Weblog with daily updates of the news on a frugal, fair and beautiful China, from the perspective of internet entrepreneur, new media advisor and president of the China Speakers Bureau Fons Tuinstra
US scholar and former foreign correspondent Howard French dives into the US debate on whether sanctioning and divesting from China are helpful. French does not think so and compares the position of China with North Korea – where sanctions did not work – and South Africa, where they did, at a debate at Intercollegiate Studies Institute.
The G7 is trying to offer an alternative to China’s global expansion by the Belt&Road Initiative (BRI) but has a hard time finding the right approach. Former China and Africa correspondent Howard French discusses the dilemma’s at a podcast by the Brooking Institute.
DAVID DOLLAR: Hi, I’m David Dollar, host of the Brookings trade podcast Dollar & Sense. Today, my guest is Howard French, a professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and a longtime journalist and observer of both China and Africa. He’s really the ideal person with whom to have a conversation about China’s activity in Africa. In particular, what caught my eye recently was an essay Howard wrote in The World Politics Review with the provocative title “Leave Infrastructure to China and Compete Where the West Has More to Offer.” This was after President Biden’s trip to Europe where he launched an initiative that’s seen as a counter to the Chinese Belt and Road. So these are the topics we are going to cover today. Welcome to the show, Howard.
HOWARD FRENCH: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be with you, David.
DOLLAR: So let’s start with the big picture on China’s infrastructure financing in the developing world, particularly Africa. You have written about the Belt and Road. How do you see the pros and cons of this Chinese initiative?
Countries in Europe, Africa and other parts of the world have turned to China to seek for help in their struggle against the coronavirus, as the European Union and the US are failing to offer assistance. But China expert Howard Frenchwonders at the Intercept whether China can face up to this new challenge.
The Intercept:
Howard French, journalist and author of “Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power,” cast doubt on China’s ability to save the day.
“If this becomes generalized, I have a very hard time imagining China has on hand, or even has the ability to crank up, production of quantities of ventilators sufficient to address the urgent care needs of large numbers of people like this in many, many countries all at once,” he said.
China can send in heavy police or army to put down the devastating protests in Hong Kong. But that would devastate its "One Country, Two Systems" approach, and nobody - including Taiwan - would trust China again, writes veteran journalist Howard French in The Guardian.
Howard French:
Beijing’s choices in Hong Kong will not grow easier. The ultimate option, of course, is to mount a police or military intervention from the mainland in order to put down the protests. But at what cost? Hong Kong would lose forever its status as a global, cosmopolitan city, a goose that lays golden eggs for China. Since Deng Xiaoping introduced capitalism to China, Hong Kong has served as a critical business and investment portal for the country: a place where foreign companies feel it is safer for them to be based because of the independent judicial system and a banking structure that allows the free conversion of currencies and unlimited international transfers. As China has grown vastly richer it has become less dependent on Hong Kong for such purposes, but lots of investment into China still passes through the city.
A takeover of Hong Kong by force would also destroy Beijing’s proposition – tattered as it may already be – that Taiwan should accept unification with China on the basis of one country, two systems. Recent events in Hong Kong have already strongly lifted the election prospects for the governing party in Taiwan, whose leader Tsai Ing-wen favours continued defiance of Beijing.
Most unpredictable, though, is how this will play in China itself. A catastrophic crackdown in Hong Kong could go very badly for Xi, a leader who has tried to project an aura of resolve and near infallibility. Today Beijing trumpets that its 1.4 billion people stand united in their opposition to Hong Kong’s democracy movement. But that is a claim only sustainable in an environment of suffocating media control in China.
If mass arrests or tanks were used to crush a protest movement aimed at securing democratic concessions, members of China’s own large and growing middle class would begin to see this not just as a defeat for Hong Kong, but as a loss for their own society as well.
China is nowadays even compared with former colonial powers when it comes to its economic rise in Africa. Journalist Howard French, the author of China's Second Continent, takes a step back and looks at how it all started in the 1960s for Worldpoliticsreview, and how it relates to South Africa.
Howard French:
As I have written in “China’s Second Continent,” the early 1990s was precisely the moment when Beijing began to put together its own initiative to become a leading force for global economic integration, beginning in Africa. The continent would come to serve as a kind of Chinese laboratory and workshop for an even bigger infrastructure and development scheme known today as the Belt and Road Initiative.
But even as China has ultimately built the new railroad and highway networks in Africa, along with many other things, it is easy to forget how much less wealthy and powerful the country was when this all started. In 1994, when Mandela became president, China’s per capita GDP was a mere $473. South’s Africa’s was more than seven times higher, at $3,445. China’s wager on Africa has paid off stunningly well, for the government and for Chinese companies and workers who by the hundreds of thousands have sought their livelihoods and built new fortunes on African soil.
Some of this, and perhaps even a great deal of it, could have been achieved instead through South Africa’s initiative and agency—by energetically expanding the pie instead of dividing it. New wealth could have been built through intra-African supply chains and networks, and millions of new jobs created, both for South Africans and Africans from other parts of the continent. While most countries have little choice about their place in the world economy, for a select few, history presents more options, including whether to be a globalizer or be globalized by others. South Africa in the 1990s had a rare chance, and made the wrong choice.
Today, a diminished South Africa still tries to sell itself to the world as a gateway to Africa, but it’s unconvincing. Its people, all too often including black South Africans, talk about the rest of Africa as if it sat on an entirely different continent, and its leaders are impassive in the face of spreading anti-African sentiments and violence at home.
As if to illustrate how far South Africa has fallen, another story circulated in newspapers in Johannesburg during my recent visit, about a spate of deadly attacks on foreign truck drivers across the country. An estimated 213 people, most of them foreign drivers, have been killed over the past year, and some 1,200 vehicles and their cargo destroyed in ongoing violence. Rather than call for calm, though, South African truck drivers are calling for companies not to employ foreign drivers, “in order to protect South African jobs.” What seems clear is that China has understood the power of economic integration, while sadly South Africa still has not.
Transparency is not a natural thing for China, not domestically nor internationally. But African states can ask China for more transparency, argues journalist Howard French, author China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants are Building a New Empire in Africa, to Inkstone.
Inkstone:
Howard French, author of China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants are Building a New Empire in Africa, said China has very limited transparency and public accountability in its own domestic processes.
“So it would be unusual to expect that China would introduce greater transparency and accountability in its dealings with African countries than it is used to at home – that is, unless African governments insist on it,” French said.
“And this is where African governance comes in. African states should insist on contract transparency but often don’t do so because that offers leaders plentiful opportunities for graft.”
Many (Chinese) arrive with hierarchical views of culture and race that tend to place Africans at the bottom, said Howard French, a former New York Times correspondent who wrote the 2014 book China's Second Continent, which chronicles the lives of Chinese settlers in Africa.
Accusations of discrimination have even emerged on a major state-sponsored project: a 482-km Chinese-built railroad between Nairobi and Mombasa. The train has become a national symbol of both progress and Chinese-Kenyan cooperation, though positive reviews have at times been overshadowed by concern over its $US4 billion price tag.
But in July, The Standard, a Kenyan newspaper, published a report describing an atmosphere of "neo-colonialism" for Kenyan railway workers under Chinese management. Some have been subjected to demeaning punishment, it said, while Kenyan engineers have been prevented from driving the train, except when journalists are present.
When asked about the controversy, China's foreign ministry spokesman suggested that Western news organisations had blown the matter out of proportion in an effort to "sow discord in China's relations with African countries."
French, the author of China's Second Continent, said that when it comes to Africa, China has had a tendency to dismiss criticism of its conduct by noting that the West, not China, fuelled the slave trade and colonised the continent.
But that misses the point, French said, by ignoring the treatment of Africans today.
"Their experience is that they are being treated in flagrantly disgusting, racialised ways," French said.
(French) said that during a speech at Columbia University, some Chinese students said his account of the situation contradicts their understanding of Chinese history, which does not consider China as a colonial power.
In reality, French said, China constantly used its sheer size to force nearby nations into accepting Chinese superiority through the tributary system. He believes that this way of dealing with peripheral countries in Northeast Asia is the deeply embedded default in Chinese culture.
“China was in this business two thousand years ago, and has been in this business with notable interruptions in the last couple hundred years,” he said.
The world best keep its eyes on China, said French, who believes that China’s imperialist history will lead it to push for global power.
“I think the strangest thing of all would be for a country as big as China not to have ambitions about reshaping the world in its own terms,” he added.
French pointed out that there is already “no country in Southeast Asia that is not heavily dependent on trade with China and is not deeply in sync with [it] in terms of politics, except Japan.”
He also predicted that the high anxiety between Japan and China will erupt in the future as China gains momentum in its aim for global power.
In the near future, China will continue to gain strength and expand its desired international system. “It won’t be stopped unless something catastrophic happens to China’s economy,” French warned.
At an ocean research center on Hainan Island off China’s southern coast, officials routinely usher visitors into a darkened screening room to watch a lavishly produced People’s Liberation Army video about China’s ambitions to reassert itself as a great maritime power.
As enormous, new naval vessels plow through high seas, a deep male voice intones: “China’s oceanic and overseas interests are developing rapidly. Our land is vast, but we will not yield a single inch to foreigners.”
The 2015 video is one of many signs that China is seeking to emulate the United States’ 19th-century policy of taking exclusive control of security in the Western Hemisphere by excluding foreign powers from the region. Without officially saying so, China hopes to impose a modern version of the Monroe Doctrine on its surrounding oceans.
French: That's really the $64,000 question, and it's kind of the core of my book really. I think that we are entering, right now, a moment of very serious danger, which in my view, and I kind of roll out this argument in an extended way in my book, is likely to last for the next 10, 15, at the longest 20 years, after which, I think, if we can get through this transitional period, tensions will subside.
But we are entering the danger period. And we're entering the danger period because China has advanced so far, so quickly. And its strength, economically speaking, in terms of industrial competitiveness, military capability, and particularly in terms of capacities for self-defense and projection of force in the nearby seas, have come to draw close to the capacities of the United States. In a situation where you’ve had a rising power and a status quo power in history, where the gap between the two narrows rapidly and dramatically, that is the precise situation of highest danger — because neither side is absolutely certain that it is able to prevail in a moment of instability or of conflict.
In the rising power, you have strong constituencies that are tied up in the investment and effort to acquire capabilities, which say, 'what's the point of acquiring all of these capabilities, if you don't use them?'
And meanwhile, in the status quo power, what was once a very clear and unambiguous lead in all of these key areas from economic strength and competitiveness, to high tech to military capacity, as the gap narrows, anxiety begins to increase. And ... a corresponding constituency says, in effect, ‘if we don't do something now to nip this threat in the bud, then it's going to be too late. We have to assert ourselves now to make clear who's in charge, or to make clear what the rules are.’
What's happening in the surrounding region is that, again I think one most usefully must resort to the realism that political scientists speak of. The neighboring powers are watching kind of anxiously to understand which way the wind blows. And so, how did they respond to this? Well the first thing they want to do is to avoid having to explicitly choose sides. And that means that most of them will want to obtain the benefits of economic cooperation with China, because China has been growing so fast and represents a huge market that's right on their doorstep, and to simultaneously enjoy the benefits of security arrangements with the United States, because the United States is this off-shore power far away that has been the trustee and guardian of the established rules of the road and who doesn't seem threatening.
And so you see lots of countries — Vietnam is the most interesting example of this — Indians are training Vietnamese submarine crews on how to run submarines that are used, among other ways, to deter Chinese attacks. The Japanese are helping pay for a new Philippines Coast Guard, and a Vietnamese Coast Guard as well. Australia plays in this game. All of the smaller countries, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand are seeking ways to balance against China — soft balancing against China in ways that are not meant to be offensive to China, but allow them to hedge their bets.
Magistad: You mentioned an important point in your book, which is, if China doesn't show respect for the rules and norms of the region, it pretty much encourages those countries to seek assistance, to seek support, to seek backup from the United States, and that actually plays against China's interests. How much do you think China's leaders are aware of that?
French: So there's a political scientist named Edward Luttwak, who I quote in the book at one point, who has developed a theory. He's basically a strategic thinker. And he's developed a theory, which is not exclusive to China, but describes a mentality or mindset that's common to very fast rising powers, as they begin to emerge, and to begin to more and more obviously contend with the status quo power. This mentality that he speaks of is called Great Power Autism. And, apologies to anyone who might take offense at this — this is not my term.
The point he's trying to make is that rising this far this fast is a giddy experience. And amid the giddiness that you experience during this rise, caution and all sorts of other perspectives are kind of lost. And so, you are not likely to be terribly perceptive of the cost that you may incur by offending other people, meaning in this case, your immediate neighbors, much smaller countries, because you think that when you rise as far and as fast as a country like China has risen, that this is an affirmation of your correctness.
So the next 10 years could be very messy, by accident or by design, to one degree or another. China could push in a way that involves hard power, to make gains in the immediate region at the expense of the status quo powers, most importantly for this conversation, the United States and Japan, which are the most important status quo powers in the region. And there could be a war. Or there could be at least some more limited form of conflict that could be ugly and very dangerous.
That's one scenario that's very real, cannot be discounted, which we must be very attentive to, and that our diplomats have to figure out a way to prevent.
You can imagine a leadership that says 'look, in 10-15 years, we can be down to 2 to 3 percent economic growth per year. ... This is the moment when we have to go we have to make our big push. We have to lock in whatever gains we can lock in right now, meaning in the next 10 years.'
Still, I'm hopeful that we'll muddle through. Once we're past this transitional period of 10, maybe 15 years, then other things begin to happen. The demographics of China, I think, kick in — with hundreds of millions of people over the age of 65, with immense costs in medical care, possibly residential care, and China doesn’t have that infrastructure yet, because it hasn’t yet been at that stage of economic development. And so, if we get past this transitional period of 10 or 15 years, I'm very hopeful that China will say, 'listen, the status quo isn't as bad as we thought it was. We don't need to be such a grudging, victim-centric country. We've done well. We've come a long way.
This opens what for me was the most interesting part of French’s book: a look at the origins of this idea and how it manifested itself historically. French is not a historical determinist, but he sees China’s push to Southeast Asia as a “march to the tropics” that began millennia earlier with Chinese civilization moving southward from its origins in north-central China toward the Yangtze River and then down to the area around modern-day Hong Kong and Yunnan. Chinese rulers and officials eventually came to see three peripheries: an immediate zone that could be conquered, such as the modern-day province of Yunnan and its many hill tribes; an intermediary zone including Vietnam, Burma, and Siam, which could be assimilated; and the further reaches of Southeast Asia, which could be occasionally conquered but were too remote for effective control.
Vietnam and the people of what was then known as the Yue kingdom bore the brunt of this thrust to the south. After losing territory in present-day Guangzhou province (which is still known in China as Yue), Vietnamese rulers hunkered down in modern-day northern Vietnam and pushed south, conquering other peoples in what was essentially a mini-version of China’s imperialist mission. Vietnam’s rulers even had a Chinese-style name for neighboring Cambodia: “the pacified west.”
China’s last great gambit south was in the Ming dynasty, from the 14th to the 17th centuries, when it initially sent armadas to the South China Sea and beyond, most famously under the eunuch Zheng He. Like the Great Wall, Zheng He’s exploits were largely forgotten in China until Westerners discovered him and saw him as a Chinese Columbus or Magellan. Chinese nationalists in the 20th century latched onto this, constructing a version of history that persists today—mainly that Zheng He was a peace-loving explorer who went to trade with the natives.
In fact, the historical record is clear that Zheng He’s ships were designed not to explore but to carry large armies that fought and bullied local governments into surrendering booty. As French argues, this makes China a classic gunpowder empire that pillaged territories by using new technologies that its neighbors hadn’t yet mastered.
What stopped China from more firmly controlling these areas—and essentially giving them their independence today—was domestic turmoil. The Ming court decided it was not interested in far-flung seas, instead concentrating on pressure from northern nomadic tribes that eventually conquered the Ming and set up the Qing dynasty in the mid-17th century.
The Qing also had little interest in lands beyond their coasts, but they did create an enormous land-based empire that China mostly still possesses today, including control over Xinjiang, Tibet, large swaths of historically Mongolian territory, and the northeast of the country, none of which had been under long-term Chinese control until the Qing. (Only modern-day Mongolia is now an independent state.)
This gives modern China a great land mass reaching deep into Central Asia—the equivalent, perhaps, of India controlling today’s Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Afghanistan. But paradoxically, even though China ended up with generous modern borders, it still suffers from what scholars call the “frustrated state” narrative: that it was a loser in history. In the 1920s and 1930s, influential writers like Liang Qichao bemoaned this loss. China, they felt, rightfully should have pursued Zheng He’s journeys and become a maritime empire.
This mattered to China’s modernizers—and today’s rulers—because they saw the world as built on sea-based empires and trade. So in 1947, the Chinese government (the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek) came up with the “nine-dash line,” a crude demarcation of China’s claims to the South China Sea that seemed to have been drawn with little more than chutzpah and a magic marker. It delineated China’s claims to all of the sea right up to the coastline of Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia, as if they didn’t exist and didn’t deserve their own coastal territorial waters. Zheng He had been there, and that trumped the centuries of kingdoms and empires in those countries. Their history didn’t matter.
Unfortunately, this untenable claim is what successive governments have adopted and every schoolchild learns that this is China’s inalienable territory. At first China was hesitant and downplayed these claims—Mao didn’t care about these sorts of issues, while Deng was realistic enough to know that China was too weak to challenge its neighbors. But 40 years after Mao’s death and 20 years after Deng’s own passing, China is now strong and its neighbors are divided and weak. Hence the push to fulfill China’s historic mission and recreate the imagined lost empire of Zheng He
Mr Howard French, whose book China’s Second Continent charts the experience of about one million Chinese entrepreneurs who have settled in Africa, agrees. “Africa has been a field where China can try various things in a very low-risk environment,” he says.
“Africa has been a workshop of ideas that now have a much bigger scale and strategic significance.”
A few numbers illustrate the shift. In 2000, China-Africa trade was a mere US$10 billion (S$13.8 billion). By 2014, that had risen more than 20 times to US$220 billion, according to the China Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, though it has fallen back because of lower commodity prices...
Mr French says Africans’ view of China “is still positive, but not as exuberant as it was”.
People welcome the infrastructure, he says. But they insist their governments should not be taken for a ride, either by overpaying, accepting shoddy work or allowing Chinese companies to use all their labour and materials.
Africans resent it, he says, when corrupt governments inflate the price of projects — as has been alleged with the US$4 billion Mombasa-Nairobi railway, inaugurated this month — to make space for kickbacks.
Still, he adds, Chinese companies have become more attuned to such issues than critics suggest.
A decade ago, they thought that dealing with the government was enough. Now, they realise they also need to engage civil society and international non-governmental organisations on issues from local skills to the environment.
Chinese companies like to be seen to be transferring skills.
Huawei, which earns 15 per cent of its global revenue in Africa, trains 12,000 students in telecoms a year at centres in Angola, Congo, Egypt, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria and South Africa.
According to Johns Hopkins researchers, 80 per cent of workers on Chinese projects are African, even if many are in low-skilled jobs such as trench-digging.
“I give the Chinese a fair amount of credit,” says Mr French. “They have been mounting quite a steep learning curve from almost no knowledge to becoming very sophisticated players.”
, discusses at the International Peace Institute how now two million Chinese immigrants and 2,500 Chinese companies build up an over US$200 billion trade between China and Africa.
