What China really wants in Africa
By Cedric Muhammad
Jun 13, 2012
While a cottage industry of "China-in-Africa" experts has emerged over the
past five years, on balance their explanations of why a magnetic like pull
exists between the two continents is unsatisfactory. Certainly no one denies
an array of state-to-state economic and geopolitical incentives recognized
by both sides. After all, the simplified resources-for-infrastructure
win-win is rather obvious.
Yet and still neither of those benefits - Africa's gain of badly needed
dams, roads, pipelines and bridges and China's receipt of desperately needed
oil and minerals - is as compelling as the widely rumored and highly
plausible determination that China's mainland can only sustain 700 million
persons. Therefore at least 300 million to 500 million of its current 1.2
billion population must go elsewhere. The "elsewhere" is Africa if we are to
believe French authors Serge Michel and Michel Beuret, who quote an
anonymous Chinese scientist in their book China Safari.
I am among those who accept the only 700 million can stay/300 million must
leave hypothesis, but I find the explanation for this sorely inadequate. The
reason provided for the necessary exodus of 300 million out of China is
environmental degradation and in particular water scarcity - so many rivers
have been polluted in China that the resource no longer exists in ample
supply to satisfy the needs of a desperate Chinese population.
While lack of water is certainly a major issue (see California;
Syria-Turkey; and Darfur disputes for proof) the Earth is still a very large
place. Why Africa would be the destination of choice for hundreds of
millions of persons fleeing a country plagued by simultaneous drought and
flood, is not answered by the environmental degradation theory.
As serious as China's population pressures and environmental woes are, there
must still be a more compelling internal and external force driving
individuals out of China. There must exist an irresistible motivation shaped
by circumstance that draws and drives an enormous mass of Chinese into
Africa.
We believe that force can be found coming from an unsuspecting source - the
Chinese "one-child" policy.
Though Mao Zedong did state that "revolution plus production can solve the
problem of feeding the population" and thought that China's large population
was more asset than liability, that thinking was replaced by efforts at
social engineering that the Chinese government now credits with preventing
400 million births, thus keeping the Chinese population from otherwise
reaching a level of 1.7 million today.
But people don't neatly fit into the cardinal or ordinal nature of numbers,
nor does their dynamism accept the rigid confines of static public policy.
There have been real and unpredictable consequences on the thinking of
generations of Chinese families and children living under these regulations
- consequences that are now spilling over into Africa.
The pattern of history shows that people vote with their feet as much as
they do by ballot and there are many illustrative examples which shed light
on the Chinese "one-child" experience. One of the best available is the
analogy painted by McGill University professor and economist Reuven Brenner,
who years ago likened the experience of Jews living in Europe with what
Chinese endure today, writing in an article "China: A Neurotic Prosperity":
"What can be the point of reference to predict consequences of China's
current childbearing pattern, adjusted over the last decades to one-kid or
you're-out-of-your-apartment policy? To make any reliable analyses, one
needs at least two points, so as to draw a straight line as a first
approximation.
Fortunately for observers, though unfortunately for those who had to adjust
to such social engineering, there is not much new under the sun. There has
been a government in the past who passed similar regulations. The year was
1726. The place, Austria.
The Viennese court, under anti-Semitic pressures, fearing a large increase
in Jewish population - a fear that by itself suggests that the Jewish birth
rate at the time was relatively high - introduced a regulation. Only the
eldest son of a Jewish family could marry. The younger boys could not. This
regulation introduced into the Austrian empire, including Bohemia, Moravia,
parts of what became later Germany, and Alsace, led to the instant migration
of young Jewish generation to Eastern Europe, to Poland, to Rumania. Whereas
within the Austrian Empire the Jewish birth rates dropped, in Eastern Europe
they did not.
How did Jewish parents, who stayed, adapt to the regulation? As one would
expect: they had less children, invested more in their education and health,
and probably spoiled them much more than would have been otherwise the case.
One can speculate that this regulation was the origins of the myth of the
neurotic Jewish mothers, and the by now tradition of driving Jewish kids to
excellence - true, occasionally, to neurotic excellence.
Will Chinese mothers and kids react in a similar fashion? At least this
point of reference suggests a positive answer. Thus one unintended
consequence of the one-child regulation will be prosperity driven by kids
who will grow up to be very ambitious entrepreneurs."
There are two intriguing features in this portion of Brenner's thesis that
resonate with us. The first is a comparison of regulatory 18th-century
Europe with family planning policies of 20th-century China. The second is
the possibility that entrepreneurship may be a more pronounced tendency of
children living under such policies.
The regulations on the Jewish birth rate are not a perfect analogy but
useful to our understanding of the Chinese experience under "one-child"
policy, because they illustrate an incentive for Chinese to migrate
elsewhere in pursuit of a greater quality of life and in order to broaden
their personal and professional network which has been confined - in a
familial context.
Africa represents a land of opportunity for the Chinese migrant. And history
shows it is often strong kinship-based ethnic groups whose economic
opportunities are more limited at "home" who become the "stranger-traders"
abroad, for better or worse. This has certainly happened in parts of Africa
where the Chinese represent a valuable link to manufactured goods and novel
services unavailable in agrarian and peasant-like societies in Africa.
It is a link that the Jewish community played not only when they migrated
into Eastern Europe as Brenner describes but also by the thousands who
migrated from Alsace into the American South servicing the Mississippi Delta
plantation economy as dry goods peddlers.
Far more important than the quality of the state-to-state negotiation
between China and African governments covered ad nauseum by the chattering
class, is the on the ground navigation of a swarm of Chinese entrepreneurs -
running away from an old reality as much as they are chasing a new one.
Cedric Muhammad is CEO of <
http://africaprebrief.com/> Africa PreBrief - a
firm guiding US-based Frontier Investors. This article is drawn from a
special report: <
http://www.africaprebrief.com/pages/special-reports.php>
"300,000,000 Million Reasons: What China Really Wants In Africa".
Received on Wed Jun 13 2012 - 14:55:08 EDT
