Made in China: New song of development or begging for neocolonialism

By Emmanuel Luciano
Blue Diamond, a nightclub that is mostly frequented by animated students and some zealous outgoing adults, is perched at Sunnyside close to Colony Casino in Blantyre. This place can be reached using the Chikwawa road past Catholic Institute. Those driving from Victoria Avenue, downtown Blantyre, will only take a minute to get there. That is how close Blantyre is to Beijing.
And there is Machaina in Lilongwe, a name of a nightclub that needs no introduction for Lilongwe revellers who spend their time at Bwandiro.
At Trade Fair in Blantyre, on the opposite left of the Chamber’s house if you are entering the fair grounds using the main gate, there is a tiny restaurant which is run by people whose identity is easily deceived by a language that somewhat sounds Greek save for some guttural sounds that accompany it. Not that they serve any Chinese food at this place, no. It’s the same food you find in most second rate restaurants in town. And that’s how near mainland China’s Peking can be to Malawi.
If you have never been to any of these places you need not worry that you have never visited mainland China in Malawi because there are numerous China shops in all cities and towns that sell Chinese and other products at prices Malawians can afford.
But it’s not that easy to get to Taiwan in Malawi. In Blantyre you have to scale the walls of the timber factory at Green corner in Blantyre or that of their nail factory at Mapanga. You also need to do a lot of travelling, say travel some 30 kilometres away from Zomba town to reach Namasalima Rice scheme where the Taiwanese are running a rice growing project.
If you are in Lilongwe, to reach Taiwan in Malawi, only ask around for a location of the fertiliser factory which the Taiwanese are running.
Naysayers of Malawi establishing diplomatic ties with Beijing, in what is being termed as the country’s strange way of asking to be hit by a wind of neocolonialism, have argued their cases well.
Proponents of the red China-Malawi relation have also articulated, with passion of a soothsayer, the enormous economic gains that the country is going to get by establishing ties with mainland China at the expense of its 40-year-old relationship with Taiwan.
The debate appears to have been boringly exhausted but there are others like Malawi Watch’s Executive Director Billy Banda who argues that the train of thoughts on whether Malawi should stick to Taiwan or jump ships to join Beijing is being derailed deliberately to curtail the apparent healthy debate.
Perhaps Banda is right considering that the Malawi’s supposed move to dump Taiwan is now considered as Taiwan’s worst diplomatic crisis since the island broke ties with its long-time ally, Costa Rica.
Banda says there is no need to establish another tie with red China because he believes that Malawi already has relationship with Beijing.
“People should be able to differentiate two different sets of ties. We already are pursuing economic ties with mainland China. There are so many businesses from China that are operating in the country with our knowledge, ofcourse. So what else do we want?
“People are talking about economic gains, but we don’t go into diplomatic relations with any country as a profit-making venture because that relation may be a sugar-coated pill that is going to eventually destroy us,” Banda says.
The fact that there is a lot of speculation surrounding the Malawi-China relation does not help matters either as it is also generating conjectures that the ties are meant to advance an agenda that is not going to benefit the majority of Malawians.
“The government is playing hide and seek by allowing information that cannot be properly substantiated to circulate. This is not quite healthy. Diplomatic ties are not done for personal reasons but for the benefit of people of this country today, tomorrow and the future generation.”
“As a civil society, we will be watching closely the progress to see whether the decision to switch to China has been made in good faith. Any advancement that comes out to have induced benefits should not be made. What reasons does government give for going for China?” says Banda.
The Parliamentary Committee on International relations said earlier this week that it was going to meet to debate on the matter, but the Malawi Watch Executive Director says “the committee should consult widely on the issue regarding Taiwan and Mainland China.
“The committee has been idle for too long yet this is an issue that involves foreign policy which cannot be left to the executive alone to decide. There are issues like Malawi’s latest position on Nepad. Was the Malawi-Scottish partnership properly reported to Parliament and exhaustively discussed for instance?”
The question of foreign policy, at the time Malawi is at diplomatic loggerheads with Libya and in the news over its relation with China, excites even those in opposition.
UDF’s Sam Mpasu, who at one time secured computers for his Ministry of information from Beijing when UDF was in power, says the UDF government never made any ties with Beijing.
“It’s not proper that anyone in opposition should be dragged to say much on the country’s foreign policy. We in UDF are being blamed for the issue of Libya and Taiwan.
“But foreign policy is an extension of the domestic policy. What you do inside determines who your friend is. Governments deal with governments. But we deal with political parties and it’s mainly Liberal Democrats in the UK and the Democrats in America because we are a democratic party.”
As Dr. Chris Alden, an authority on China writes in the Commonwealth Press Union Magazine of August 2007, “for the investment starved African continent, China’s arrival has been overwhelmingly welcomed with open arms.”
“At the same time, there are signs of disquiet on the part of local trade unionists as the use of Chinese labourers and conditions in some Chinese enterprise has tempered the initial unbridled enthusiasm.”
As Alden continues in his article, Leveraging the Dragon: Toward "An Africa That Can Say No" in eAfrica of March 2005, Africa, when approaching China, needs to re-orient the very premise of its engagement with China from a residual liberation paradigm, … where Africa needs to consciously promote and preserve its interests.
As wrote Fred M’membe, editor of The Post, Zambia found itself in a precarious situation for not properly bargaining in its deals with China.
“It doesn’t seem we’re engaging the Chinese in the most beneficial way. China investment in Zambia is, in many respects, continuing the pattern established with the West---which has left Zambia poorer.
“We continue to place very little value on our natural resources and a much higher value on capital required to exploit them,” Mwembe wrote in CPQ Magazine of August 2007.
As Banda says, the rush for China should have come after a well-thought out cost-benefit analysis that would translate those ties into a new song of advancement other than a new form of colonialism.