President Bingu wa Mutharika returned from his weeklong state visit to Mainland China and brought home a K40 billion aid package for Malawi. Mutharika briefed the press on his visit at the New State House in Lilongwe. Reading the President’s communique, Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Henri Mumba said the K40 billion includes a K12.2 billion grant, which would, among other projects, be used for construction of the Karonga/Chitipa road and the new Parliament building in Lilongwe.

The new Country Assistance Strategy for the Democratic Republic of Congo, which the Bank has kept secret, suggests a continued emphasis on the natural resource sectors as sources of growth going forward and predicts at least $1.4 billion in new lending over the next three years.

How can aid effectiveness in Sierra Leone be improved? This European Network on Debt and Development (Eurodad) report reveals piecemeal progress in improving aid effectiveness. It focuses on issues of accountability and ownership to analyse who sets the policy agenda and identify obstacles to the development of an accountable, democratic and country-driven aid system.

Humanity United and Ashoka's Changemakers launched a global online competition to identify innovative approaches to exposing, confronting and ending modern-day slavery. Today over 27 million children and adults are in slavery or bonded labor around the world—more than any other period in human history. As one of the fastest growing criminal industries in the world, slavery remains largely hidden from the public eye and thrives on the rising global demand for inexpensive, unskilled labor and commercial sex. Deadline: June 18, 2008.

Advert free and available for use by anyone with access to the net Loband simplifies websites into text-only pages (with clickable links so you can view important images) making them around five to ten times faster. By filtering out everything except the core text, sites that were previously difficult to view on poor connections become usable.

Regarding the article on China and Africa - - compared with Europe and the US, both China and India are small players in Africa. But just as recent reports from the Economic Commmission for Africa said, cooperation with Asian countries, such as China and India, boosts Africa's economies.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/359/47200india.jpgIn the March 27th, 2008 Pambazuka issue, Firoze Manji argued that in comparison to Europe and the US, and that while keeping an eye out on China, Africans should not be distracted from paying attention to the West's continued exploitation of the continent.

In this essay, Paranjoy Guha Thakurta adds yet another layer by looking at India's growing role in Africa

The world's two most populous countries, China and India, are now seriously competing with each other to engage resource-rich Africa, thereby imparting a new dimension to South-South relations.

From Apr. 7-9 New Delhi will host heads of government of 12 African nation-states and a similar number of regional economic groupings. Many see this as a modest answer by India to the grand Africa summit that Beijing hosted in 2006.

Among heads of government expected are Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria, Joseph Kabila Kabange of Congo, Mwai Kibaki of Kenya, John Kufuor of Ghana, Yoweri Kaguta Museveni of Uganda, Maitre Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal, Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia, Tertius Zongo of Burkina Faso and Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete of Tanzania.

The New Delhi meeting will be attended by leading functionaries of the African Union, various regional economic communities and the New Partnership for Africa's Development. Notable absentees will be Muammar Gaddafi of Libya and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt.

While this is the first time India is organising such a large summit of African leaders, this country has had long links with the continent. "Indian traders once sold glass beads to an eager African market (and) now its expertise centres on science and technology," observes a media release of the Johannesburg-based South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA).

The release added: "China's inroads into Africa are well known; India's approach has been much quieter. The India-Africa Forum meets for the first time?offering a fresh insight into this modern-day scramble for Africa."

A government of India official told IPS, who may not be named according to briefing rules, that unlike "China's greed for Africa's oil, copper and other minerals", India is more interested in longer-term economic partnerships that are mutually beneficial and do not replicate colonial systems of exploitation of African wealth.

This official pointed out that India had for long supported South Africa's anti-apartheid movement because of the personal involvement of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the 'father' of the Indian nation, who had cut his political teeth in that country. More recently, India was the first country to send United Nations-sponsored troops to Congo.

The Indian government has, in addition, supported technical exchange and training programmes in most African countries. For more than four decades now, 1,000 individuals from sub-Saharan countries have been provided technical training in India each year. Besides, there are an estimated 15,000 students of African origin currently studying in Indian universities and educational institutions, many of them on government scholarships.

Pointing out that the "waters of the Indian Ocean united us" and that India and Africa had a "common civilisational heritage and shared experience of colonialism", India's Minister for External Affairs Pranab Mukherjee recently said "our commitment to solutions based on common but differentiated responsibility and respective capability remains steadfast".

Ethiopia's Minister of State for Trade and Industry Tadesse Haile, on a visit to India, last year, said this country should be a ''shareholder and not just a stakeholder in Africa's development process''.

India has participated in projects relating to rural electrification in Mozambique and Ethiopia, railways in Senegal and Mali, cement in Congo and computer training in Lesotho. Indian companies are involved in building Ghana's National Assembly and military barracks in Sierra Leone.

Private corporate groups in India have had long-standing ties with African countries. For instance, the Tata group has a presence in 14 countries in areas such as hotels, telecommunications, hydro power and transportation. The word 'Tata' is synonymous with 'bus' in a country like Uganda, writes Seema Sirohi, Indian journalist for the 'Outlook' magazine who was recently in Johannesburg.

Indian pharmaceutical manufacturer Cipla has led the way in supplying inexpensive generic anti-AIDS drugs to African countries in the teeth of opposition from Western multinational corporations. Other Indian business groups have made major investments in Africa in the areas of information technology, hospitality, electrical equipment, and hospitals.

Senior journalist Neerja Chowdhury told IPS: "India had ignored its natural allies in Africa for a long time and in fact, many in this country had a rather patronising attitude towards Africa that was seen as a backward continent. Thankfully, that attitude is changing somewhat and the Indian government is re-focussing on Africa." Nevertheless, she said relations between India and Africa are "still nowhere what they should be".

While annual two-way trade between India and Africa has gone up fivefold from five billion US dollars to 25 billion dollars over the last five years, this volume is half that of Africa's export-import trade with China. Indian officials, speaking off-the-record, say China's economic strategy is more aggressive than that of India's and basically aimed at capturing Africa's mineral resources like oil, copper and manganese.

In a paper, Navdeep Suri, India's consul-general in Johannesburg has written: "We cannot match China dollar-for-dollar nor do we have the command economy where state-owned companies can be ordered to pursue the government's directive regardless of their own bottomline."

India's Minister of State for External Affairs Anand Sharma, while stating that the New Delhi summit would "help the pace and spirit of historic and time-tested ties between India and Africa gather momentum", has argued that it "would not be correct" to see India-Africa relations as "competition with any other country".

Sirohi, who spoke to influential South African minister Essop Pahad, quoted him saying that while he wanted to engage with both India and China, the two countries would have to compete. "Let the best man win," he remarked.

Arun Kumar, professor of economics at New Delhi's prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University, told IPS in an interview that there is "considerable potential between India and Africa in the areas of agriculture, energy and sustainable exploitation of minerals". He added that the fact that persons of Indian origin had settled in large numbers in East African countries besides Libya, Sudan and Darfur, could help strengthen economic ties.

In Durban, South Africa's foreign affairs spokesperson Ronnie Mamoepa told the Press Trust of India news agency that the New Delhi summit could not only consolidate and drive the position of developing countries in the World Trade Organisation but also lead to the "writing off (of) the debt owed to India by the poorest countries of the world, a large number of which are African countries."

What may indirectly help India, Sirohi wrote in her article in the 'Outlook', is that the Chinese presence in Congo and Zambia has sparked off local resentment. Trade unions have protested against China's policy of 'dumping' cheap goods. Congo reportedly recently expelled 600 Chinese nationals and shut down three firms.

*Paranjoy Guha Thakurta is a journalist with over 20 years experience in print, radio and television, the last two years of which have been with Television Eighteen. Paranjoy anchors the India Talks discussion and interview show on ABNI. This article first appeared in Inter Press Service.

**Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

This new CGD working paper analyzes an often neglected facet of development-higher education. While higher education was in vogue in the 1950s and 1960s, it subsequently fell out of favor. The various development paradigms, from basic needs to rural development, structural adjustment and policy reform, had little place for higher education; and the recent emphasis on institutions also pays little heed to this subject.

This paper takes a fresh look at the issue of Angola and China's partnership. The study is based upon fieldwork carried out in Angola in 2007 and 2008 and includes numerous interviews with Angolan officials. It describes a pragmatic bilateral partnership, deconstructing the Chinese loans to Angola and documenting the number of Chinese workers in Angola and the impact of their projects.

The Human Rights Council, Guided by the principles and objectives of the Charter of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Right and the International Covenants on Human Rights, Reaffirming that all Members States have an obligation to promote and protect human rights and fundamental freedoms as stated in the Charter of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenants on Human Rights and other applicable international human rights instruments...

Amnesty International, one of the world's biggest and most popular human rights organisations, is looking for an experienced, dynamic and extremely self-motivated editor to manage a new website in English and Chinese (Mandarin) being launched in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics. The site will be a forum for debate and will have guest bloggers to help stimulate that debate.

DRC mining contract commission to push for a greater share in the Tenke Fungurume mining concession, one of the largest copper-cobalt deposits in the world. Critics charge that EIB's investment in the highly contested project before the conclusion of the contract review was "irresponsible."

Thank you for your article on China/West/Africa at . I have always thought this has been the case; that there is china-bashing from the West while deflecting criticism of themselves, and your article provided some useful details. I will shortly add a link to it, but in the next few weeks, hope to add a bit more on my site (http://www.globalissues.org) referring to your article in a bit more detail.

I entirely agree with Firoze [China still a small player in Africa, I would add, however, that one of biggest problems that Africa has been suffering from is a type of leadership which has generally been focused on how to get richer as selfishly as possible, turning the exercise of leader into one comparable to a feudal CEO (e.g. Mobutu).  When a leader like Jean Bertrand Aristide appeared on the scene, determined to change the equation imposed by the West, and follow up on what was squashed after 1804, the West finds a way to remove/kill him (Kimpa Vita, Kimbangu, Lumumba (DRC), Moumié (Cameroon), Sankara (Burkina Fasso), Muhtar Mohamed (Nigeria), to only mention a few.  

Firoze, quite rightly points out that both China and the West are engaged in maintaining the same system (e.g. working hard to increase the rate of profit).  What he does not mention and a topic which is creating a great deal of tension in some countries is China's practice of insisting to use its own workers.  Most African countries  suffer from extremely high unemployment rates.  If I were a skilled or unskilled worker in any of these countries, I would not like the practice, at all.  But, even here, the practice of the West is not much better, especially if one looks at skilled labor.  China itself is suffering from growing rates of unemployment as the gap between rich and poor in China gets deeper. 

Will the emergence of China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, etc. trigger the badly needed awakening within the African leadership?  Issues like access to food, education and health for all have become a world problem in a way that it will become increasingly difficult if not impossible to resolve within the dominant mentality of capitalism whether Chinese or Western. 

Firoze's piece is very much welcome, but I also think that, given the situation in which humanity finds itself, important to pay attention to ideas coming from thinkers like Ernest Wamba dia Wamba, Lewis Ricardo Gordon, Alain Badiou, who have been thinking about emancipatory politics  beyond and away from capitalism and its accessory institutions.

Review of African Political Economy - - is a leading left journal on Africa examining: the politics of imperialism; development; agrarian, popular and democratic struggles; class, gender and social justice.

The latest special issue of the journal , No.115, March 2008, focuses on China-Africa relations and includes editorials, articles and briefings dealing with the different dynamics of Sino-African relations. In this issue Marcus Power and Giles Mohan look at the 'New' Face of China-African Co-operation, and Rapahel Kaplinsky explores how the rise of China impacts Africa's industrialization.

The table of contents of the forthcoming issue is available at the link below.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/en/357/46990-hands.jpgFiroze Manji argues that in comparison to Europe and the US, China in Africa is still a small player. While keeping an eye out on China, Africans should not be distracted from paying attention to the West's continued exploitation of the continent including the use of military might to protect its economic interests.

"What I find a bit reprehensible is the tendency of certain Western voices to … raising concerns about China’s attempt to get into the African market because it is a bit hypocritical for Western states to be concerned about how China is approaching Africa when they have had centuries of relations with Africa, starting with slavery and continuing to the present day with exploitation and cheating."
Kwesi Kwaa Prah (2007)

Open any newspaper and you would get the impression that the African continent, and much of the rest of the world, is in the process of being ‘devoured’ by China. Phrases such as the ‘new scramble for Africa’, ‘voracious’, ‘ravenous’ or ‘insatiable’ ‘appetite for natural resources’ are typical descriptors used to characterise China’s engagement with Africa. In contrast, the operations of western capital for the same activities are described with anodyne phrases such as ‘development’, ‘investment’, ‘employment generation’(Mawdsely, 2008). Is China indeed the voracious tiger it is so often portrayed as?

China’s involvement in Africa has three main dimensions: foreign direct investment, aid and trade. In each of these dimensions China’s engagement is dwarfed by those of US and European countries, and often smaller than those of other Asian economies.

Foreign direct investment (FDI) of Asian economies globally has been growing. The total flow of foreign direct investment (FDI) from Asia to Africa is estimated to have been an annual average of $1.2 billion during 2002-2004 (UNCTAD, 2006). Chinese FDI in Africa has in fact been small in comparison to investment from Singapore, India and Malaysia, which are the principal Asian sources of FDI in Africa according to UNDP (2007) with investment stocks of $3.5 billion and $1.9 billion each by 2004, respectively. Such investments are greater than those of China. The same report goes on to say, however, that Asian investments in Africa are dwarfed by those of the United Kingdom (with a total FDI stock of $30 billion in 2003), the United States ($19 billion in 2003), France ($11.5 billion in 2003) and Germany ($5.5 billion in 2003). And if China sits in fourth place amongst the Asian ‘tigers’, the scale of its investments in Africa are miniscule in comparison to the more traditional imperial powers.

Asian FDI flows to Africa have certainly grown 10-fold since the 1980s, but smaller than the 14-fold growth in FDIs globally in the same period. Compared with India, for example, China’s FDI is small. India has a larger investment in oil in Sudan and Nigeria than does China. Of 126 greenfield FDI projects in Africa, Indian companies accounted for the largest number. Indeed, amongst the Asian economies, Malaysian companies dominate in mineral extraction sector in Africa. Africa’s share of total outward flow of Chinese FDI is marginal - only 3 per cent goes to Africa, while Asia receives 53 per cent, Latin America 37 per cent. It should be borne in mind that China is a net recipient of FDI, and receives a flow of FDI also from Africa: SAB Miller breweries and SASOL from South Africa, Chandaria Holdings in Kenya, amongst many others.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/en/357/46990diagr.jpgAfrica is certainly important trade partner for China, the volume increasing from $11 billion in 2000 to some $40 billion in 2005. China has a growing trade surplus with Africa. According to UNDP (2007), China has become the third largest trading partner of Africa, following the United States and France. China has focused primarily on the import of a limited number of products - oil and ‘hard commodities’ for a few selected African countries . China’s trade with Africa represents only a small proportion of Africa’s trade with the rest of the world, and is comparable to India’s trade with Africa, although both have been growing rapidly.

China imports from Africa five main commodities - oil, iron ore, cotton, diamonds and logs. The export of these commodities, and in particular oil, has grown significantly in the last ten years. A few African countries (Sudan, Ghana, Tanzania, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Uganda and Kenya) source a significant share of their imports of manufactured products, mainly clothing and textiles, from China. (Kaplisky, McCormick and Morris, 2007). China has been vigorously castigated for its support of repressive regimes. In almost all cases, China’s involvement has been in support of its need for strategic natural resources, especially oil. And it is perhaps here that one finds the reason for the fears expressed in the west about China’s role in Africa. USA is the world’s largest consumer of oil products , with 25% of its requirements destined to come from Africa. While China sources some 40% of its oil from the Middle East, it currently sources 23% from africa 23%.

Much attention has been drawn to the negative impact of the cheap Chinese commodities on African economies. Certainly this has contributed to the decline of industrial production and the growing retrenchment of workers. But China has essentially taken advantage of the ‘opening-up’ of Africa’s market that has resulted from the adoption of neoliberal economic policies that the international financial institutions, backed by the majority of the international aid agencies, have forced Africa’s governments to comply with. Given that the relative size of Chinese imports is small in comparison to imports from industrialised countries, the blame for the decline in industrial production and growing unemployment in Africa can hardly be place entirely at China’s door. Furthermore, it is important to recognise that some 58% of exports from China are manufactured by foreign owned companies. The retrenchments and closures of local industries occurring as a result of cheap goods imported from China need to be placed at the door of the multinationals concerned as much as on the Chinese government and Chinese companies.

Just like other western powers, China has used aid strategically to support its commercial and investment interventions in Africa. Aid has taken the form of financial investments in key infrastructural development projects, training programmes, debt relief, technical assistance and a programme of tariff exemptions for selected products from Africa, not dissimilar to the agreements that Africa has had with Europe, US and other western economies. China’s aid is attractive to African governments not only because of the favourable terms offered, but in particular because of the lack of conditionality that is offered that has so constrained, and many would argue, undermined develop that would have the potential for bringing about social progress.

The most serious worry for the US was expressed by the spokespersons of the IMF and World Bank who complained that China’s unrestricted lending had ‘undermined years of painstaking efforts to arrange conditional debt relief’. There is clearly concern that China can now offer favourable loans to Africa and weaken imperial leverage over African economies. (Campbell, 2007). “The US and World Bank claim to be fighting poverty in Africa,” he continues, “but after two decades of structural adjustment the conditions of the African poor have worsened, with indices of exploitation and deprivation increasing by geometric proportions. According to one estimate, at the present pace of investment in Africa from the West, it will require more than one hundred years to realise the Millennium Development Goals. Chinese investment potentially provides an alternative for African leaders and entrepreneurs, while providing long term potential for the development of African economies.”

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/en/357/46990drawing.jpg"China’s official development discourse is explicitly non-prescriptive, employing a language of ‘no strings attached’, quality and mutual benefit. It emphasises the collective right to development over the rights-based approaches focused on individual rights. Once the dust settles on the current China-in-Africa fever, and notions of China’s exceptionalism wear off, all involved will need to harness hopes to realistic vehicles in order to make the most of the current potential." (Large, 2007). Rocha (2007) suggests that Chinese investments in Africa are having and could continue to have some positive impacts. China is helping African countries to rebuild their infrastructure and providing other types of assistance to agriculture, water, health, education and other sectors. This could have very positive spin-offs in lowering transaction costs and assisting African governments to address social calamities such as poor health services, energy crisis, skills development. However, it is true that ‘Chinese companies are quickly generating the same kinds of environmental damage and community opposition that Western companies have spawned around the world’ (Chan Fishel 2007).

The evidence available suggests that the drive to increasing the rate of profit is exhibited as much by Chinese as by western capital. The west has the advantage in having already established its dominant position that is potentially being threatened by the ‘new boy on the block’.

But China has the advantage of never having enslaved or colonized the continent. China has also not made any false promises coated with neo-liberalism. While the West, the IMF and the World Bank put conditions that only aid in their fleecing of Africa, China has so far been willing to provide unconditional aid and invest in infrastructure. At the same time, however, it freely takes full advantage of the opening up of markets that neo-liberal economic policies over the last 25 years have offered, unencumbered.

And so far, unlike the US, China has not sought to establish military bases in Africa to protect its economic interests, which the US has sought to establish through AFRICOM

* Firoze Manji is director of Fahamu and editor of Pambazuka News.

**Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

***Footnotes are available at the URL shown below

New Tactics in Human Rights’ featured online discussion for March will focus on ways in which Truth and Reconciliation processes have and are being implemented to aid community healing.

The Sephis programme has two sub-themes; 1. Equity, Exclusion and Liberalization. and, 2. The Forging of Nationhood & The Contest over Citizenship, Ethnicity and History. These reflect the double range of interest of the programme, directed at both understanding processes of cultural change and developing new visions on development emerging in the South. Sephis will pay special attention to projects that support the elaboration of these themes, which - as it were - reflect the cultural and economic side of the programme.

Stephen Marks argues in this extended review of recent publications about China that there are few other important global players whose affairs are so exclusively analysed on the basis of ignorance and stereotype. There is little understanding outside China about the differences of perspectives of Chinese intellectuals - they are far from being a homogeneous group.

China is no longer a topic - it’s a dimension. On every issue, from global warming to the credit crisis, China and its impact can no longer be ignored, not as a subject apart to be left to experts, but as an integral component of the global picture, on which every analyst or commentator has to have an opinon.

And as we all do when we have to come up with an opinion on something of which we know nothing, we reach off the shelf for a ready-made answer. In the case of China, these are easy to find.

There is the cold-war image of China the sinister Communist dictatorship. There is the older racial image of the sinister ‘inscrutable’ Chinese. And for Africa, there is the image of the voracious Chinese imperialist, concerned only to rape the ‘eternal victim, the dark continent’, of its precious resources. (see ‘' by Emma Mawdsley.)

There are few other important global players whose affairs are so exclusively analysed on the basis of ignorance and stereotype. Across the world, those who follow international politics are aware of the major policy debates in Washington between neo-cons, traditionalists and ‘multilateralists’. The ebb and flow of federalist currents in the EU are common knowledge. Even the revival of Russian assertiveness under Putin can be analysed as a modern trend, without invoking the ghost of Stalin or images of the Russian Bear.

But as Mark Leonard, Director of what calls itself ‘the first pan-European thinktank’, asks us in his recent book, ‘how many of us can name more than a handful of contemporary Chinese writers and thinkers?’ Indeed, if we are honest, ‘a handful’ would be generous where most of us are concerned.

The chief merit of Leonard’s contribution [What does China think? Fourth Estate 2008] is to show us what we are missing, and whet our appetite for more. The same feeling of stumbling across a hitherto unknown continent of argument and debate around central issues of our time comes from Zhang Yongle’s summary of the range of ideas in a leading Chinese intellectual journal in his article ‘Reading Dushu’ [New Left Review 49 second series, Jan Feb 2008].

It is no surprise to be introduced to the ideas of ‘New Right’ economist Zhang Weiying, a pioneering advocate of the free-market economic reforms which led to China’s astonishing record of 9 per cent growth year after year for three decades.

But cliches will be shattered by exposure to the thinking of some of China’s ‘New Left’, who have no wish to turn their backs on the market at home or abroad, or to turn the clock back to a central command economy, but instead are grappling with the same issues of combining market institutions with social justice and equity, as their counterparts in the West and South.

Economists Wang Shaoguang and Hu Angang argue persuasively that a central state which was at once stronger and more democratic could curb unaccountable regional power centres which currently waste resources through corruption and duplicated prestige investments. The resulting resources could finance a welfare safety-net which would give the public confidence to consume, thereby strengthening the domestic market and reducing China’s dependence on Western consumer demand.

Other writers such as Wang Hui and Cui Zhiyuan lament the ‘new enclosure movement’ which is ripping-off public property, and discuss ideas such as an Alaska-style ‘social dividend’ for citizens from the profits of state-owned enterprises, which would provide a ‘social wage’ to replace the largely dismantled welfare state.

Slightly more exposure abroad has been given to the environmental critique of Pan Yue, quantifying the horrific human, ecological and economic cost of the environmental degradation that has accompanied China’s breakneck growth. Though appointed to head the official State Environmental Protection Association, his report has been shelved, and widely ignored on the ground. But its concerns are certainly reflected, however inconsistently, in official pronouncements.

When it comes to political institutions, the Chinese debate is also far from the stereotype of Stalino-Maoist totalitarianism, though still remote from any Western concept of democracy. There have been some widely-trumpeted experiments in village-level democracy, contested inner-party elections, and consultative innovations such as ‘citizens juries’ and public policy hearings. But these remain few, localised and untypical.

Moreover, their champions do not see them as leading to multi-party democracy but rather to a ‘chinese model’ of ‘deliberative democracy’ where the central government allows a range of consultative opinions to be presented to it, supplemented by low-level electoral participation.

However, as new leftist Wang Shaoguang points out, this represents in effect a convergence with the West where the established electoral democratic system is increasingly perceived as ‘hollowed out’ and formal, and is frequently being supplemented by consultative processes, citizens juries and local referendums. Could China and the West be converging on the same destination from different starting-points?

The debate that Leonard reports on issues of global governance is equally stimulating, and shows a keen awareness that Chinas’s interest lies in promoting a notion of ‘soft power’ against the one-dimensional US obsession with hardware.

Many of us are familiar with solemn Western debates about how to ‘manage’ China’s rise, so as to ‘assist’ the new arrival to be a ‘civilised’ member of the ‘international community’ just like an assumed Western ‘us’. So it is a pleasant and amusing surprise to be introduced to the mirror-image debate in Beijing about how to ‘manage’ the West’s decline.

This debate came out into the open in 2006 when Wang Yiwei, a young scholar, asked in a newspaper article ‘how can we prevent the USA from declining too quickly?’ Shen Dingli argued that China’s goal should be ‘to shape an America that is more constrained and more willing to co-operate with the world’.

So however we are to analyse the complex and changing reality of the ‘actual’ China, the cliches of the conventional wisdom – the ‘evil Communist Tyranny’, the ‘inscrutable oriental’, or the new imperialist raping and looting Africa – are clearly more a hindrance than a help.

Which therefore leads us to ask why these unhelpful images persist. One obvious approach would be to ask whose interests are served by portraying China in this way. Less obvious, but also perhaps more interesting, is to make a comparison with the first encounter between the West and China, in which the prevailing stereotypes were not negative but on the contrary, rather idealised.

Leading philosophers of the 18th Century Enlightenment, including such figures as Leibniz and Voltaire, frequently referred to China in the most glowing terms. This followed an explosion, reminiscent of our own days, in the volume of Western publications about China.

According to the German scholar Thomas Fuchs (

Now these utopian images of China did indeed draw on aspects of reality. But their purpose was not so much to understand the real China, as to say something about the society of the West. Could the same be true of today’s negative image?

For example, the ‘neoconservative’ US columnist Robert Kagan goes so far as to argue that China's policy towards Sudan and Zimbabwe is determined not so much by economic self-interest as by political solidarity with their dictatorial regimes, and foresees a Sino-Russian 'League of Dictators'. [Robert Kagan League of Dictators? Why Russia and China Will Continue to support Autocracies Wahington Post April 30 2006.]

Is he really trying to say something about China’s policy? Or is he using a certain image of China in order to say something positive by contrast about US policy – just as the Enlightenment philosophers used their idealised image of China for the opposite purpose?

Likewise when China’s African role is reduced to a supposed re-run of Europe’s exploitative colonial past, is the real purpose a better understanding of China’s role? Or is it to imply, by comparing China’s present to the West’s past, that the West’s present is different to the West’s past?

Of course, just as with the idealised China of the European past, the demonised image of today can also draw on aspects of reality. But perhaps any such correspondence is, also as in the past, purely incidental to other more important functions.

To separate fact from fiction, and disentangle reality from the myths, an indispensable first step must be to acquaint ourselves with the actual and often surprising debate taking place within China itself.

However before we all get carried away we must remember that these debates are taking place within limits which, while far broader than the generally accepted cliches would suggest, are still constrained by a government which does not claim to subscribe to Western concepts of democracy and individual rights.

Paradoxically, the lack of western-style political pluralism enhances the role of ‘insider intellectuals’ and their debates. And as Leonard points out; ‘The Chinese like to argue about whether it is the intellectuals that influence decision-makers, or whether groups of decision-makers use pet intellectuals as infornal mouthpieces to advance their own views’.

But either way, if China is a central component of the issues that we face in every continent, including Africa, so the ideas that contribute to shaping its policies, and those who frame those ideas, should be part of our reality too.

* Stephen Marks is research associate with Fahamu.

**Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Nearly 20,000 South Africans have been displaced by mining giant Anglo American in its search for platinum, a BBC File on 4 investigation has found. It was also shown evidence the UK-based firm had polluted water sources and scores of miners had been killed.