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Namibia is not China’s puppet…yet!

 

Last week in a meeting with Chinese Ambassador to Namibia the ambassador appeared to be telling the President what to say when he meets Chinese President Xi Jingping next week at the African leaders summit in Beijing for the annual Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) . This did not go down well. Mr Geingob  made it quite clear that he did not believe that Namibia was ‘China’s puppet’ and for the moment that remains absolutely true. Namibia remains a free nation to do what it chooses and say what it chooses  with China, the country’s old friend and liberation struggle supporter. For decades when the Western world condemned Namibia and South Africa’s liberation struggle heroes such as Nelson Mandela and Sam Nujoma as terrorists, the Chinese stood behind Africa and gave invaluable support to the struggle for freedom. But that was yesterday’s China.  

China is slowly achieving its primary political and economic objective of the 21^st century which is to return to its rightful place as the world’s largest nation and economy which it was at the beginning of the 19^th century before the European, American  and Japanese powers took over the entire coast of China with what were called ‘treaty ports’. In 1839 Britain fought the first of two so-called ‘Opium Wars’ against the imperial Chinese government to convince that country that they should not restrict the trade in opium which was the one of the few legal exports that Britain had from India that many Chinese wanted to buy. If you had Chinese silk, why would you buy cheap cottons from Manchester? Much was different then- opium was a legal drug but much was the same- the iron ships of the British navy devastated the wooden ships of the Chinese navy. In compensation the British got Chinese tea for which they have a deep and enduring love rather than having to pay for the tea in silver or gold which they definitely love more than tea, they could pay in Indian opium. For China the 19^th century ‘free trade’ in British opium was a catastrophe that resulted in what was estimated as many as 20 million drug addicts.

In the 19^th century it was not the Kali or Sinaloa cartels that controlled the trade in addictive and lethal drugs it was institution that was far more greedy and ambitious, Her Majesty’s government and its chief enforcer the British Navy, which was more murderous than anything the 21^st century drug cartels could ever hope to produce. As recompense at the end of the war the British got Hong Kong as a colony from which they could continue to trade drugs and Canton (now Guangzhou) as a treaty port where British law ruled and opium was freely traded. But Britain was not alone, France, Germany, Russia and Japan all had treaty ports where Chinese sovereignty ended. By the latter part of the 19^th century China as a nation state in effect ceased to exist as a functioning nation, it was a puppet as its entire coast was gobbled up by treaty ports of the imperialists. It was this period of great humiliation at the hands of the imperial powers that sparked the creation of the Kuomintang and the Communist Party and resulted eventually in revolution and the rise of communism in China. History is long!

After such an unhappy history one would imagine that China understood the meaning of humiliation and loss of sovereignty to greedy imperial powers  and would have learned but then power, hubris, money and time change everything.  China has been reborn as a great power, no longer easily trampled on by the European imperialists but yet in many ways it is doing precisely what the Europeans did 150 years ago but its choice of weapon is quite different and far more effective. Whereas in 1834 it was the British navy that was the principle vehicle of imperial control, but today the new Chinese empire has a more effective and peaceful weapon- debt and we in Namibia seem to love debt much more than tea.

China today has foreign exchange reserves of US$3 trillion. What do you do with that much money after you have bought as many US Treasury bills that you can? Clearly you have to be both intelligent and inventive and the Chinese are certainly both. China has assiduously used its exchange reserve to help ‘develop’ the so-called Belt and Road initiative (US$4-8 trillion) which aims to improve transport and port infrastructure all over the world to link raw materials to Chinese markets and markets to Chinese producers. By building efficient railroads and ports China will cement its commercial advantage over all other potential competitors.   

In the last three years China has embarked on an ambitious port, road and rail building program all over the developing world. It has built railways such as the Benguela railroad that will link Katanga and the Copperbelt to the Angolan coast. It is building the port at Cabinda as well as Walvis Bay. Last year China acquired its first foreign naval facility in Djibouti right under the noses of the French and Americans.

But in 2017 the Chinese government did something unparalleled in its history – it seized the port of Hambantota in southern Sri Lanka. The port which was built and funded by China as  part of, called Belt and Road and was seized because the government of Sri Lanka had failed to meet its mounting debts and the Chinese in turn did what they were legally entitled to do – they seized not only the port but also the 15,000 acres around the port which it will own for the next 99 years. Thus without a shot being fired China got exactly what British Navy got from China  in Hong Kong 180 years ago after the First Opium war- a ‘treaty port’. Similar situations are developing in Mynmar and in other regions.  

Today President Xi Jingping will tell the assembly of African leaders in Beijing that what China is doing on the African continent is about development and yes it is true, but it is about China’s development. China is now the world’s leading producer of just about everything when it comes to minerals but this will not last forever as these  Chinese resources are non-renewable and so if it wants to bring 1.3 billion Chinese to the same standard of living as the developed world then it will need resources from Africa and Asia and if it wants to sustain its trade advantage it has to make sure that those resources arrive in Chinese ports cheaply. So rather than developing Africa, China is bringing its engineering firms, its workers and its materials to build ports and railroads all over the world. These are expensive ‘gifts’ for which Africans will have to repay and when by 2022  Namibia’s debt has grown from 45% of GDP today to an estimated 70% of GDP will Mr Geingob still be able to look the nation in the face and say we are not puppets?

 

These are the views of Professor Roman Grynberg and not necessarily those of UNAM where he is employed.