IMHOTEP: The dragon and the sphinx

“Let China sleep, for when she wakes, the earth will tremble”. So said Napoleon Bonaparte. When I was a student in Paris over two decades ago, I had a rather eccentric Chinese friend by the name of Liu. Then as now, Paris was the fashion capital of the world, with many of my African brethren more obsessed with following up on haute couture in the shopping malls of Montparnasse and La Defence than anything else.

Liu was a high-flying member of the youth wing of the Chinese Communist Party. He was quiet, studious and reserved and excessively bright. He vowed that he would never buy even a handkerchief in France. I asked him why, and he replied that they in China were in the process of constructing the greatest nation on earth and everything he did within and outside his fatherland must contribute to that single goal.

That was in the spring of 1985. To be completely honest, I suspected Liu to be just another communist crackpot. It took me the better part of a decade to grasp the full import of what he meant. On October 1, China celebrated sixty years of Communist rule. They have been years of sweat, blood and tears -- from Mao’s bloody ‘cultural revolution’ to the massacres at Tiananmen Square.

The Middle Kingdom remains the oldest surviving civilization on earth, with five millenniums of history behind it.

The secret of that remarkable endurance lies in the country’s inherent capacity for self-regeneration; it’s tradition of respect for excellence, its scholasticism and the pragmatism of its leaders.

Today, the country is the second largest economy in the world (measured by purchasing power parity),

with external reserves of nearly $US2 trillion. Chinese economic growth has been one of the most dazzling achievements in world economics, at an unprecedented annualized average of 15 percent between 1985 and 2004.

As fate would have it, China’s man of destiny after Mao was a little chain-smoking philosopher-king by the name of Deng Xiaoping; a pragmatist who preached that “it is glorious to be rich”. He also famously declared that “it does not matter whether a cat is black or white, so long as it can catch mice”.

Deng’s reforms were anchored, first, on the liberation of the rural peasantry by the dismantling of farm collectives. Agricultural modernisation was linked to a coherent strategy of industrialisation. Some of the Chinese leaders visited Singapore and took copious notes on what they saw. They also found inspiration from neighbouring Taiwan and South Korea.

A so-called ‘coastal strategy’ led to the creation of special economic zones in such areas as Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Xiamen and Shantou. There was also a deliberate policy to welcome foreign direct investment. Banking reforms were also implemented while pork-barrelled state enterprises were dismantled.

The tax regime was modernised while trade policy was overhauled. Money began flowing in, much of it initially from Diaspora Chinese investors who controlled between them capital in excess of US$1 trillion. The impact was stupendous.

From 1980 to 2004, the gross national product increased seven-fold while per capita incomes doubled, with savings increasing by an astonishing 14,000 percent. Exports rose from a paltry US$10 billion in 1980 to over US$2.5 trillion in 2008.

The African Sphinx has a lot to learn from the Chinese Dragon. But we must be as wily as serpents in our dealings with the Dragon. Sino-African relations date back to medieval times, when Chinese ships arrived the East African coast as early as the fourteenth century. Their mission was scientific and commercial, unlike the Europeans and the Arabs whose sole aim was rapine and pillage. Today, China has virtually overtaken the West as the main donor to Africa, with an ODA of US$20 billion per annum.

China-Africa trade stood at US$107 billion in 2008.

In his address to our National Assembly during his state visit last year, President Hu Jintao declared: “Africa has rich resources and market potentials, whereas China has available effective practices and practical know-how it has gained in the course of modernisation”. And so it is. But I would insist that if our relations have no moral content at all, we would ultimately only reap the whirlwind.

There are many aspects of Chinese business practices that give us cause for worry, notably the dumping of substandard and even dangerous products on our Mother Continent.

Chinese companies have also been known to treat their African workers with savagery. They are also totally amoral where oil and other strategic natural resources are concerned. Increased policy dialogue with the Dragon is therefore crucial to ensuring that we safeguard our sovereignty, our equality, our mutually shared obligations and the dignity of our people.

Over to you, Liu.