from sanctions
over the killing of people in Darfur in exchange for access to Sudanese oil.
China is now Sudan's biggest customer. Beijing has also provided Iran with
diplomatic cover at the UN for the Middle East country's nuclear development
program in
exchange for access to its huge natural gas reserves.
In Zimbabwe, it's not petroleum that China covets. Rather, the African nation
is the world's second-largest exporter of platinum, a key input for China's
auto industry. China is also the world's largest steel producer, and Zimbabwe
controls more than half of the world's known chromium reserves, used in making
stainless steel.
On the agricultural front, China has long coveted Zimbabwe's rich tobacco
fields. As the world's largest cigarette producer, China produces roughly 2
trillion sticks a year (which annually kill about a million Chinese). Over the
past decade, by providing Mugabe with diplomatic cover at the UN and by lending
his regime huge sums, China has been able to gain control of much of Zimbabwe's
valuable tobacco output.
Zimbabwe used to sell its tobacco at international auction for top dollar and
hard foreign exchange. Today, Zimbabwe’s crop is funneled directly to China's
300 million smokers as payment in kind for the loans Beijing provides. Even as
Zimbabwe's agricultural sector collapses under Mugabe's rule, Chinese companies
control land the Zimbabwean government once confiscated from white farmers.
China's Zimbabwe gambit is symptomatic of a broader brand of Chinese
imperialism that would have Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong turning in their
graves. It is a strategy driven by China's reliance on a heavy-manufacturing
economic model, leading to the country now consuming half of the world's
cement, one third of its steel, one fourth of its copper, one fifth of its
aluminum, and having the fastest-growing share of the world's oil.
China's strategy for securing these scarce natural resources is a zero-sum game
played against the West. Rather than relying on world markets as do Europe and
the US, China seeks to gain physical control of these resources. It does this
by first ingratiating itself with foreign governments, then encircling the
country's natural resource riches with virtually every strategy described by
Lenin in the "imperialist playbook".
As its core strategy, China dangles lavish, low-interest loans as bait and uses
its huge army of engineers and laborers to help the country build up its
infrastructure, from roads and dams to hotels and stadiums, from parliament
buildings and palaces to satellite capabilities and telecommunications
networks. In countries from Angola to Zimbabwe to Myanmar, China also sells the
ruling elites the weapons they need to hold on to power - and rig the
occasional election, as Mugabe just did.
Today, more than a thousand Chinese firms, private and state-owned, have been
deployed to more than 50 African countries, many bringing in their own workers
to add to the estimated 3 million Chinese working overseas. Backed by
heavily subsidized, low-interest loans from the government, both state-owned
and private Chinese construction firms have been able to put down deep economic
roots in African soil, while helping China to solve its own politically
volatile unemployment problems.
The investments made in highway systems and communications quite literally and
digitally pave the way for precisely the kind of imperialistic "high-low" trade
that Lenin once railed against. On the high end, China directs its financial
capital and human resources to the development of the extraction and harvesting
activities and transport of the natural resources back home for the production
of higher value-added goods.
In the process, China systematically strips nations of their raw materials and
natural resources. Adding injury to injury, China recovers the costs of these
resources and materials by dumping cheap finished goods into these same
countries, often driving out local labor and driving up the local unemployment
rate.
That China implements this imperialistic strategy by leveraging its position as
a permanent member of the UN Security Council with veto power is arguably one
of the most reprehensible aspects of an amoral foreign policy. That foreign
policy is founded on a principle that China's own President Hu Jintao has
preached like the lowliest of rug merchants across Africa and Latin America:
"Just business, no political conditions."
Peter Navarro is a business professor at the University of
California-Irvine, a CNBC contributor, and author of The Coming China
Wars (FT Press). www.peternavarro.com
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