아프리카는 중국의 "약속의 땅"

Africa: China's promised land

 

By Cedric Muhammad

 

Asia Times, Jun 15, 2012

 

Aside from the parallels between policy, emigration and entrepreneurship in 18th-century Alsace and 20th-century China there is another equally important feature of Reuven Brenner's provocative viewpoint that we interpret as having a bearing on why Africa, more than any other place on earth, is a potential promised land for ambitious entrepreneurial Chinese who have grown up under the one-child policy:

 

"Neither Chinese law, nor Chinese courts are today reliable institutions. There is no great commercial legal tradition in China. And such tradition can neither be imposed, nor created quickly. So how will the Chinese expand their family businesses? Whereas in Europe, large families succeeded to pool together their resources and expand family

businesses backed by legal institutions - and that's how Western European corporations developed before having access to developed financial markets - this arrangement cannot be done in China for the simple reason that the one-child policy kept families small. There are no brothers, sisters, and for the coming generations no first cousins.

How will then the small family businesses, that reached their limits and would like to grow, expand?"Since it will take long before China will have developed sophisticated financial markets (which do need solid legal backing), the expansion will have to take place through voluntary associations between "trusted" families. This is what happened among Jews within the larger European community, or happened elsewhere in the world among tribes which, for one reason or another were discriminated against (such as the Chinese in Thailand), and where the countries had no reliable legal framework. What shape and form these voluntary organizations will take, I do not know. But people are ingenious in the ways they can adapt - even if the adaptation has long-term neurotic consequences, which are not anticipated, and whose origin will be long forgotten when they surface."

Our short answer to the question posed by Brenner, "How will then the small family businesses, that reached their limits and would like to grow, expand?" is one word: Africa.
Moving to Africa is the 'ingenious adaptation' that we believe millions of Chinese are gambling upon in order to escape environmental degradation and the impact of the one-child policy. The journey west also permits enough breathing room for Chinese ethnic trading networks to expand and collaborate in ways not possible on the mainland. The weakened condition of African central authorities dominated by kinship based systems (tribes, ethnic groups, religious communities and even 'gangs') makes the necessary 'voluntary associations between trusted families,' more possible there, than anywhere else.

Though not connected with the one-child policy in the minds of elite 'China-in-Africa' intellectuals, the dilemma of Chinese firms - even in Africa - struggling to reach scale is real. Brenner's expectation that the Chinese face a continued challenge in expanding family businesses and that such expansion can only take place through voluntary associations is an insight that can be shown to already be a factor in the Chinese experience in Africa. In an October 1, 2011 paper by Terutomo Ozawa and Christian Bellak we read:

"It is true that Chinese entrepreneurs and migrant workers (estimated to be over one million) are already in Africa and will continue to accompany any large-scale, China sponsored development projects, and will create many more small-scale business clusters across the continent than in the recent past.

But these private investments - mostly by 'family multinationals' - may not be large enough to spur local industrialization ... And further in a footnote we see, 'Excepting a few manufacturing investments by China's large private companies (eg Huawei Technologies, Holley Group, and Haier), China's investments in Africa's manufacturing are made by individual entrepreneurs and small companies (Gu, 2009).' " [1]

Of all of the different groups of Chinese moving into Africa we anticipate it will be those coming from the province of Fujian that will have the most success in executing a strategy to expand family businesses. Not only does Fujian have the advantage of being the prized possession of a Chinese-Taiwan competition - enabling it to attract capital from both sides - it also has been arguably the most successful in establishing migration networks between both continents while enjoying close to US$2 billion in trade with Africa. With those statistics and momentum toward a commercial code governing Chinese businesses in Africa it would not be hard to imagine a repeat scenario from 20 years ago which saw 75% of the foreign capital invested in mainland Chinese businesses pouring in from the Chinese diaspora. Simply replace 'mainland Chinese businesses' with 'Chinese businesses based in Africa.'

There is no denying the risk that China runs in jumping borders into foreign land. Although Chinese designs on Africa are more imperialist in nature than a form of Western evangelical colonialism (we don't see the Chinese as seeking to impose their culture on unsuspecting Africans) already dust-ups in several African countries - typically over the expanding market share of small scale Chinese traders - have occurred. For some these are minor growing pains, for others ominous signs that China has violated a law of Biblical proportions. If ever there was a necessary test of Acts 17:26 - "From one man He created all the nations throughout the whole earth. He decided beforehand when they should rise and fall, and he determined their boundaries" - 300 million Chinese moving into the borders of Africa is providing it.

Although the economic and geopolitical motivations of China's aggressive move into Africa are enormous, the demographic reasons are the most poignant, even desperate. In that sense China needs Africa, not to thrive but actually just to survive.

For China, Africa is not a future colony as so many superficially think but quite possibly her only possible neurotic promised land.

Cedric Muhammad is CEO of Africa PreBrief, a firm guiding US-based Frontier Investors. This article is drawn from a special report, "300,000,000 Million Reasons: What China Really Wants In Africa". He can be found on Twitter here

Note:
1. Terutomo Ozawa and Christian Bellak. 2011. Will The World Bank's Vision Materialize? Relocating China's Factories to Sub Saharan Africa, Flying Geese Style. Global Economy Journal Volume 11, Issue 3, 2011, Article 6.

(Copyright 2012 Cedric Muhammad.)

 

 

 

What China really wants in Africa

By Cedric Muhammad

Asia Times,  June 15, 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 Africa PreBrief - a firm guiding US-based Frontier Investors. This article is drawn from a special report: "300,000,000 Million Reasons: What China Really Wants In Africa". Twitter: http://twitter.com/cedricmuhammad

(Copyright 2012 Cedric Muhammad.)