Recently, I had the good fortune to listen to a
former Chinese ambassador to several African countries, who is now a
professor at a university in China.
He is an unassuming chap who is very skilled at
expressing things simply. So he was asked about China and that matter of
poaching and illegal trading in tusks that is finishing off the African
elephant.
Well, he said, the problem was that probably the
punishment for dealing in illegal tusks is not high enough. When a man
says that you would think the tusk dealers get a light sentence of three
months.
No, the few who are convicted get on average five
years! China is a leading executioner of convicts in the world, so you
one can understand why any sentence that is not death would be
considered light.
But the really striking thing he said was that
just one illegal tusk is enough to build one a nice house, so the
incentives to kill elephants are huge. What is five years if you are
leaving your family in a new nice house in the suburbs, surely?
The questions kept coming. A boisterous economist
from Costa Rica who works on Africa had said the low-cost production
model on which China has relied to become fabulously wealthy is running
its course as wages rise and the country becomes rich.
The question, he said, is who will replace China?
Africa, he said, has a good shot to take over from China as the world’s
low-cost, low-wage mass producer. That, he argued, would finally make
the continent rich, because that stuff we dig up from the ground — gold,
coltan, copper — will not do it. But we are not alone. India could also
be the next China.
He thought that was unlikely though because India
has too many structural problems and is unlikely to make the reforms and
changes needed to take advantage of China’s move upstairs.
Well, our professor ambassador was asked to
comment on that. It was unlikely, he said, because it was based on a
misunderstanding of how China works. The low-cost industries in China,
he said, are based along its coastal regions, which are richer than the
hinterland.
When the costs at the coast become too high, he
said, the low-cost jobs will not come to Africa or India. They will go
to the poorer Chinese hinterland. So China is not about to leave its
seat at the table vacant. Clear, straightforward, and persuasive.
He was not done. He was asked how much China actually understands Africa, and whether he thinks Africa understands China.
“No, both sides still know very little about each
other,” he said. He explained the Chinese side of this ignorance. The
Chinese, he said, like to learn about peoples from stories they tell of
themselves. They are always more revealing than stories about them told
by others, he said.
There was a problem with Africa, he went on. There
are very few books about Africa written by Africans that are available
for translation into Chinese, he said in a matter of fact tone.
It was disheartening that the Chinese can rip off
African kitenge and art, but can’t find decent African non-fiction to
pirate. Surely, we can do better.
Charles Onyango-Obbo is editor of Mail & Guardian Africa (mgafrica.com). Twitter:@cobbo3
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