A-Infos (en) South Africa, An anarchist Journal Zabalaza: #7 - IS CHINA AFRICA'S NEW IMPERIALIST POWER?,,by Lucien van der Walt and Michael Schmidt

The African tour of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, centred on fostering 
trade relations between China and African and Arabian countries, 
highlights an important recent development. Revolutionaries in 
Anglophone Africa have always seen Britain and France as the dominant 
imperialist powers on the continent, but other forces are emerging from 
the shadows to challenge their continued post-colonial dominance - and 
it’s not just the United States. Southern African anarchist-communists 
would normally see the former British colony of South Africa as acting 
as a sub-imperialist power on behalf of the big capitalist powers and 
its own capitalist ruling class in the region, a sort of regional 
policeman as it were: if British interests in Swaziland are threatened 
by the democracy movement, we are sure that South African military might 
will intervene (as it did against Lesotho in 1998) to shore up the Swazi 
elite.

But the international scene is changing and today we can chart the rise 
of the People’s Republic of China as one of Africa’s most powerful 
kingmakers, whether backing the genocidal regime in Khartoum, or 
embarking on large-scale building projects including the new Luanda 
airport (in exchange for 10,000 barrels of crude oil a day) and the 
Number One Stadium in Kinshasa, a city that with its giant gold statue 
of a fat, Mao-like Laurent-Desire Kabila is looking like a city on the 
Yangtze River instead of the Congo (the DRC's mimicry of the Chinese 
national flag, before adopting a new flag this year, was too obvious to 
miss).

*STATE CAPITALISM *

Unlike the old Soviet Union, China has managed to engineer a successful 
transition from closed State-capitalism (the Maoist era) towards an 
export-orientated neo-liberal model. Its rapid economic growth and cheap 
goods - overseen by the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP - may see the 
country overtake the US as the largest manufacturing power worldwide by 
2010.

This capitalist boom has been built on the back of a brutal suppression 
of the working class and peasantry. Strikes are illegal, dissidents are 
murdered, and the top 20% of households earn 42% of total urban incomes 
while the poorest 20% receive just 6%.

There has been a sharp rise in class struggle, with strikes rising from 
8,150 in 1992 to 120,000 in 1999. Last year residents of the village of 
Huaxi, Zhejiang province, battled the police and local officials in 
hand-to-hand combat in April and drove them off. In December, hundreds 
of villagers armed with dynamite and petrol-bombs attacked police in 
Dongzhou, Guandong province, after police killed 20 villagers who had 
protested against land seized to build a power plant. A source close to 
the CCP central committee revealed last year that some 3-million workers 
took part in protests last year.

This is a country where the official monthly minimum wage is US$63 
(compare that to US$45 to US$55 in rural and urban Vietnam, 
respectively, levels won by Vietnamese workers last year by embarking on 
wildcat strikes against their communist bosses), which has probably the 
worst mining fatality record in the world (the official Xhinhua News 
Agency figure is 5,986 dead in coal mines alone in 2005, resulting in 
some cases in miners armed with dynamite attacking their bosses), and 
multinational sweat-shop operations such as Nike and McDonalds setting 
up operations in special “economic exclusion zones”.

While terror and repression fuel China’s economy, the country’s 
capitalist ruling class looks outwards for cheap labour, raw materials 
and fuel supplies. Africa, economically sidelined in the world economic 
crisis starting in the 1970s, has suddenly become hot property. In 2005, 
the overall African economy grew at 5% - it’s fastest in decades - as 
demand for African raw materials shot up, with Chinese demand playing a 
key role. The 1980s and 1990s saw Africa fall off the investment map, 
with Africa getting less than 1% of all private direct investment to 
“third world” countries in 1995. Chinese (and South African) capitalists 
have increasingly taken the gap, and the trend is reversing.

*CHINA IN AFRICA*

China clandestinely traded with apartheid South Africa despite its 
funding of liberation movements in the country and in neighbouring 
countries like Zimbabwe. Formal relations with South Africa were 
re-established in 1998.

According to Martin Davies, the director for the Centre for Chinese 
Studies at Stellenbosch University (and a businessman with interests in 
Shanghai), last year, trade between China and Africa soared to 
US$35-million, with Chinese investment primarily centred on the oil 
industry, especially in Nigeria, Angola, Sudan and Equatorial Guinea.

Grim conditions in these countries have hardly worried the Chinese 
dictatorship: whether it is the total lack of democracy in Equatorial 
Guinea, the state-driven race-war in Sudan, or the fact that the blatant 
theft of oil wealth by the ruling cliques in Angola and Nigeria has 
fuelled conflict, with UNITA and the Movement for the Emancipation of 
the Niger Delta, respectively trying to win back a slice of the pie.

So it will come as no surprise that Chinese helicopter gunships have 
been used against civilians in Darfur, according to human rights 
activists. China - which maintains an electronic listening post on the 
Comores - gave Sudan massive military aid between 1996 and 2003, 
including jet fighter aircraft, shipped tons of arms to Ethiopia and 
Eritrea prior to the outbreak of their border war in 1998, and has sold 
jets, military aircraft and radio-jamming equipment (to prevent outside 
broadcasts being heard inside the country) to the Zimbabwean regime.

*SOUTH AFRICA*

China has greased its imperialist wheels in Africa by scrapping over 
US$1-billion in debt owed by 32 African countries and the SABC reported 
this year that South Africa’s trade with China is growing at 26% annually.

South Africa is China’s largest trade partner in Africa, with trade 
growing 400% over the last six years. South Africa supplies iron ore and 
other raw materials, and receives manufactured goods - and a new trade 
agreement will see China limit textile exports but strengthen 
co-operation in areas like nuclear energy. Meanwhile, South Africa’s 
trade with traditional partners like Britain is shrinking.

However, the importance of relations with China is relatively limited, 
given the strength and diversity of South African capitalism. On the 
other hand, Chinese investment looms very large in weak economies like 
those of Equatorial Guinea. China’s interest in securing direct raw 
material supplies - for example, oil outside the OPEC cartel - means we 
can expect these relations to intensify, and African elites to solidify 
their links with the East Asian power. Africa now provides around 30% of 
China’s oil imports.

*SOLIDARITY OR XENOPHOBIA*

But what does all this investment in guns, ore and oil mean? COSATU has 
reacted with alarm to a deal struck between the South African and 
Chinese governments, warning that with the country flooded with cheap 
imported Chinese clothing (a 480% increase since 2003), the 
already-fragile domestic textile industry (62,000 jobs lost in the same 
period) could collapse.

COSATU leaders were embarrassed last year when members of their 
affiliated SA Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union demonstrated against 
the fact that the congress’ red T-shirts were made in China. Many 
mainland Chinese textile operations have relocated to Africa in order to 
by-pass European and American quotas on Chinese imports, but they have 
often brought with them brutal working conditions. At the same time, 
COSATU and its ally, the SACP continue to praise China as a socialist 
country.

Neither position is correct. COSATU’s “Buy South Africa” campaign will 
do nothing to stop cheap Chinese imports. It promotes anti-Chinese 
racism and feeds into the poisonous xenophobia that afflicts the local 
working class. It also suggests that all South Africans, capitalists and 
workers alike, have a common interest. Nothing is further from the 
truth: South African capitalists are not the friends of South African 
workers.

Further, the ANC’s GEAR policy promotes free trade, so there is no 
prospect of the wave of imports subsiding in meaningful terms. COSATU is 
left with making futile appeals to the morals and patriotism of the 
South African ruling class - appeals that will achieve nothing. South 
African capitalists are developing a pact with Chinese capitalists: if 
these rivals can unite, why can’t the working class learn the lesson, 
and defend Chinese labour?

*THE “CORE OF ENTERPRISES”*

As we have noted in these pages before, both GEAR and NEPAD aim at 
attracting more trade and more foreign investment, and China fits both 
bills. Meanwhile, Intelligence Minister (and ageing Young Communist 
League politburo member) Ronnie Kasrils enthused in a glossy book China 
Through the Third Eye: South African Perspectives - funded by the China 
Chamber of Commerce and Industry in SA - that China’s building boom, 
including the controversial Three Dams project on the Yangtze that will 
displace 1-million people, “is a construction engineers’ dream”. This is 
a good thing, it seems: “If China is to remain a sustainable economy, it 
has to speed the transition from a rural to an urban society, from an 
agricultural to an industrial economy.”

Chief state spin-doctor Joel Netshitenzhe claimed in the same book that 
“South Africa and China share mutual goals as both countries are 
committed to ensuring a better life for all their citizens. Both aim to 
lower the levels of poverty.” Given the state-enforced poverty of the 
Chinese people, one wonders what Netshitenzhe has in mind when he 
praised the role of the Chinese state propaganda machine for “the rigour 
and focus with which China uses information to mobilise people around 
common objectives and a shared vision…”

A chill settles in one’s bones when one reads him hailing the “diversity 
of voices” in the Chinese media, while studiously ignoring state 
censorship and the complicity of Western search engines such as Yahoo in 
helping China jail political dissidents.

The view of SACP deputy secretary general and one-man think-tank Jeremy 
Cronin is even more revealing. The SACP, terrified that the bubble of 
“real, existing socialism” was washing down the drain with the 
restructuring of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China, sent a 
delegation there in 2001 to check things out.

Cronin and his delegation were clearly wowed by their CCP hosts: he 
quotes a 1999 central committee document that “The public-ownership 
economy, which includes the State-owned economy, is the economic basis 
of China’s socialist system… China must always rely on and bring into 
full play the important role of the SOEs to develop the productive 
forces of the socialist society and realise the country’s 
industrialisation and modernisation…” China, it seems, is socialist as 
well as capitalist! What are we to make of such confused thinking?

“To manage SOEs well in general, efforts must be made to establish a 
leadership system and organisational and managerial systems in them that 
conform to the law of the market economy and China’s actual situation, 
to strengthen the building of their leadership, to give play to the 
Party organisations as the political core of enterprises, and to adhere 
to the principle of relying on the working class wholeheartedly…” And 
“rely” they do, for China’s miracle is built “wholeheartedly” on 
exploitation and terror!

*A CHANGING OF THE GUARD?*

So, Chinese communism is finally revealed as nothing more than a 
modernisation programme guided by authoritarian marketing and management 
gurus who double as Party bosses! And the Party itself is revealed as a 
clique of commissars that rides on the working class!

Cronin admits that the delegation “did not have sufficient time to gauge 
the degree to which” the central committee’s stated commitment to 
workers’ “democratic decision-making” and “status as masters of their 
own enterprises” - capitalist enterprises steered by the party - but he 
thought it significant that these cheap words had been put on paper.

Cronin lauds the regime for the “fairly clear socialist agenda [that] 
shines through…” “There is no reason,” he huffs, “why markets should not 
exist under socialism” - a liberal interpretation that allows for the 
coexistence of “the emergent small and medium privately owned service 
sector”. Where exactly “socialism” “shines” is not clear.

From such mixed economic thinking arises a confused politics, based on 
industrial and market requirements rather than people’s needs, where in 
Cronin’s view, wage increases in the public sector, adopted purely to 
stimulate market demand qualify as “socialist”.

So what we have is an ANC/SACP government that is not only increasingly 
trading with, but ideologically inclining itself towards, the world’s 
last large totalitarian state, a state that is so blatantly capitalist 
and simultaneously anti-labour that Cronin’s skill as a poet fails to 
gild the brutal reality. The SACP’s state-capitalist thinking has 
finally manage to find, in the Chinese example, a happy marriage with 
neo-liberalism.

*PROTECTIONISM OR CLASS STRUGGLE*

Chinese goods are cheap because Chinese labour is cheap. If COSATU wants 
to protect local jobs - and show its commitment to the international 
working class struggle - it should support trade union organising in 
China, and step up the class struggle at home and in southern Africa. 
Neo-liberal capitalism thrives on pitting cheap labour in one country 
against even chepaer labour in another, in a race to the bottom. The 
only way out is international solidarity and class struggle, starting 
with a struggle for an international minimum wage and universal union 
rights.

China has a proud tradition of class struggle - and this does not mean 
the CCP and Mao! Back in 1913, anarcho-syndicalists built the first 
trade unions in Canton, rising to challenge reformist and communist 
unionism in all the big industrial centres such as Shanghai in the 
1920s. Armed anarchist peasant movements controlled huge swathes of 
territory in Fukien province and in Kirin province, Manchuria, in the 
1930s and anarchist guerrillas fought alongside communists in the 
resistance to Japanese imperialism in the 1940s.

But after the Maoist coup d’état of 1949, China’s estimated 10,000 
anarchist trade unionist militants were driven underground and 
Makhnovist-styled guerrillas such as Chu Cha Pei were forced to retreat 
into the hills in Yunnan province from where they continued to harry the 
new ruling class headed by Mao and his entourage of warlords and 
state-capitalists.

As Africa increasingly becomes the back-yard of China’s oil-driven 
imperialism, one has to ask firstly, whether the government will try to 
mimic the worst aspects of China’s enforced civil peace, a development 
that would prove a serious challenge to our own working class.

*ANARCHISM OR MARXISM*

We have no interest on following those leftists who hope for an end to 
“capitalist restoration” in China: China has been capitalist since Mao 
took power, and any Chinese revolutionary movement must jettison Marxism 
and its Maoist variant. Nor can we agree that China is - in fact - 
“socialist,” despite what SACP leaders may think.

Capitalism is a class system, and a class system means class struggles. 
Sooner or later China’s working class will rediscover its proud fighting 
tradition and take charge of its own affairs to the exclusion of 
parasitic Party leaders and capitalists - what is called in Chinese 
wuzhengfgu gonchan, or common production without government, in a word, 
anarchist-communism - and bury the CCP.

But until that day, there is a more serious question we have to ask, one 
with implications beyond our borders: will China replace Britain as 
South Africa’s imperialist power, a changing of the guard, so to speak - 
leading to South Africa embarking on military expeditions in Africa to 
protect Chinese capitalist interests. All serious anti-imperialists must 
consider and plan for the possibility of Africa becoming the future 
battle-ground between US-backed Western and Chinese expansionist 
interests, and unite the continent’s people in a battle against the oil 
barons.
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