China finds its place
Writing
on the eve of Chinese leader Xi Jinping's arrival in Durban
to attend the Fifth BRICS Summit, Vijay Prashad discusses
some of the familiar charges levelled against China
with regard to its role in Africa.
AN
old colonial saw worries about the entry of the Asians into European
colonies in Africa and settler colonies (Australia,
New Zealand and
South Africa)
- they will arrive to be field labour and shopkeepers, multiply by
migration and by procreation, and then supplant the white man from
their own colonies. A broadside by the Johannesburg-based colonial
LE Neame (The Asiatic Danger in the Colonies), published in 1907,
warned that if the Asians came to Africa, these 'inferior masses..., with all their virtues,
will underlive and undersell' the Europeans. After the Chinese migrate
to Australia,
Neame worried, 'the Chinaman would become sufficiently expert to do
the work, and the white man be compelled to join the ranks of the
unemployed, or accept a Chinaman's wages and live down to the Chinaman's
standard.' The danger was not to the Africans or the Aborigines, whose
well-being was not Neame's problem, but to the European.
A
hundred years later, North Atlantic writings on the Chinese in Africa are far more genteel in their offensiveness. A few
titles will suffice: China Safari: On the Trail of Beijing's Expansion;
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon?: Africa and China;
The Age of the Dragon: China's
Conquest of Africa; The Dragon's Gift: The Real Story of China in
Africa; The Morality of China in Africa: The Middle Kingdom and the
Dark Continent.
Cliches
abound. Dragons and Tigers must be part of the story. So too must
hunting. Africa is subordinate; China
is the predator. The storyline from old Neame is relatively unchanged.
Then it was the small merchant and the agricultural worker who was
the worry; now it is the Chinese state, its public sector firms and
the Chinese entrepreneur.
Australian
mining firms, such as Rio Tinto, Newcrest and Ivanhoe, have all begun
to excavate the African sub-soil for copper and platinum, gold and
iron ore. The Australia-Africa Mining Industry Group has designs on
vast projects, compensating for regulations in Australia
that have sent costs upwards. No books have appeared with the following
titles: Crocodile Africa: Australia Mines the Dark Continent; Dingoes
Dig the Savanna: What Is Australia Doing in Africa?;
The Adventures of Rio Tinto, King of Guinea.
Goals
of Capital
What
Chinese business is doing, in essence, is not so very different on
the surface from any other country's firm. A hunt for resources and
markets has detained Capital since the 19th century - and this is
precisely what motivates the Chinese and others to bring their surplus
and their needs to places such as Africa. There is nothing mysterious or inscrutable about
what the Chinese are up to. Their Capital seeks what all Capital seeks
- investments, resources and markets. To claim otherwise is to fall
into the old colonial anxiety about the Asiatic menace.
Besides,
a new UN study shows that the largest investors in Africa are France, the United
States, Malaysia,
China and India. If there
is any residual worry it should be spread equally amongst these five
states, two of the largest investors being from the North
Atlantic.
In
that most unlikely anti-imperialist journal, the Financial Times,
Nigeria's central bank chief Lamido Sanusi, another
unlikely anti-imperialist, wrote, 'It is time for Africans to wake
up to the realities of their romance with China.' 'So China takes our
primary goods and sells us manufactured ones,' wrote Sanusi. 'This
was also the essence of colonialism.' Africa,
he argues, 'is now willingly opening itself up to a new form of imperialism.
We must see China
for what it is: a competitor' ('Africa Must Get Real About Chinese
Ties', 11 March). Sanusi essayed no broadside against North
Atlantic imperialism. That simply would be gauche.
What
is the antidote to Africa's problem?
African countries must 'produce locally goods in which we can build
comparative advantage, but also actively fight off Chinese imports
promoted by predatory policies'. In other words, African states need
to craft import-substitution schemes as in the 1960s and 1970s - although
these very schemes were assaulted by the North
Atlantic states in the name of globalisation, promoted
enthusiastically by the Financial Times and by Sanusi himself. 'Investment
in technical and vocational education is critical,' says Sanusi, although
he does not tell us how this is to be funded. Sanusi is in favour
of the withdrawal of Nigeria's
fuel subsidy, and would like to open up the fuel markets - there is
no Venezuelan solution to Nigeria's
own education policy, namely to use the super-profits and royalties
from the oil sector to finance a massive human development project.
Far easier to warn about the Asiatic menace and champion policies
that you actually oppose than to truly grapple with the stranglehold
of class power in African states.
Africa's
path forward
Sub-Saharan
Africa, according to the most recent
Human Development Report (2013), 'has become a major new source and
destination for South-South trade. Between 1992 and 2011, China's trade with Sub-Saharan Africa
rose from $1 billion to more than $140 billion.' The North Atlantic,
notably the US, has tried all manner of mechanisms to compete against
China, including pressure through the World Trade Organisation (WTO),
bilateral pressure on its regional allies and, of course, the threat
of Africom (the African Command). Nothing has worked.
China
is not in Africa on a missionary
project. It is in African countries as part of its own accumulation
strategies. I asked Ibrahim Kaduma, Tanzania's
former foreign minister, how he would approach the Chinese investments
in Africa. He said that 'African states need to come up with
their own assessment of their path forward' and engage with the Chinese
or any other investor on the basis of these values. Absent a strong
foundation, and absent a clear programme for development, the new
elites accommodate whoever comes in, often for a very small price
paid to them personally. The nation suffers as a result.
Stopping
over in Dar es Salaam, China's new leader Xi Jinping sought to assuage
the growing disquiet in the continent over China's investments. 'Africa belongs to the African people,' he said. 'In developing
relations with Africa, all countries should respect Africa's dignity and independence.' Such moist rhetoric
is familiar to the continent. Capital tends to speak in this register.
It does not like to portray itself as heartless. Nevertheless, there
is a strand in African affairs that sees things from a positive light.
Donald Kaberuka of the African Development Bank hopes to learn from
the Chinese 'how to organise our trade policy, to move from low to
middle income status, to educate our children in skills and areas
that pay off in just a couple of years'. In other words, there is
an African constituency that seeks to follow the Chinese Road or at least the Flying Geese
Paradigm to benefit the growth rates of African states.
These
views do not emerge out of a hallucination. 'To check the adverse
consequences of rising exports to some of its partners,' the Human
Development Report (2013) notes, 'China is providing preferential
loans and setting up training programmes to modernise the garment
and textile sectors in African countries. China has encouraged its mature industries such
as leather to move closer to the supply chain in Africa
and its modern firms in telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, electronics
and construction to enter joint ventures with African businesses.'
No
doubt that Chinese investment is already building a vast communication
and transportation network in Africa.
No doubt either that Chinese business is building up industrial infrastructure
and, with it, institutions for education and health. No doubt too
that Chinese aid and grants come without 'conditionalities'. All investment,
whether from the North Atlantic or Asia,
comes for the raw materials and the markets. But North Atlantic money
also sought political power, with the US
pushing its funds via the government's Agency for International Development,
a phantom arm of the State Department. China's
money comes from its Ministry of Commerce and its Export-Import Bank,
which have a double mandate: to ensure access for China
to raw materials (oil and rare earth minerals) and to ensure a market
for China's overheated
industrial sector. Business leads the way.
This
business-first approach is not neutral. It reveals first a weakness
in the Chinese model, petrified by the limitations of capitalism -
overproducing goods through the magic of industrial capitalism; underpaying
workers who cannot buy these goods; delivering credit as a mechanism
to produce demand; seeking new pastures for cheaper raw materials
to reduce the cost of the final good, and for markets to sell these
goods. This is the satanic cycle of capitalism. China is an export-oriented
industrial giant gradually shut out from the saturated consumer-driven
debt economies of the North Atlantic, and therefore now eager, even
desperate, to create and cultivate new markets in the South. This
is precisely the lever that African countries could use to make the
best of their current situation. Without a clear-cut social democratic
or socialist project, 'values' in Kaduma's lexicon, what you end up
with are bad deals for Africa negotiated by venal politicians who are eager to
skim their own share of the cream.
As
Xi arrives in Durban, the BRICS summit
will announce the formation of a BRICS Development Bank with a $50
billion capital chest (China
has a surplus of $3.31 trillion, a vault that will likely be recycled
through this kind of bank). But there are grave doubts about the model
of the investment, coming in to promote resource extraction rather
than social development. There is worry too that the new BRICS Bank,
which is likely to be housed in Shanghai, will be a well-capitalised
Southern version of the World Bank rather than the kind of development
bank envisaged by BancoSur (before its radicalism was tempered by
the Brazilian government - as pointed out by Oscar Ugarteche and Eric
Toussaint). The kind of regimes that now control the BRICS process
are constrained by their own class projects - they favour neoliberal
policies as long as these do not discriminatorily favour the North.
This
article is reproduced from the CounterPunch website (www.counterpunch.org).
*Third
World Resurgence No. 274, June 2013, pp 25-26
