[Marxism] "This isn’t progress. It is colonialism"

[Louis Proyect]

NY Times, August 21, 2007
New Power in Africa
In Africa, China Is Both Benefactor and Competitor
By LYDIA POLGREEN and HOWARD W. FRENCH

KABWE, Zambia — The courtyard in front of the Zambia China Mulungushi 
Textiles factory is so quiet, even at midday, that the fluttering of the 
ragged Chinese and Zambian flags is the only sound hanging in the air.

The factory used to roar. From the day it opened more than 20 years ago, 
the vast compound had shuddered to the whir of rollers and the clatter 
of mechanical weaving machines spooling out millions of yards of 
brightly colored African cloth.

Today only the cotton gin still runs, with the company’s Chinese 
managers buying raw cotton for export to China’s humming textile 
industry. Nobody can say when or even if the factory here will reopen.

“We are back where we started,” said Wilfred Collins Wonani, who leads 
the Chamber of Commerce here, sighing at the loss of one of the city’s 
biggest employers. “Sending raw materials out, bringing cheap 
manufactured goods in. This isn’t progress. It is colonialism.”

Chinese officials and their African allies like to call their growing 
relationship a win-win proposition — a rising tide that lifts all boats 
in China’s ever-widening sea of influence. This year, China pledged $20 
billion to finance trade and infrastructure across the continent over 
the next three years. In Zambia alone, China plans to invest $800 
million in the next few years.

 From South Africa’s manganese mines to Niger’s uranium pits, from 
Sudan’s oil fields to Congo’s cobalt mines, China’s hunger for resources 
has been a shot in the arm, increasing revenues and helping push some of 
the world’s poorest countries further up the ladder of development.

But China is also exporting huge volumes of finished, manufactured goods 
— T-shirts, flashlights, radios and socks, just to name a few — to those 
same countries, hampering Africa’s ability to make its own products and 
develop healthy, diverse economies.

“Most of our countries have been independent for 35 to 50 years,” said 
Moeletsi Mbeki, a South African entrepreneur and a political analyst. 
“Yet they have failed to develop manufacturing for a variety of reasons, 
and for the Chinese that’s a huge opportunity. We are a very important 
market for China.”

On the one hand, Chinese imports give Africans access to goods and 
amenities that developed countries take for granted but that most people 
here could not have dreamed of affording just a few years ago — cellular 
telephones, televisions, washing machines, refrigerators, computers. And 
cheaper prices on more basic items, like clothing, light bulbs and 
shoes, means people have more money in their pockets.

“There is no doubt China has been good for Zambia,” said Felix Mutati, 
Zambia’s minister of finance. “Why should we have a bad attitude toward 
the Chinese when they are doing all the right things? They are bringing 
investment, world-class technology, jobs, value addition. What more can 
you ask for?”

But across Africa, and especially in the relatively robust economies of 
southern Africa, there are clear winners and losers. Textile mills and 
other factories here in Zambia have suffered and even closed as cheap 
Chinese goods flood the world market, eliminating much-needed jobs in a 
country where less than half the adult population has formal employment. 
And the Chinese investment in copper mining here has left a trail of 
heartbreak and recrimination after one of the worst industrial accidents 
in Zambian history, a blast at a Chinese-owned explosives factory in 
Chambishi in 2005 that killed 46 people, most of them in their 20s.

“Who is winning? The Chinese are, for sure,” said Michael Sata, a 
Zambian opposition politician who campaigned in last year’s presidential 
election on an anti-China platform. He lost, but with a surprisingly 
strong showing, and his party, the Patriotic Front, won many seats in 
local and parliamentary elections in Lusaka, the capital, and the 
Zambian industrial heartland, where China has made its biggest investments.

“Their interest is exploiting us, just like everyone who came before,” 
he said. “They have simply come to take the place of the West as the new 
colonizers of Africa.”

Officials at the Chinese Embassy in Lusaka did not respond to repeated 
requests to discuss the country’s role in Zambia. But Chinese diplomats 
across Africa and top officials in Beijing have emphasized the money and 
opportunity they bring to Africa. In Zambia, for example, government 
officials say that the Chinese are sending dozens of workers for 
training in China, and that their investments will create thousands of 
high-wage jobs.

Measured in some ways, Zambia’s economy is booming. Copper prices have 
soared from 75 cents a pound in January 2003, to more than $3 a pound 
this year, driven in large part by Chinese demand. That demand has 
pushed Zambia’s long-dormant copper mines into record production.

China’s Non-Ferrous Metals Corporation, a state-owned company, purchased 
rights to develop a mine in Chambishi, in the heart of the copper belt, 
in 1998, and it plans to build factories in an export processing zone 
that will bring as many as 60,000 jobs, according to government officials.

But China’s growing presence in global trade is wiping out thousands of 
jobs in countries with fledgling manufacturing sectors like Zambia and 
South Africa.

Despite relatively low wages in many countries, African manufacturers 
find it very hard to compete, arguing that China’s currency policies 
undervalue the yuan and give Chinese exporters a huge advantage. Many 
industries in China also benefited at various points from subsidies and 
free or low-cost government financing, making their costs lower. Beyond 
that, there are major infrastructure problems in Africa, where industry 
struggles with inadequate roads and railways, and unreliable electricity 
and water supplies.

“So who do you blame?” said Martyn J. Davies, director of the Center for 
Chinese Studies at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. “You can’t 
blame China for being too competitive. China is doing what every other 
emerging market is doing.”

The textile and clothing industry, one of the engines China used to fuel 
its own economic expansion in the 1980s, has been particularly hard hit 
in Africa. For decades, African countries exported large quantities of 
clothes and textiles to developed countries under a trade agreement 
designed to protect European and American markets from competition from 
China and others, while encouraging exports from the world’s poorest 
nations. But the trade provision, the Agreement on Textiles and 
Clothing, expired in January 2005, putting these countries in direct 
export competition with China.

Africa found itself once again on the losing end of globalization. If 
copper is Zambia’s bread and butter, manufacturing should have been its 
main meal — just as many economies across the globe have progressed from 
producers of raw materials to low-tech manufacturing and beyond, a 
well-trod path to development.

Ms. Zimba, a 40-year-old quality control worker at the plant here who 
asked to be identified only by her common last name because she feared 
losing her termination benefits, first got a job at the factory in 1989, 
after moving to Kabwe from the depressed eastern region of the country 
with her brother.

She earned a little less than $100, as well as free health care and a 
pension, and a little three-room house in the workers’ compound. But 
since she lost her job, her family’s standard of living has plummeted. 
The water was turned off, and Ms. Zimba does not know where she will 
come up with next semester’s tuition for her 20-year-old daughter’s 
trade school.

“We will see what God brings me,” Ms. Zimba said.

For Ms. Zimba, the transition from salaried work to selling goods for 
pocket change in the market is a devastating setback to a grim fate she 
thought she had escaped— her mother was widowed when Ms. Zimba was 15 
and reduced to selling in the market as well.

“I am right back where I started,” Ms. Zimba said.

As for the Chinese, she bitterly refers to them as “briefcase investors.”

“They just fill their briefcases with our wealth and leave,” she said.

Such anti-Chinese sentiment has been brewing here for several years. 
When China’s president, Hu Jintao, visited Zambia earlier this year he 
received the usual red carpet treatment from his Zambian host, President 
Levy Mwanawasa , but the reception from many ordinary Zambians was 
nasty. A trip to the site of China’s big new investment, Chambishi, had 
to be scuttled entirely because of fears of unrest, and the 
circumstances of the industrial disaster there are still not entirely 
understood.

The mine at Chambishi had for decades been run by the government, and 
had limped along while copper prices slumped in the 1980s. When the 
Non-Ferrous Metal Mining Group bought the rights to develop the mine in 
1998, local residents cheered, hoping for new jobs.

In 2003, Keegan Chibuye got one as a mechanic at the mine, a job he was 
grateful to have in a country where even skilled men like himself 
struggled to find work. Mr. Chibuye’s sister, 27-year-old Vennie, also 
found work under the Chinese, as a computer specialist at an explosives 
factory on the mine’s grounds. Ms. Chibuye was the eldest of seven, and 
her parents had sent her to Britain at great expense, to a technical 
college in Derbyshire, where she earned a diploma in information 
technology. Another brother, Mwape, got a job as a casual worker in the 
explosives factory, for a little more than a dollar a day, to save money 
for college.

Keegan Chibuye said he had concerns about the way the Chinese managers 
were running the mine almost from the beginning.

“They were careless,” he said. “Safety was not their priority. 
Everything was about productivity no matter what.”

On April 20, 2005, Keegan Chibuye heard an ear-splitting boom that would 
shatter his world — a huge blast at the explosives factory.

There was almost nothing left of Vennie and Mwape left to bury. 
Virtually all the bodies had been incinerated. Only fragments were 
buried just off the main road at the graveyard built by the Chinese 
owners — a finger, an ear, a bit of scalp. As the 46 headstones testify, 
most of the workers were young, born after 1980.

Officials of the company that runs the mine did not respond to repeated 
telephone requests for an interview to talk about working conditions and 
safety at the mine. But at the Chinese workers’ compound in Chambishi, 
Han Yaping, who identified himself as the company’s human resources 
manager, said that the company hoped to help Zambia develop.

“China works here in cooperation with Zambia,” Mr. Han said in English. 
“It is friendship.”

Asked why the wages at the mine were lower than those paid by other 
companies, Mr. Han said that Zambian workers had limited skills and no 
experience with technology. By way of example, he said, a Chinese worker 
trying to remove a screw would use a screwdriver.

“But a Zambian worker,” he continued with a chuckle, “he use his finger.”

A look around the compound for Chinese workers illustrates why China is 
able to do business so profitably in Africa. While Western companies 
must provide relatively plush and private accommodations to attract 
expatriate workers, the Chinese employees at Chambishi live in 
barracks-like conditions, several to a room. A table for table tennis 
and a dusty soccer field are the only recreational facilities.

“We like simple,” Mr. Han explained.

Many African scholars and political leaders say Africa has no need for 
the colonial baggage and paternalism of the West, and they welcome the 
Chinese approach of cowboy capitalism. “Let the Chinese come,” said 
Mahamat Hassan Abakar, lawyer in Chad, a former French colony in central 
Africa with deepening ties to China. “What Africa needs is investment. 
It needs partners. All of these years we have been tied to France. Look 
what it has brought us.”

In South Africa, dozens of clothing and textile companies closed, 
according to trade organizations representing manufacturers. Tens of 
thousands of jobs were lost because of Chinese imports, and in response 
the government negotiated temporary voluntary restraints on some items. 
But Iqbal Meer-Sharma, deputy director of South Africa’s Department of 
Trade and Industry, said that the clothing industry was ultimately less 
valuable to South Africa than the other benefits of its growing 
relationship with China.

“We’ve always known we have a dysfunctional relationship with the West,” 
Mr. Sharma said. “Now with China we have a relationship as equals. They 
don’t look down on us. They are not condescending.”

In an era of ruthless global competition, Mr. Sharma said, Africa should 
stop trying to compete with China at what it does best — producing cheap 
goods for export — and find other ways to compete instead.

But in the meantime, many Africans are caught in limbo.

Clarissa Fabrik, 19, lives at the edge of Atlantis, a depressed 
industrial town in South Africa’s Western Cape. She had hoped to earn an 
engineering degree, courtesy of the scholarship fund from her mother’s 
clothing worker’s union benefit package. But her mother’s factory 
closed, and now she is trying to teach herself basics from a textbook on 
industrial electronics when she is not at her retail job.

“I don’t know what the future will bring,” she said.