From Miss Uchenna Ubekwe’ thoughts.

I. China as a neo-colonial power: is the comparison with the previous European powers relevant?*

1. China, a rising giant walking on the Black Continent….

在非洲投资您的时间 ( You too, come invest your time in Africa)

Any solution? Well, I guess that Africans exiled all over the world, worried about the future of their mother continent should at some point go back on the promised lands, and be a part of the reconstruction. Africa needs brains, Africa needs upright souls, Africa needs…. pro bono applicants to avert the risks of an endless scenario. Come, and invest your time. If you wish to apply, please contact me. Chinese language a plus, but not a requirement.

-- KamelB - 22 Apr 2009

• I think we can agree that this is a response to, rather than an edit of, Uchenna's first draft. Your effort went not to the clarification of her ideas, but to the expression of your own, which sometimes coincided with but more fundamentally differed from hers. The assignment to edit others' work is not the same as an invitation to develop your own ideas; I make explicit that purpose when it is the purpose. But what we are trying to do here is to cultivate other skills: the ones, in particular, that enable us to build upon the contributions that our colleagues make to a common project.

• Taking your project on its own terms, I think the readiest area of improvement would be to step back from the Euro-centric form of political analysis that is an unspoken assumption here. Indeed, as you say, the form of imperialism that grew from the European scramble for Africa is no longer in full flower. But the older and more durable forms of exploitation have gone nowhere, and Uchenna was writing about one. Your response is to emphasize the importance of the European stake, and to deprecate the Chinese relevance with a rather dismissive "isn't it quaint that the Chinese would have come out of their sphere to be so far away as Africa" sensibility, accompanied by a question about who'd have thought it twenty years ago, as though the Chinese hadn't been in Africa, building non-alignment and Third World solidarity, twenty years ago as well. The Euro-centric perspective would be pretty clear even if the rhetoric didn't wind up in a peroration about "what Africa needs," which turns out to be that the descendants of Africans finally getting some chance at a share of the wealth and power they're entitled to as equal citizens of rich societies should give up that effort, and go back to Africa to help out.

• If we are really framing an attitude about Chinese investment in Africa, it would make sense, I think, to start from an Afro-centric point of view. Uchenna's draft did, and concluded that two primary interests could be distinguished there: the leaderships of militarized kleptocracies, grateful for Chinese non-interference in their despicable regimes, which constantly experience intrusive demands for reform from the international financial organizations; and the people in those states, who are overly impressed by the sight of Chinese-funded infrastructure monuments that may not actually improve their lives, and are about equally poorly served by the US "international aid" scams that benefit Bechtel and the Chinese resource extraction deals that benefit the kleptocrats. At least, Uchenna hypothesizes, the competition may bring some actual attention to meeting peoples' needs. Those points could have been made more clearly, and some realism could have been injected about what will happen in the new smaller global economy, when Chinese manufacturing is contracting and Chinese social stability is becoming a problem for the CCP. But switching away from the actual present concerns to lofty observations about "what Africa needs" doesn't constitute a very productive response.