It is a straightforward point in international relations that nations put their own interest first in all engagements. What defines a nation is the ability to define and pursue its agenda within the extant international laws which, incidentally, are routinely violated by the powerful economies
ADEREMI MEDUPIN
Why focus on China
There is ample reason for China to deserve our focus at this moment in global geopolitics. For one thing, the unique prominence of that country has become indisputable. This why the US in particular regards China as its main economic and geopolitical rival. In this enterprise, the other willing and unwilling members of the G7 are dragged along who in turn are also trying to attract the countries of the Global South to their side. Another key justification for our choice of theme is the growing disquiet over what critics see as imperialistic behaviour of China as unfolding especially on the African continent.
Putting our subject in context, as documented by Encyclopedia Britannica, China is the largest of all Asian countries and has the largest population among all the countries in the world with perhaps the disputed case of India. Occupying nearly the entire East Asian landmass, it covers approximately one-fourteenth of the land area of Earth. Among the major countries of the world, China is surpassed in area by only Russia and Canada, and it is almost as large as the whole of Europe. China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is the world's largest military force (not including paramilitary or reserve forces) and has the second largest defense budget in the world. According to Wikipedia, China's military expenditure was US$292 billion in 2022, accounting for 13 percent of the world's defense expenditures. She has the second largest air force in the world after the United States, which has the most significant air force strength. Although she lags behind the United States regarding operational skills and military hardware, it has also improved relative capabilities in many areas. China is ranked 3 of 145 out of the countries considered for the annual Global Firepower review. The People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) surpassed the US Navy in fleet size sometime in 2020 and now has around 340 warships, according to the Pentagon's 2022 China Military Power Report, released in November 2022. Overall, the People's Liberation Army Air Force operates a large and varied fleet of some 4,000 aircraft, of which around 2,566 are combat aircraft (fighter, attack, and bombers). According to FlightGlobal, China has the second-largest active combat aircraft fleet and the third-largest total aircraft fleet in the world. The 2022 report ranks Japan as the third most powerful country in Asia after the United States and China. India follows in fourth place, while Russia is ranked fifth, followed by Australia, South Korea, Singapore and Indonesia.
Meanwhile, according to Wikipedia, with 778 million workers, the Chinese labour force was the world's largest as of 2020, ranking 28th on the Global Competitiveness Report. She has the second-largest financial assets in the world, valued at $17.9 trillion as of 2021. As of March 2022, the country already had over 500 million 5G users and 1.45 million base stations installed. China is the world's largest manufacturing economy and exporter of goods.
In their “A Theory of China’s ‘Miracle’” in Monthly Review (Jan 01, 2017), Cheng Enfu and Ding Xiaoqin noted how China’s model has been variously described as a form of neoliberalism, or as a novel kind of Keynesianism. Based on their study and understanding, the duo advanced a set of essentially self-explanatory features of the country’s economic structure and management spelt out as: “Eight Principles of Contemporary Chinese Political Economy”, namely:
i) Sustainability led by Science and Technology: this principle emphasizes that liberating and developing the forces of production is the overriding mission of socialism at its earliest stages. As an economic model, socialism requires a certain level of material and technological development at its base. This principle stresses that population growth, resource exploitation and allocation, and the environment should mutually support and sustain one another.
ii) Orienting Production to improve the livelihood of the people: the direct and ultimate objective of production in socialism is to meet the whole people’s material and cultural needs.
iii) Public Ownership Precedence in National Property Rights: Contemporary Chinese political economy adheres to the principle of property rights, with dominant public ownership. In the context of the relative underdevelopment of productivity in socialism at its earliest stages, economic development has required that a dominant public ownership develop alongside diversified private ownership.
iv) The Primacy of Labour in the Distribution of Wealth: The distribution of wealth in a Chinese socialist economy must be guided by the needs of labour, not capital. In other words, the state and society must strive against exploitation and polarization. The income gap should be bridged, and increased income for all citizens should coincide with economic growth and labor productivity.
v) The Market Principle Steered by the State: The point is that in the Chinese socialist economy, the market is steered by the state, not the other way around. This “state-steered market” principle emphasizes that a socialist society can develop a market economy in a planned and proportionate way, and that the fundamental role of the market in resource allocation should be carried out under government supervision.
vi) Speedy Development with High Performance: The essence of this principle is that the optimal economic growth rate should seek to maximize economic performance.
vii) Balanced Development with Structural Coordination: The law requires that the overall social labour of people, tools, and materials should be distributed proportionately according to demand, in order to maintain a structural balance among different industries and sectors.
viii) Economic Sovereignty and Openness: A final principle is to open the economy to trade and investment. This principle holds that such opening is beneficial to economic growth both at home and abroad, aiding optimizations in the allocation of resources and improved interactions between industry and technology.
In practical terms, therefore, and as detailed in “The U.S. Economy and China: Capitalism, Class, and Crisis” by Martin Hart-Landsberg in the February 2010 edition of Monthly Review, Chinese state policies have transformed China into an export powerhouse, with the U.S. market its main target. Initially, Chinese exports were predominately labour intensive, low-technology products, such as textiles and shoes. However, beginning in the mid-1990s, China also became a major exporter of higher valued added, high-technology products, such as computers, cell phones, and other consumer electronics. Not only are Chinese imports to the United States becoming increasingly sophisticated, China is also increasingly the main foreign supplier of such products. Little wonder therefore, that Rana Mitter and Elsbeth Johnson, in their May-June 2021 Harvard Business Review piece, “What the West Gets Wrong about China”, declared:
When we first traveled to China, in the early 1990s, it was very different from what we see today. Even in Beijing many people wore Mao suits and cycled everywhere; only senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials used cars. In the countryside life retained many of its traditional elements. But over the next 30 years, thanks to policies aimed at developing the economy and increasing capital investment, China emerged as a global power, with the second-largest economy in the world and a burgeoning middle class eager to spend.
Overall, as an economic system, China is characterized by the state continuing to dominate in many strategic sectors, such as finance, energy, and transportation, the great majority of value added in the all-important manufacturing sector is now produced by profit-seeking, private firms. Zhiming Long, Rémy Herrera and Tony Andréani, writing on: “On the Nature of the Chinese Economic System” in the October 2018 Monthly Review, invoked the official line of the Chinese leadership to the effect that: China’s ruling class admits that the capitalist private sector plays a very important role in the country’s economy. However, it claims that this sector is one of the many components of a mixed economy, in which the public sector and the power of the state must be strengthened. Based on their speeches, many Chinese leaders seem to argue that China is currently in a “primary phase of socialism,” an essential step toward developing the necessary productive forces for full-fledged socialism.
Coming to politics, as Wikipedia notes, currently there are eight political parties in China other than the CCP that are legal, but all have to accept CCP primacy to exist. The CCP says that China is a "socialist democracy", in which the CCP is the central authority and acts in the interest of the people. According to the online medium, “During a visit to Europe in 2014, CCP general secretary Xi Jinping said that a multi-party system would not work for China. He said China had experimented in the past with various political systems, including multi-party democracy, warning that copying foreign political or development models could be catastrophic because of its unique historical and social conditions”.
Daniel Bell, a notable analyst and author on China, asserts that China’s model and strategy of development is creating free-market capitalism with an authoritarian one-party state that prioritizes political stability. Yet he unveils more complexity to the China Model in his analysis, pointing to how China's political model could prove to be a viable alternative to Western democracy. In particular, Westerners tend to divide the political world into "good" democracies and “bad” authoritarian regimes; but the Chinese political model does not fit neatly in either category.
The most embracing yet essentially correct description of the socio-economic system of China is perhaps the one provided by Zhiming Long, Rémy Herrera and Tony Andréani in the October 2018 piece cited above, as having the following features:
a) The persistence of powerful and modernized planning, which takes various modalities and mobilizes different tools according to the sectors concerned.
b) A form of political democracy that makes possible the collective choices that underpin this planning.
c) Very extensive public services, which condition political, social, and economic citizenship and, as such, are off the market or weakly marketable.
d) Public ownership of land and natural resources—state-owned at the national level and collective at the local level—thereby guaranteeing farmers access to land.
e) Diverse forms of ownership suitable to the socialization of productive forces: (1) SOEs, provided that they differ from capitalist firms, particularly with regard to the participation of workers in management, (2) small individual private property, and (3) socialized property. In addition, there is capitalist property, which was maintained and even at times encouraged during the long socialist transition in order to stimulate activity and make effective other forms of property.
f) A general policy consisting of increasing labour income relative to other sources of income.
g) The promotion of social justice from a more egalitarian perspective.
h) The preservation of nature, considered to be inseparable from social progress, as a goal of development in order to maximize wealth.
i) Economic relations between states based on a win-win principle that is, systematically seeking mutual benefits.
j) Political relations between states based on the pursuit of peace and more equitable relationships.
The last point above on Chinese inter-state relations policy is brought out vividly in early June 2023, when a Qatari website reported that “Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman are to form a joint naval force under China’s auspices towards enhancing maritime security in the Persian Gulf”, which is a clear demonstration of the spread of Chinese influence and relevance on the global scene.
If nothing is said about Taiwan in this brief, it would be perceived rightly as a gross omission given the recurring controversy around it. From geography, we see that Taiwan is an island, roughly 100 miles from the coast of south-east China. On the island’s status and its relationship with China, David Brown of the BBC News Visual Journalism Team has offered a simplified overview, noting that: China sees self-ruled Taiwan as a breakaway province that will eventually be under Beijing's control. China's President Xi Jinping has said "reunification" with Taiwan "must be fulfilled" - and has not ruled out the possible use of force to achieve this. But Taiwan sees itself as distinct from the Chinese mainland, with its own constitution and democratically-elected leaders. Going down memory lane, the BBC reported on how historical sources indicate that the island first came under full Chinese control in the 17th Century when the Qing dynasty began administering it. Then, in 1895, they gave up the island to Japan after losing the first Sino Japanese war.
China took the island again in 1945 after Japan lost World War Two. But a civil war erupted in mainland China between nationalist government forces led by Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong's Communist Party. The communists won in 1949 and took control in Beijing. Chiang Kai-shek and what was left of the nationalist party - known as the Kuomintang - fled to Taiwan, where they ruled for the next several decades. China points to this history to say that Taiwan was originally a Chinese province. But the Taiwanese point to the same history to argue that they were never part of the modern Chinese state that was first formed after the revolution in 1911 - or the People's Republic of China that was established under Mao in 1949. The unnerving game of claims and counter-claims persist till date.
At another level, mention must be made of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. As summed up on the platform of the Council on Foreign Affairs in a piece, “China’s Massive Belt and Road Initiative” on February 2, 2023: China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), sometimes referred to as the New Silk Road, is one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects ever conceived. Launched in 2013 by President Xi Jinping, the vast collection of development and investment initiatives was originally devised to link East Asia and Europe through physical infrastructure. In the decade since, the project has expanded to Africa, Oceania, and Latin America, significantly broadening China’s economic and political influence.
The BRI is one of the cases pointed to as demonstration of China’s territorial ambition albeit oftentimes laced with more subtle propagandist rhetoric.
Anti-China propaganda versus Chinese reality
The bias of reportage on China by the media in US and Western Europe is what John Ross exposed in an article in the MR Online of May 23, 2023, titled: “Peak China”, where particular attention was given to the role of The Economist Magazine. As introduction to his objective commentary on the biased reportage of the magazine on China, John Ross entered the following instructive caveat, that: . . . in order to avoid any suggestion that we are misrepresenting The Economist, let us factually establish its prolonged inaccuracies on China. Similarly, to avoid any suggestion of seizing on incidental or secondary remarks, taken out of context, which do not represent the central views of the publication, only front pages, and special supplements, that is the journal’s most important publications, on China will be used.
The commentator thereafter proceeded to cite several instances of the magazine’s published positions that turned out as false-both in factual representation and projections. Contrary to western propaganda’s projection, in terms of per capita GDP, China’s total growth from 2010 to 2022 was 105%, and an annual average per capita GDP growth of 6.2% which show that China’s socialist “state directed growth” was far more effective at producing per capita GDP growth than expected or acknowledged. More significant, on a comparative basis, “since the creation of the People’s Republic in 1949, China has improved its per capita GDP position relative to the U.S. by more than five times”. Meanwhile, the country’s leadership has set its goal of becoming a “strong, democratic, civilized, harmonious, and modern socialist country” to be achieved only by 2049.
John Ross concluded his incisive debunking of western anti-China propaganda with a dismissal of Goldman Sachs’ negative reading and projection of the Chinese trajectory with a celebration of the latter’s uniqueness, arguing rhetorically and confidently asserting that: China is different from other economies. Why? For the simple reason that its economy is growing much more rapidly than they are! Therefore, it is producing a more rapid increase in average living standards than they are, it has produced a more rapid reduction in poverty than they have etc. and which overall has produced the most rapid sustained improvement in the living standards of any country in human history.
This is the basis for Cheng Enfu and Ding Xiaoqin, in their January 2017 Monthly Review article cited earlier, to point to why China’s rapid economic development in recent years is often characterized as “miraculous”, such that China model has become commonplace in academic debates.
In the study on “Attitudes towards China”, published by the Pew Research Center, Laura Silver, Kat Devlin and Christine Huang reported: Around the globe, people are divided in their opinions of China. A median of 40% across 34 countries surveyed have a favorable view of China, while a median of 41% have an unfavorable opinion. The country’s most positive ratings come from Russia (71% favorable), Nigeria (70%) and Lebanon (68%). The most negative views are found in Japan (85% unfavorable), Sweden (70%) and Canada (67%).
It is interesting to compare the above reported negative perception to how Africans among the 19 sampled countries see China; the picture is: Kenya (15%), South Africa (15%). Clearly, while the sample size may be questioned, the picture here may just be a reflection of the opposite of Japanese experience which logically frees China from the burden of colonial guilt among Africans.
Although there has not been a long-standing imperial regime in China since the Xinhai Revolution and the country is officially a People's Republic, some refer to China as an imperialist country. On a presumably radical platform, the International Socialist Alternative, Per-Åke Westerlund, on May 9, 2021, pointedly titled a piece, “China’s State Capitalist Imperialism”, in which, while invoking Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest stage of Capitalism, written in 1916, made direct reference to what he called ‘the rise of Chinese imperialism’. In a categorical verdict, the writer compared USA imperialism to China’s, on the note that: The record of US imperialism is crystal clear. Washington has never hesitated to use war and force to sustain its power. It is the mightiest military power the world has ever seen. The challenger, Chinese imperialism, is a brutal dictatorship against working people and any opposition. These two forces are now positioned for a long-term global imperialist confrontation. Citing Harvard Business Review, Per-Åke Westerlund pointed to how “the Chinese state and its subsidiaries have lent about $1.5 trillion in direct loans and trade credits to more than 150 countries around the globe. This has turned China into the world’s largest official creditor — surpassing traditional, official lenders such as the World Bank, the IMF, or all OECD creditor governments combined.” This observed trend of China becoming main creditor and exporter of capital, serves as legitimate basis for an informed assessment of the unfolding relationship between China and Africa.
China and Africa
One of the principal arguments in the armory of critics of China is what appears to be a conscious, officially coordinated entry into Africa. In this vein, a rich and updated summary of the role of China in Africa has been provided in the piece, “Overview on the China-Africa Trade Relationship”, published in the Open Journal of Social Sciences-July 2019-with the following submission: China-Africa trade relationship has deepened over the years, and is illustrated by numbers of development projects financed by China in Africa, and also thousands of Chinese firms operating on the African continent. From the year 2000, China has become an important partner of the whole of Africa with investments and finance flows. During the world financial crisis in 2008, China appeared as an alternative market to the traditional importers of African’s products which were experiencing a deep economic contraction that reduced their demand. Since then, China has become an essential trade partner of Africa, and in 2009, became the most important trading partner of Africa, overtaking the United States.
In a piece by Harry G. Broadman, “Africa’s debt dance with China in creating the Belt Road Initiative”, shared on the platform of The Africa Report posted on April 21, 2021, we get the benefit of a somewhat balanced even if patronizing view of the issue under consideration as the author notes: With more than half of the 60-plus recipient countries under China’s Belt Road Initiative (BRI) located in Africa, it’s hard to not commend the Chinese for their willingness to make significant investments to develop infrastructure on the continent. After all, many advanced countries still have yet to fully grasp both the imperative to help African countries grow through such investments and that substantial risk-adjusted returns can be earned from helping the continent close its long-standing “infrastructure gap.” However, that China’s financing of its BRI projects across Africa (as in the other emerging markets where the programme is underway), is mostly comprised of loans to governments that are both very large and conditioned by signatories’ commitments to not fully disclose their terms, is cause for deep concern. The headlines in the last couple of years about Zambia’s struggle to repay its debt burden to China highlights just the most recent case in point. The basic fact is that only a strong nation can exploit a weak one; this boils down to the imperative of African nations transcending their current relatively weak status within the global economic order by ascending to a truly great status.
What makes a nation truly great
It is a straightforward point in international relations that nations put their own interest first in all engagements. What defines a nation is the ability to define and pursue its agenda within the extant international laws which, incidentally, are routinely violated by the powerful economies. I can hardly resist the temptation of ending this briefing with the culturally combative but valid anecdote of John Ross cited extensively earlier to the effect that: A long time Afro-Caribbean friend of mine, knowing I followed China as closely as I could, once asked me “but what does China’s rise mean for the rest of us?” I said: “Well among other things it destroys the myth of the ‘superiority’ of the white race”. To which their reply was “well that’s a victory for everyone.” I come in peace, please.
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