A Caution on China


Engagements By Chidi Amuta. Email & Tel: chidi.amuta@thisdaylive.com, 08056504733


I find this article below by Thisday's Chidi Amuta thought provoking. What are your thoughts?


It has become fashionable to welcome the rise and incursion of China into the African market as an unmitigated blessing. Chinese goods are cheap relative to what we get from the West. The Chinese offer business and funds without silly conditionalities. China used to be a Third World country that has risen rapidly to constitute a counter civilisational force in the world. The Chinese do not necessarily come to you with supremacist swagger. They do not overtly lecture you on any anything. They talk to themselves mostly in a language many do not understand and which requires patience and artistry to write. We can go on with the list of attractions and curiosities about the new China.

I do not share this sense of euphoria. My attitude is that we need to take a long-term strategic view of China’s coming if we have any degree of national self-interest left. At this point in time, the best attitude is one of great strategic caution and informed engagement. If we are a serious nation with an eye on the future of our children instead of our present greed, we need to have put in place a team of people who have a capability for strategic thinking to fashion out a China policy. This is imperative not just because that is what other serious nations are doing but because it is the sensible thing to do because of who we are and the position we ought to occupy in the emerging world order that is staring us in the face. There are lessons to be learnt and dangers that are clear and present.

We have a huge population. But of our over 150 million people, our collective real productivity earns less than 20 per cent of our foreign exchange. In other words, if we take out oil and gas, we are a very unproductive people because the funds we generate through real sectors and activities are hardly enough to keep this flag flying for longer than 30 days. But our potential and inherent capacity exceeds the over 80 per cent of earnings from oil and gas. The rest of the money we are fighting and quarrelling over comes as oil and gas rents, explored by others with technologies we are reluctant to master and sold at prices determined by forces we do not control.

But we remain the largest number of Africans hurdled up in one nation state. In that capacity, we have a potential to generate enough diplomatic noise to engage any major external force that wants to do business with Africa. I guess that for these reasons, we present an attractive curiosity to the Chinese. Their perception of our weaknesses and potentials largely informs their presence and nature of activities in our midst.

But we cannot afford to ignore China. The reasons are simple. First, it is perhaps the first nation in human history that is developing simultaneously as an economic, military, diplomatic and civilizational force with a population that is one and a half billion strength and still growing, even if weakly. Second, the rise of China is the historic antitheses of the values and assumptions that colonized, imperialised and have informed our economic development strategies and international relations to date. Literally, China challenges us to learn new wisdoms in middle age.

China’s Confucian wisdom knows something that most of us do not realise: globalisation unites humanity not around the fear of America’s big guns but around the desire to possess the same goods - cheap cell phones, computers, clone wrist watches, fake denim, T-shirts, modern homes and appliances that make life easy and encourage people to feel special and a sense of belonging in a new train of civilization. And China goes on churning out those goods, thereby uniting humanity faster than the merchants of fear and humanitarian imperialism.

In terms of our contemporary reality, a few things are true. Made in China goods are relatively cheap. Chinese finance and credit come without obvious conditionalities. Most times, Chinese contractors bid lower and mobilise faster on projects. These contractors inundate the project sites with Chinese workers and therefore deliver fast because the communism-induced work ethic of the average Chinese leaves little room for indolence. In any case, they are too many to afford the luxury of laziness.

More importantly, China’s centralised political system and its heavy dose of ideology have ensured that every Chinese has imbibed the growing sense of national global mission; the mission to provide a counterweight to Western, especially American, world dominance of the international economic system. So, Chinese are going everywhere in the world, learning local languages and customs, trying to understand and fill real needs of real people.

But a few other things are worrying. For every dozen Chinese workers involved in projects here, that many Nigerians cannot find the same jobs. And most of these jobs are not specialised in any sense. China’s indifference to the domestic and foreign policies of their host African countries is a dangerous veneer for condoning vicious human rights abuses as in the case of its relationship with Sudan and its heavy involvement in that country’s oil industry while Darfur festered. The working conditions in Chinese factories in Nigeria violate nearly every code of minimally decent labour laws.

The influxes of cheap Chinese exports means that Nigerian manufacturers cannot compete even in the most basic of sectors and in most cases have to close shop after heavy investments and massive borrowing. Most importantly, the aggregate lowering of standards of quality for goods imported from China simply because we are poor does not deliver value for money in the long term.

Chinese participation in African economies is unrestricted and therefore making incursions in areas where our people should ordinarily be left to thrive in order to reduce poverty. At Oshodi and Aswani markets in Lagos, there are Chinese retailers. The poultry industry in Nigeria and Zambia is heavy with Chinese participants. So also bakery, basic carpentry, furniture, garments etc. They are no longer content with importing their produce. They are setting up manufacturing plants and workshops here as well.

There is every advantage in pursuing diversity in the national economy. There is also value in globalisation and the encouragement of competition so that our manufacturers can raise their standards and seek ways of producing cheaply, more efficiently and better products. May be the Chinese incursion is an advantage in this regard. But no country leaves its economic borders unprotected simply because you want to belong to some phantom global village. Both China and the United States have strict laws on which industries should be left to local participants and which should be open to external competition. Nigeria with its population and large-scale unemployment needs to be even more aggressive in this regard without being overtly protectionist.

There is an even greater worry. Why try to do something that someone else is doing for you cheaply and effortlessly? I recall that until the influx of cheap Japanese calculators in the 1970s, we went through the horrors of long multiplication, long division, use of log tables, slide rule etc. in Mathematics classes in high school. Our Mathematical instincts were honed in the arduous tasks of arriving at solutions through a long process. You were punished for arriving at answers to Mathematical questions without showing clearly, stage by stage, how you got there. Not anymore.

There are calculators everywhere now: in cell phones, on street sides, in computers, in the remotest villages etc. Our kids do not need to worry about how to arrive at answers. The answers have been provided by others. We need not ask questions. The answers are ready and waiting. Your daughter does not need to be trained by her mother on how to wake up early to make breakfast. The microwave oven is plugged and ready, set at two minutes! Food is ready! You can even set a reminder on the device.

The same goes with the ability to innovate, which is one area where Nigeria has failed woefully. Our ability to innovate, to come up with unusual solutions to our myriad problems are directly proportional to the pain we feel in those areas of problems. The Chinese are helping in providing us cheap solutions and therefore engendering a new culture of dependency and patent laziness. When you get used to too much of a good cheap thing, you may not need to work hard to do the same things for yourself. That is my worry.

But that worry can be converted into a national advantage. Forget the wheel. It has been invented for you while you were snoring. Wake up and pick what is already there and run as fast as you can. Those who advocate a leapfrog approach to our development challenges have a point in this regard. But we are not doing that.

The Nigerian state may be powerless in constructively engaging China on trade and skills because we have not even tried to understand that new frontier. But there are a few basic things we can do if we are minimally strategically minded as a nation. First, introduce Chinese language as a compulsory subject in our school syllabus. You cannot ignore the language and culture of a nation of one and a half billion people that is in clear and present prospect of assuming world economic domination. Our agreements and contracts with Chinese governments should include clauses for active exchange of skills and training of Nigerians in Chinese industries. We also have a huge population of unemployed citizens. We should minimally protect some of our rudimentary industries from Chinese dumping. Most importantly, we should have the political will to protect our industries from unfair competition.

Our obligation to our children in this China matter is even simpler: let us equip them with the language and culture of the power that will tomorrow determine what they wear, how they travel, communicate, study and see the rest of the world. We learnt the language and culture of our colonial and imperial masters.

Nice post!