ABOCO (Africa Bending-Over to China's Overlordship) is an acronym of Greyhorn's own making. It refers to the undignified and dangerous manner Africa is exposing it's vulnerable economies to China's domination. (A quick view of the Jamaican dancehall tune -Bend Over- will bring the point home; an apt revelation of how 'Bending Over' is an utterly disgusting and degrading thing. This being what I want the reader to feel about China free ranging into Africa's economies).
Any person who has pedestrian knowledge of empires and major global powers would know that it is always a delicate balance for smaller powers to get their own strategic needs met vis-a-vis those of major powers. The objective: Political and economic co-existence without being trampled, subsumed or subjugated with the bigger power. It is like having to routinely eat from the same diminishing bowl of rice with a selfish gluttonous warlord who has his battle axe at his side . . . gleefully daring you to empty the plate.
China is no in different. In fact China has been a great power in one form or the other for the better part of 3,000 years which makes China's rise nothing even remotely close to a novelty. What it trully is, is a mere and natural reclamation of China's so called 'rightful place' in the global pecking order . . . one that had been temporarily usurped by the much smaller European powers by means of their technological advancement.
The West has never really been blind (or comfortable) with China's potential given it's vastness and large pool of human resources. It was not even an open secret, it was just an ugly fact for the West that as long as there was a single polity in China, it could only be a matter of time before that unconquerable Oriental giant regained it's traditional influence. This then has been a source of nagging worry and anxiety for various sections of Western political thinking and military leaders for the better of the last century. Things have changed; it is no longer a thing to be worried about . . . it is something to be absolutely paranoid about.
One needs just to look at the frantic ganging up of the Americans with the Japanese, South Koreans, Australians, various other Asian states and the EU into various economic and military alliances against the growing might of China to realize how worried everybody else is (other than the usual myopic stragglers) of China's increasingly dominant position in the global economy.
The only people who are oblivious or who are actively cheering on China are those who had been smothered into perpetual economic subjugation by the dying Anglo-Saxon and European hegemony -- Africa, South America and other third world countries. And then there is the weird polity called Russia. Nobody knows for certain what the Russians want or what they make of this growing Chinese preponderance. Perhaps they are just too confused by the leadership of Vladmir Putin to bother or it could be that they are still vindictive against the West as a hangover from the Soviet era and thus they would cheer on any nemesis of the West.
The feigned shock with China's rise -- which is rampantly being bartered in the mostly Western controlled international media -- is one that is solely based on the fact that the West has to ruefully accept that China’s economic re-emergence has come under a communist authoritarian regime and not a capitalist, 'democratic' one. A terrible and fateful historical misplacement; especially given the fact that it came so soon after the fulfilling failure (for the Yankees and allies) of the communist Soviet experiment.
{Around 550 years ago the French mystic and seer, Nostradamus foretold the fall and eventual re-emergence of China as a major power in the early part of this millennium. This was when the Ming Dynasty with an archaic army of over one million men was still a force to reckon with; the Chinese Imperial Army was a giant surrounded by midgets, for it was numerically bigger than all the standing armies of Europe, indeed the world, put together. Well, numerically China still has the biggest army in the world but even in terms of numbers it is still not as awesome as three hundred years ago, when China alone accounted for over half the number of soldiers in standing armies (peacetime armies) in the world}.
In it's natural intentions and geopolitical inclinations China is and can never be anything else other than an imperialist power. With no military wherewithal to advance her interests it has proven immensely more lucrative for China to undercut the Western powers economically.
With the capital glut and wealth that was cheaply harvested from the West's callous capitalist kleptoparasitism (which a short while ago had completely favoured the western end of the Northern Hemisphere) the West naturally got sloppy and complacent; particularly over the last half century. Western governments began to artificially place more economic value to their human capital through social welfare systems and labour laws. And why shouldn't they have? They had all the money in the world yet their populations had stagnated or in some cases had even began shrinking. So they arbitrarily placed a premium on Caucasian lives and labour.
This was a privilege that an impoverished and overpopulated China could not (and still cannot) afford. It has hundreds of millions of people to work to death and at dirt cheap prices therefore easily out-competing the rest of the world.
The fact that these people could do nor say anything about it and that the authoritarian communist regime can still direct massive resources in whatever part of the country and outside the country in whichever way it sees fit, adds tonnes of strategic advantage to China's imperialist economic manoeuvers. Africa could better China if it were a single political entity under an authoritarian regime (democracy won’t do nor work, at least not as spectacularly -- India is the proof), we too have lots of people to cheaply work to death, people who are in any case dying of hunger and internecine tribal wars.
This economic sneaking-in and universal political pandering of China going under the guise and banner of a Chinese policy deceptively called 'Soft Power' is actually a ravenous push to get by stealth what cannot be sustainably obtained (as yet) by other coercive measures such as threat of military force.
The economic juggernaut in China has to a great extent been dependent on importation and acquisition of necessary resources from outside China. Oil from the Middle East and various kinds of raw materials and mineral wealth from Africa and other third world countries. Then of course there is money from Western and developed countries by means of providing markets for their products and through Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) etc.
Without sustained economic growth in China to substitute for lack of individual and political freedoms China would right now be convulsing with violent social unrest. It is inconceivable the Chinese of today would acquiesce to being starved to death while at the same time being brutalized and imperiously lorded over by their authoritarian government as Mao Zedong and his communist cohorts did during Mao's reign.
Without sustained economic growth in China to substitute for lack of individual and political freedoms China would right now be convulsing with violent social unrest. It is inconceivable the Chinese of today would acquiesce to being starved to death while at the same time being brutalized and imperiously lorded over by their authoritarian government as Mao Zedong and his communist cohorts did during Mao's reign.
The implicit contract between the China's Communist Party and the Chinese people that was arduously charted by Deng Xiaoping i.e. “We will give you jobs and economic prosperity and in return we can stay on as authoritarian rulers” seems so far to have worked well. But the natural progression and the drivers of what has been spectacular economic growth sooner or later are bound to hit a limit, the bane lurking in all natural distribution curves.
In fact the incoming crop of China's leaders might very well be the last rulers under this authoritarian communist arrangement; for they are bound to be the last who would enjoy the cushion of unbridled economic growth. What will follow is a puzzle, but a revolution seems to be perilously in the offing -- one way or the other -- either a slow gradual one or the usual cataclysmic Chinese ones. The days of Mao Zedong's communist dynasty are for certain numbered.
All these things seem to be nothing more than an all Chinese affair that has nothing to do with those of us here in Africa, but unfortunately it has a lot to do with our future economic stability and our growing dependence on China as a substitute market to the West. This growing tie between Africa and China can only make us all the more vulnerable to such an eventuality. This is a real threat, not just to the economies of Africa, but in various unseen ways it also portends a real threat to national security all across the various states of Africa -- which I will be shortly coming to.
In certain quarters even here in Kenya a statement prophesying the demise of China might be deemed downright malicious. China's growth has been a wonderful blessing for Africa, add to this the allure of it's whitewashed imperial history -- the one in which China never 'colonized', 'enslaved' peoples or 'occupied' any country. How at the end of the 15th century they sent an embassy to Africa, how they always gave out more valuable presents than they received from the various City States along the East coast of Africa etc.
It has also not been lost to many in Africa that China has for a long time (since the seventies) been making huge generous gestures to African countries -- building stadia and fully equipped referral hospitals for free, graciously offering to pay and build various government office complexes and offering huge grants to build infrastructure (that are speedily built by Chinese firms).
The Chinese are also admired for working with little complaint and they seem to shun or abhor needless nagging -- this despite the fact that they are often thrown the most difficult, undesirable tasks that have to be done in extremely difficult conditions. The Chinese seem to do relatively far much more with minimal noise -- unlike Europeans and Americans who are perceived to be in the business of shouting from rooftops for each pebble they move and each penny they spend or donate . . . money which never fails to come with often demeaning herding of African diplomats through labyrinthine project protocols and conditions. Western aid and grants in African minds has become synonymous with puppeteering, attachment of strings, reprehensible interference and ‘indignification’.
In contrast China has become synonymous with chapa kazi -- a Kiswahili phrase that takes meaning along the lines of utmost diligence and heroic efficiency. A Chinese civil works contractor would beat hands down a European or American firm in a popular vote anywhere in Kenya. They have attained such a high level of fame with their road construction projects that one would think such praise should be more fittingly reserved for mythical engineering demi-gods . . . unfortunately Kenyans have not been given the chance to know any such gods other than the Chinese. So Chinese efficacy might be questionable or in the very least untested.
It would also be accurate to say that China is now firmly clawed into Africa's soft underbelly. Yet sadly, no African leader seems to be in a hurry to disengage his country and fewer still even seem cognizant of the Chinese danger; leave alone anyone of them putting their minds into how this death grip can be ameliorated or done away with going into the future.
Unlike previous imperial powers there is a certain set of circumstances with China that should always be kept in mind.
The first and most obvious one is that China has a seventh of the global population, which means one in every seven persons in this world is Chinese. These people are tightly packed in a country that is being seriously environmentally degraded and denuded by mind boggling industrial activity. The limited arable land has also been undergoing extreme transformation, over-use and traumatization. In short China is heaving at the limits to provide for it's large population, by hook or crook (and perhaps military force in the future) it must seek ways to meet the needs of it's people.
The largesse that Africa has been receiving from China are frantic bribes to ensure that China is not locked out of the only remaining cheap resource region in the world. The South Americans are already doing a good job in utilizing a bigger and growing chunk of their own natural resources which in any case are in high demand just north of their region.
Asia still has great promise for China, but being so close to the comparatively larger continent-sized China and the attendant quarrels amongst neighbours -- such as the South China Sea wrangles with Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and Indonesia -- the Asian states are understandably far much more wary of China than anybody else. Letting China's red hordes in (economically or by other means) is strategically unappealing as it might prove an uphill task to get them out once they are firmly rooted in the host country.
{This might have been the reason why the military junta in Myanmar made a sudden u-turn on it's relations with China. China's economic entrenchment in Myanmar was imprudently unmasked before full fruition by China's earnest push for more mega-projects that would have been costly to Myanmar in the long-term while most of the benefits would have accrued to China.
The avaricious and rapacious nature of the Chinese must have increasingly seemed -- even to the venal generals of Myanmar -- to be like the constricting grip of a python, slowly chocking out the legitimacy and authority of China’s puppet allies in Myanmar. Cut out and isolated from the rest of the world (at the behest and encouragement of China) Myanmar’s rulers were precipitously left at the mercy of China -- no wonder they jumped ship and immediately ran to the comforting bosom of the West.
If corrupt, pampered generals in totalitarian Myanmar can ran away from China, why shouldn't African leaders be more cautious and prudent with the beguiling philosophy of China? That is, do business and don't ask questions -- especially about human rights, democracy and other such Western nonsense.}
Secondly, China has no apparent fallback plan if it's economic growth should suddenly collapse. The British Empire wasted into oblivion with little ramifications for a majority of Britons other than the nagging realization and feeling of being a lot more insignificant. The same was the case for the French colonial empire. The collapse of the Roman Empire left it's constituent parts still viable entities on their own and so on so forth.
The sudden collapse of the Chinese Empire would be something much less tolerable for it’s denizens and it would probably herald upheaval in unimaginable scales. This mainly lies in the fact that a divided and disintegrated China does not appear to be a good candidate for viable post-imperial prosperity. There would be far much less resources (that would not be under effective control for distribution) to be able to support China's bulging population.
So implosion and collapse of the central authority in China is not an option. Which in effect means the Chinese would sacrifice just about anything and anybody just to make sure they get what they need to continue some sort of agreeable existence. If that means economic colonization of Africa, then so it will be -- and they will do it without even flinching.
Meddling in the internal affairs of African countries is not a game that the imperial powers do out of fun; to them they are just protecting their strategic national interests at the cheapest possible cost. So supporting a rebel group here, assassinating a John Garang there, crushing a coup thereabouts, forcing the Kenyas, Zimbabwes and Ivory Coasts of this world to have coalition governments etc are all legitimate means for them. The International Criminal Court and twitter revolutions are other new techniques that they have availed themselves.
The claim by China, an imperial power that it would never interfere in the internal affairs of other countries should be taken as a polite lie -- they are already interfering, by omission and commission Sudan and Syria being good cases in point. This lie is necessitated by amongst other things the fact that China's rulers actually lack the legitimacy to rule that country -- they are in power by virtue of the martial force at their command. Chinese and non-Chinese people are heavily being breathed down by this ruthless dragon -- can you imagine the Chinese Communists practically swallowed a whole independent country called Tibet, and ever since they don't want to hear anything of it?
If you were a Chinese ruler wouldn't you silence everybody by putting forward such a cynical policy if you had swallowed a whole country? That is: "We see no evil, we hear no evil and we speak no evil --we just do evil to our own pesky minorities and other trouble makers. To be fair we are rather efficient about it."
So believe me China would not only meddle it would occupy, colonize and even enslave Africa if it could. In a future that would be overshadowed with an unaccountable, roguish Chinese superpower, one that is desperate for resources for it's own survival, Africa might be the region under the greatest risk. But alas! This is only so because Africa is where the Chinese would have entrenched themselves the deepest -- more and more governments in Africa and even private entities are practically falling over each other to attract Chinese attentions.
As of now the Chinese have been trying out various techniques in meddling (though not interfering?), chief amongst them being bribery of high ranking officials and entire countries with wonderful altruistic seeming projects. What we do not yet know is what punitive measures China would hit us with -- should most of our countries begin to waste the Chinese initiative by turning around and running silly like Myanmar.
Would invasions and Chinese nukes start falling from the sky? Would they bankrupt our economies by calling in their huge loans and grants? Would they support terrorists and assassinate our leaders? I think we need to look more keenly at what they have been doing in Tibet, after all they have occupied that country since the 1950s and murdered a million people along the way, there are bound to be heaps of revelations about China's ugly tactics there.
In conclusion Africa should be more wary of China. This ABOCO game that we are plunging head-long into -- without even thinking of how we would get out if China proves to be an even more appalling imperial power than the West -- appears to me like a script for a disaster movie. Stop the ABOCO stampede or we forget about the much touted, fallacious and curious concept called African sovereignty.
In conclusion Africa should be more wary of China. This ABOCO game that we are plunging head-long into -- without even thinking of how we would get out if China proves to be an even more appalling imperial power than the West -- appears to me like a script for a disaster movie. Stop the ABOCO stampede or we forget about the much touted, fallacious and curious concept called African sovereignty.
PS: And another blogger bites the dust
One hitherto unknown Kenyan blogger (unknown to me) Dennis Itumbi has been arrested with all the media razzmatazz that nowadays seems to come with arresting bloggers. This allegedly for fabricating the infamous letter presented in parliament alleging some sort of British conspiracy to have President Kibaki arrested and arraigned at the ICC once he leaves office. The police were literally salivating with anticipation to have some ‘private’ time with him. Roughly tugging him from all directions and even closing his mouth with their hands to stop him from talking to the media, which he did anyway. His trousers mind you kept falling – and he kept repeating they should give him time to get a belt.
Though this man might very well be the criminal he is accused of being, am not amused by his handling during the arrest. It has not escaped my attention that I myself might also be going down that road in the coming days. That is, if there is already someone out there hunting for me. This is definitely not good for the freedom of expression, freedom of speech etc but more importantly it is not good for the worsening blogger paranoia in Kenya. Am not advocating for stupid violations of the law by bloggers, but the situation on blogger freedom will continue to be monitored and it might reach a point worth getting onto the streets to face our detractors once and for all in asserting our general freedoms.
Even a weakened foe with no means of escape, can turn into a most formidable opponent – whoever is orchestrating this noose tightening better know his limits, or he will have a far much more grievous situation on his hands once the raw anger bursts onto the streets.
Yes, it is frustrating. This blogging enterprise is proving far much more dangerous than I bargained for -- creepy readers, strange probing urls and a government crackdown on bloggers. Can’t anybody blog in peace anymore? Why does everybody want Kenyan bloggers to be drinking tasteless porridge in jail all of a sudden? Has blogging and ranting now become illegal?
Greyhorn is still irreverent; satire has to go on. . . Alluta Continua. (Humour- monger, Rumour-monger it is all just semantics that depends on those who arrest bloggers, so why fret about it? They will beat the right meaning of blogging into any arrested blogger’s head anyway . . . although am certain none of those goons understand even half of what we write in these blogs). By the way fellow bloggers, what is the ‘cause’ we are getting arrested for again? I didn’t get that memo, am just blogging things that irritate me or topics that brutally land in my head . . . you?
M. Wycliff,
Nairobi.
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