9UNP0213SD_Edward_Friedman_WordPress

- Okay, our speaker today for the Global Hotspots lecture is Professor Ed Friedman who is in the Department of Political Science. And he was one of our speakers in the Global Hotspots series last year, as well, on the topic of China. He is, we asked him back to revisit that topic because it was an incredibly popular talk, as well as a very engaging one. And he is going to revisit the topic of China with a slightly different angle. And now I would turn it over to him and ask you to join me in welcoming Professor Ed Friedman. 
(APPLAUSE)
 
- Thank you, Sara. Good afternoon everybody. 

I hope everybody had a nice lunch. I even more hope that finally tomorrow the badgers will win a Big 10 game. The topic for the talk is "Given Darfur, How Come African Leaders are Infatuated with China?" And in the very short time we're going to be together, I'm going to ask you to join with me in pondering this paradox. Given that the People's Republic of China, the Communist Party regime in Beijing, a government that I'm going to refer to throughout by the shorthand of China. Given that China and Sudan backs people who have perpetuated and continue to carry out major systemic abuses of human rights, atrocities, against black Africans and Darfur, how is it possible that dominant elites in black sub-Saharan Africa, subsequently just called Africa, have a love affair with China? I think it can fairly be called a love affair. How can you love a government which perpetuates what former Secretary of State Colin Powell called a genocide. A government which unapologetically abets the mass murder of people like you. At the United Nations, China has blocked all attempts at effective action to end the genocide in Darfur. 

Just prior to the Beijing Olympics in response to a campaign to brand the Beijing Olympics a genocide Olympics, China made a few small gestures, largely empty, to act as if it cared about stopping the slaughter. The industrialized democracies, so called OECD nations, to stop the genocide had been boycotting Sudanese oil. None of them would invest in Sudanese oil in order to pressure the government -- to end the slaughter of the black Africans in Darfur. Then China rushed in. It signed drilling leases. And it has bank-rolled the Sudanese government ever since. It provides weapons, it built weapons factories, it has turned the capital city of Khartoum into an oil boom capital, similar to other authoritarian petro states. How would it be that this China is loved in Africa? The headlines in American national media on Africa tell us that China's atrocious behavior toward Darfur is part of a systemic pattern of supporting some of the worst regimes in Africa. As you all know, in Zimbabwe the Mugabe regime which has plundered the country 50% unemployment at least, 1 million plus percent inflation, God knows how you even understand that, is similarly financed by China and buffered by Chinese intervention at the U.N. Famously earlier this year, China tried secretly to run weapons to the Mugabe regime after he stole an election. 

This was to help Mugabe preserve his tyrannical rule. The weapon ship was blocked at every African port by union workers who refused to unload the cargo. Finally the ship had to return to China without delivering its murderous cargo to Mugabe. I could cite numerous similar cases, but just last one to drive home the nature of China's conduct in Africa. In Zambia, Chinese-owned mines are killer mines. By the way, China is the number one country in mine deaths; they are not treating Africans any worse than they treat Chinese. Protests against the mine deaths by an opposition political candidate in Zambia upset the Chinese. The leader of the Opposition Party promised that if he were to come to power, if he were elected, he would kick out the Chinese exploiters who don't care about African lives. The government of China responded by saying if the opposition leader were democratically elected, then China would punish Zambia and pull out all of its investment from all over Zambia causing a great loss of jobs and wealth in Zambia. China plays hardball. 

The anger at the Chinese in the mining region in Zambia is such that subsequently in the year when the president of China, Hu Jintao, visited Zambia, he was forced to cancel his trip to the mining region, he wanted to show off Chinese successes, for fear of the rage of the local people. So here's our paradox. Why then do Africans love China? Because, basically, they do. Well, you might say not all do. After all we just mentioned Zambian opposition parties who protest China's exploitative practices. And it's true that democratic unions throughout Africa tend to be anti-China. In general, throughout Africa societal non-government organizations are also very critical of China's practices in Africa. So are the democratic political parties of Africa. They tend to see China as just another colonializing exploiter. 

They all have the experience when an agreement known as the multi-fiber agreement, which is an agreement in which the industrialized democracies gave out quotas for importing textiles and apparel into their country, it ran out and the Third World countries wanted to run out because they saw it as a restraint on their ability to export to the rich countries of the world. What actually occurred was when the agreement ran out, that all of the apparel manufacturers essentially moved to China. And a great many jobs lost in Africa, a great many factories in Africa closed down. So here is an Africa which has an experience in China which many of these democratic forces in Africa refer to as colonialism or neocolonialism. A ripping off of African resources, a putting of weapons into the hands of security forces which protect some of the worst regimes in Africa which plundered the country and impoverish the people. And these critical voices in Africa refer to the Chinese as just as bad as the old colonialists. This also is the point of view of the European Union. Countries in Europe see China in Africa as undercutting the conditionality that the Europeans had put in place for loan money. In order to get investment and loans from Europe, African governments were required to have good government meant to clean up the corruption, respect societal forces, move in the direction of democracy and human rights. The European view was no matter what aid you had been giving, it was all a waste, because it was ripped off by corrupt elites. 

You had to change the governing system if you wanted to have any impact from this aid and investment in Africa because you hadn't done that before all the project aid to Africa essentially had been wasted. The key place where this is supposed to finally succeed was the country of Angola on the southwest coast of Africa which was bankrupt, it was an oil producer but it was so corrupt and wasteful that it couldn't even produce oil. And they were signing and agreement within the EU for loan money. They were going to meet these good governance conditionalities. And in the Chinese showed up in 2006 and they said, hey, forget the Europeans, we'll give you the loan money, just give us the drilling rights in your country. And they did. And Angola thumbed their noses at the European. Now the European Union and the democratic forces in Africa tend to agree that the long-term result of Chinese neocolonialism, as they call it, will be the further entrenchment in Africa of corrupt despots who will collude with Chinese to plunder their people and their resources so that at the end of the day Africa will not have the wherewithal to eventually get rich. Instead, despots, their cronies are going to be able to hold power in perpetuity using Chinese monies for these purposes. So the real question is, how come most Africans see it differently? 

How come they see Chinese as their savior? Because I want to tell you, they do. For authoritarian elites, obviously they can see China as their savior because from the Sudan to Zimbabwe to Angola, China is saving the authoritarian leaders of some of the worst African regimes. But China's popularity goes well beyond these narrow authoritarian groups. In the big question is, how come? First, they've had it with the Europeans. At independence the former colonialists left Africa, as the Africans experienced it, with nothing. And after independence, European aid and most of the aid to Africa has been from Europe, because they were their colonies, has failed. Africa has more countries than any other region in the world. Although if time permits at the end and you have questions, I would argue that South Asia from Burma to Afghanistan is actually worse off than Africa and we have a prejudice stereotype of Africa as if everybody is dying from AIDS and in civil war with each other. 

That's a separate topic. Anyway, in addition the African see the Europeans as endlessly intervening in Africa with their military and they experience this conditionality of aid to get good government as just another arrogant effort by the former colonialists to intervene in Africa, to humiliate Africans and what Africans want is dignity and independence and the Europeans don't offer it. And China does. China is seen as offering aid and money with no strings attached. You get the investment, you get the loans without conditions. No endless haggling about conditions. The Chinese arrived, the money arrives, the money is yours. No humiliations involved. You make a deal, Chinese get the resources, you get the money, what could be nicer? The Chinese deliver. 

And the Chinese also deliver because they really do want to get these resources from Africa. The Chinese also build infrastructure. They make investments where no European would go. They accept smaller profit margins. Their workers work in worse conditions. The result of this investment, and Chinese investment only begins gradually in 1998. It really begins to take off in 2000, and it really finally gets big only in 2006, so this money is new and still rising. The World Bank reports that the Chinese money has already led to a 20% increase in Africa's rate of GDP, gross domestic product, growth. And China, as I just said, is only getting started. So the Chinese have two trillion dollars almost in foreign-exchange. 

They need African resources. Their commitment to Africa is going to continue because Chinese growth is going to continue. They have to keep importing energy and other resources. Africans experience it as a good deal. China needs the energy and resources, Africa has the energy and resources, China wants to do business, so does Africa. Now it is a fact when suddenly 10 billion Chinese dollars, actually they're American dollars, appear in the Congo or in Nigeria as they have, the feeling is more, more, more is coming, how could you not love it? The Africans experience the Chinese as having risen rapidly since the death of Mao from nothing to be a superpower. They wonder what the Chinese secret is and wherever China is going, they want to buy in. They want to benefit. The way the Africans see it, everybody wants the benefit from China's rise. 

American financial firms, which are going bankrupt or have gone bankrupt, go to Beijing to beg for a bailout. So why shouldn't the Africans also take Chinese money? The western critique about Chinese immorality, seems to the Africans, to be hypocritical. Would you like them to give you a list of nasty regimes that the Europeans or Americans are in bed with? They see, the Africans see the Europeans and Americans doing the same thing and applying a double-standard in calling the Africans names. The next question is rather obvious. Who is right? Is Africa actually going to benefit from this or is it neocolonial Chinese exploitation? The African Democrats who argue that the money is just money down a rat hole of corrupt despotic regimes, have so far in some ways been proven right. $10 billion was given to the Congo. 

You might think it's impossible for $10 billion to disappear. No one knows where the $10 billion is, but China has all sorts of mining leases as a result. So the point of view, however, of the Africans is that they are patriots. They're against colonialism. They are against Europeans, who are the real neocolonialists. China was never a colonial power in Africa. China is going to help Africa end its indignities, end its poverty, end its misery and the fact is, as the Africans see it, is the Europeans have a track record of failure, intervention, hypocrisy, and then more failure. So from the Africans' point of view, China is a breath of fresh air. Chinese leaders go to Africa more than leaders from any other major nation in the world. They have created a special organization for Africans. 

They treat the African leaders very well when they come to China. The African leaders see how well China is doing, and I hope you all know that China, since 1978-'79 is the fastest growing country on the planet Earth, the transformation is beyond words to portray it. So it seems to me that the Africans have a prima fascia case. Why shouldn't they be betting that China may just have the goods to deliver even in Africa and help Africa end its poverty which no one has since independence around 1960. And the basic view is something like this: How will it happen? Well starting around 1960, Japan in its investment and policies in east and southeast Asia totally transformed Asia. It's a policy known as flying geese. And China is now doing the same thing in Africa. And as Japan incorporated Asia into this Japanese dynamism, this economic growth success, China is in the process of beginning to do the same thing to Africa. And not only is China doing it, but other nations in Asia which compete with China which see themselves as China's equal, India and Japan, are also now coming into Africa and doing similar sorts of things and suddenly Africa is being offered monies and investments and bids that no one was offering them ever, ever, ever. 

So from an African point of view, the Chinese promise is being fulfilled in spades. Now this is not a view which says because of China everybody in Africa will be able to rise out of poverty. Because in Japan it was not the case that everybody in Asia rose out of poverty. Taiwan did. Singapore did. South Korea did. Hong Kong did. And in the next cycle Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia. And then the third cycle China, Vietnam and others now beginning to join in. But the view is that as Japan did that to those countries in Asia, which are willing to fly in that flying geese pattern, so countries which want to join in can similar succeed with China. 

If you don't join, of course, you're not going to succeed. Not everybody in Asia joined. North Korea did not join. A basket case. Burma did not join. Misery. Laos did not join. Misery. So if you don't join in Africa, you're not going to benefit but there it is as a possibility for you. How does it work? 

The view is that the lead goose, in the first instance Japan in Asia and now China and Africa, keeps flying higher and higher. That is, it moves from one technology to another. It moves from lower technologies to higher technologies. It moves from lower school work to higher school work. It moves from lower wage employment to higher wage employment. But it does not just move, each time it moves it takes the lower ends which it's abandoning and it passes them on to the geese that are flying behind. The lead goose remains the lead goose but everybody, everybody flies ahead. And since you keep moving up in the technology and the wages and the skills, than everybody keeps flying forward leaving poverty ever further behind too. Now some people thought especially when the multi fiber agreement died and all of this apparel factories in Africa closed down and they all went to China that China would be different. That China would hold onto lower-end jobs as well as the higher end jobs and there would be no flying geese flying behind. 

But it turns out not to be the case, and the economic laws at work simply work for China just like everywhere else. The currency is rising in value. Wages are rising in value. Lower-end jobs are beginning to leave China. The question is, will the Chinese policies help them reach Africa? And the African view is, yes. They are going to make sure that they will benefit from linking up with the Chinese lead flying goose. They are going to tie themselves in. One of the ways this happens is Chinese are moving to Africa. Now this is not part of most people's view. 

Most people still have the view of China as if it were the Mao era and it's simply a totalitarian state and everybody is in control and they have no feeling for the dynamism of the society. They have no feeling from the huge amount of private space that exists in the society. They have no feeling for how much China is swept up in an entrepreneurial frenzy. People in China, who would otherwise be locked into poverty are seeking opportunities anywhere in the world. There are already more Chinese in Nigeria, a former colony of the United Kingdom, than there ever, ever were English in Nigeria. Even at the height of British colonialism. There were already more Chinese in Angola, a former colony of Portugal, than there are Portuguese in China. There are still in China 300 million people locked up into poverty and misery in the countryside. Bottom-end jobs are beginning to leave for the reasons we just gave, wages are rising, the currency is rising. They want a way up. 

These people, full of ambition, full of adventure are increasingly going off to Africa. Millions, I believe, are going to go. And they have the ties back to these firms in China so they can move the enterprises off-shore, they can still hold on to the markets and you can get this flying goose pattern of movement. In fact, maybe you'll see it even faster in Africa than even occurred in Asia. After all, there are 10 times as many Chinese as Japanese, and Japan benefited at the end of World War II from an excellent land reform which ended misery in the countryside but no such thing happened in China which is why there are these hundreds of millions of people in China who are looking for alternatives with their entrepreneurial energies. As I said, the key is that you have to be willing to plug in. Those will not plug in with China are not going to win. But, it may be a wider impact than you might think. Because of two policies that the Chinese government is following which sort of will hot-house what would otherwise be a slower-moving flying goose pattern of development. First are what are called special economic zones. 

These were originally created in Taiwan, the Chinese learned about them in Korea. They implemented as part of the first reform policy. The idea is these are special places. They no longer work like the old economy. They're welcoming of investment. You can get tax breaks. You have labor that's going to produce for you. Everything is provided for you. These are places to go to make money. But they're also places, spots, which attract local people who learn new skills, who learn how to do things and who move out and spread what they know over the rest, in China's case, the country, and Africa's case, the continent. 

And the Chinese government is facilitating the creation of these five large special economic zones. Second, the Chinese government is facilitating the building of infrastructure in China. It's not done out of charity. China wants to ease their ability to get oil and other resources from Africa. They want to show that their way of doing things, authoritarian development, works while the European way of doing things, democratic development, fails. And they want to have their own firms in Africa learn from competing with America and European firms in Africa have become globally competitive eventually to move into Europe and elsewhere, and to become really competitive global Fortune 500 firms. And Africa is sort of the preseason before you get into the big leagues. So multiple forces are at work. The Chinese commitment is real. The firms are going there. 

The government is backing it. Entrepreneurial Chinese are heading there. They know how to carry out this flying goose pattern of development. Now I don't know the future for sure. None of us do. But I can't see why I have to be persuaded by those who see the Chinese in Africa as a neocolonial rip-off. I don't see why China can't help develop Africa as Japan helped develop Asia. The Japanese did not do it as a promoter of democracy and human rights, and I can assure you China is not doing it for such purposes either. It is economic and global strategic motives that are at work. But these are real and these are serious and these are going to persist and that means the Chinese commitment is real. 

So I think the African leaders who are supposedly infatuated with China are actually making a rational and self interested bet in believing that China can help them develop and transform Africa. Articles in the dominant American and European media present a very different picture, as I said at the beginning. And the Africans dismiss it. "Western media sensationalism is full of accusation that China is Africa's new colonizers. Instead, they want to focus on the impact in 2006, China's first big year in Africa, of $6 billion, that's billion like almost real money, in infrastructural development, roads, railroads and the like. The Chinese government is flying, it's backing this flying goose effort. Its firms want to take advantage of these special economic zones effort. And I think the Africans conclude that the Chinese effort is making growth and wealth creation in Africa real." That's a quote from an African journal. In conclusion, it seems to me that two points stand out. 

One, China is a superpower. Most Africans see it as a super power. In their eyes, China is not discredited by its human-rights abuses. In fact, most governments in Africa are actually cynical about the human rights stories. There is actually very little difference between the policies of Democratic South Africa in Darfur, Zimbabwe and Burma, take another miserable place where China is very influential propping up the government, there's very little difference between South African policies and Chinese policies. Just because you're a democracy doesn't mean you're a saint. You can still act in very nasty, self-interested ways. And the Africans tend to see China out of those kind of spectacles. It's a big mistake not to understand what it means that China is a superpower. Europe was startled to discover in 2006 that China was out-competing it in Africa. 

But it was. And similarly, the same shock hit Japan in 1995-1996, we can go into this later if you want, when they discovered that China was on its way to becoming a dominant power in Asia because their assumption had been that it was preordained that Japan was to be the dominant power in Asia. Now the Chinese government rejects being labeled a superpower. The Chinese leadership says, how can you call us a superpower when we have so many poor people, in fact I just pointed out to how many poor people exist in China. But you have to remember if you ever read Charles Dickens' novel Oliver Twist or angles on the working class in England, when England rose to be the world's strongest power, it was precisely when workers in factories in England and the urban poor in general were worse treated and most miserable. Having poor people does not detract from superpower impact in the world. As that was true with England in the 19th century, so I think it's going to be true with China in the 21st century. It is a superpower. The only question I think for the future, accepting that China is a superpower, is whether it is the superpower or whether it's the other superpower. That's a separate question which we can discuss too. 

But that it is at least a superpower strikes me as indubitable. The second point is, the second conclusion or question or however you want to stress this, is to ask what does this rise of authoritarian China to superpower status mean for America and the other democracies of the world? First, it means that all businesses in America feel that in order to succeed globally, they must be able to compete in China. A world renowned economist writing in the Financial Times this week said that what China should do is take about $500 billion of its almost $2 trillion in foreign exchange reserves and bailout the United States. 
(LAUGHTER)
 It's presuppositional for people looking at the World Economic that China is a superpower. And this rise of any nation to a superpower status turns other nations into supplicants. And this has global implications for the future of democracy. Increasingly, the world accepts the Chinese explanation of how it succeeded, of how the world works. And in that explanation of the authoritarian Chinese Communist Party regime, authoritarianism is superior to democracy. 

In this view, democracy hurts development. That's why you're supposed to conclude that India lags and China soars. That is why there is nothing immoral from this point of view. For China to back some of the worst dictators in the world, not only in Africa and Asia, Uzbekistan, Burma and North Korea, but throughout the world. Of course it is in the narrowest self-interest of the ruling group in China and the authoritarian regime, the monopoly of unaccountable power that it doesn't want to be challenged, threatened. It is most comfortable in a world where its power can be made permanent by having other similar authoritarian regimes all around the world. From the point of view of this ruling regime, the worst thing that could happen is to see the spread of democracy and human rights. China has already defeated internationally the human rights regime. It is pushing back against democracy. And it's not doing so by military aggression. 

It's not doing so by invasion. It's not doing so by subversion. It's doing things through ordinary, diplomatic and economic pressures. To be sure some bullying, to be sure some hanky-panky but, come on, that's how the world works. China is in no way uniquely evil in any of these kinds of things that it does. The most important thing is it's winning. Let me read you some quotes from a journalist just back from Africa writing about this. Now he actually believes in the position I introduced at the beginning of the talk about China as neocolonialism but in making his argument he tells you what the view of Africans are that disagree with him. I'm only going to read that part, just so you hear how Africans say it. He then says the things that I said at the beginning of the class. 

"Out of desperation much of the continent is selling itself into a new era of corruption and virtual slavery. As China buys up all the metals, minerals and oil she can lay her hands on. Copper for electric and telephone cables, Cobalt for mobile phones and jet engines, the basic raw materials of modern life. It is crude rapacity. But to Africans and many of their leaders, it is better than the alternative which is slow starvation. China's cynical new version of imperialism is a wicked enterprise." That is his view. For the government, however, of Africa, there are gargantuan loans, promises of new roads, railroads, hospitals, schools in return for giving Peking a free and tax-free run at Africa's rich resources of oil, minerals and metals. For the people, there are these wretched leavings which, miserable as they are, must be better than the near starvation they otherwise face. China's scramble for Africa has much to be said for it. 

China needs African markets for its goods and has an interest in real economic advance in that broken continent. For once, foreign intervention in Africa might work. Precisely because it is so cynical and self interested. Western aid with all its conditions did little to create real advances in Africa. The only state that ever got rich through donations is the Vatican. 
(LAUGHTER)
 Why get so head up about African corruption anyway? Is it really so much worse than corruption in Russia or India or China? China has canceled, just to take one example of a country, Zambia's debts. Eased Zambia's exports to China. 

Established a special economic zone in the copper belt. Offered to build a sports stadium, schools, a hospital and an anti-malaria center as well as writing scholarships and dispatching experts to help with the agriculture. Zambia-China trade is growing rapidly. Mainly in the form of copper. Outsiders come and go in Africa. Some greedy, some idealistic, some halfway between. Time after time they fail or are defeated. Leaving behind scars, slag heaps, ruins, and graveyards, disillusion and disappointment. New great-power China is scrambling for wealth, power and influence in this sad continent without a single illusion or pretense. Perhaps after two centuries of humbug, this method will work where all other interventions have failed. 

China is winning. People in Africa see China as a model of authoritarian success. Africans see what is going on, south-south cooperation, the poor of the world joining together. The largest bank in Africa, the Standard Bank of South Africa, is now in partnership with the largest international bank of China, Commercial Industrial Bank, involved in investment opportunities all over Africa. This is seen as replacing north-south exploitations. The democracies of the world, and democracy in general, is endangered by the rise of China. This rise, this success, remember is not brought by invasion. African leaders, of course, are infatuated. The real question is not Africa. The real question is the rest of us. 

What does this challenge mean for the fate of democracy around the world? And I'll stop with that question. 
(APPLAUSE)