Over the last decade, African leaders’ Christmas letters to Santa Claus have been being redirected from the Lapland address to Beijing. Santa Xi has stuffed many countries’ stockings but the decayed train set I’m riding on as I write this in central Africa was an earlier Chinese gift, from Mao Zedong’s day some 50 years ago. The problems this line has since faced should have served as a lesson to Mao’s successors. The free world’s ideological foe and economic competitor is nothing like as clever as we think.
China concluded a two-day international conference last week marking the tenth anniversary of the People’s Republic’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The whole idea is facing headwinds. I believe they will intensify.
Invited to the conference were mostly developing countries (China calls them the global south) that Beijing wants to bribe or blackmail into its orbit: the many now-indebted beneficiaries of a sprawling array of massive infrastructure projects, local schemes, cultural initiatives, happy thoughts and all-round Good Thing stuff for which leaders of cash-strapped nations in the developing world have over the last decade been offered BRI funding.
Why? In Beijing to Britain, a weekly intelligence briefing on relations with China, there’s an interview with Jacob Mardell, a journalist and researcher who has been studying the BRI closely for years. He concludes that “there’s little strategic coherence” and you can hardly call it a plan: “it is simply branding for a narrative that Beijing is trying to sell about its place in the world”.
China says it just wants to share with less fortunate nations the fruits of Chinese Communist ideas and governance. The free world, led by America, worries that behind a humanitarian front China is trying to elbow western liberal democracy aside as a moral force, and turn developing countries into client states, while cornering the market in strategic commodities, essential minerals and rare earths.
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Who’s right? By way of an answer, here’s my thesis. China’s plan won’t work. To those many “China hawks” in our own country who see a mortal threat in every Beijing move, dare I suggest that the People’s Republic has got itself out of its depth with a naive, ill-considered and expensive idea?
I write this in the pleasant sleeping compartment of a Chinese-built railway carriage drawn by a Chinese-manufactured locomotive on a thousand-mile Chinese-constructed railway line, trying to get up a long, curved incline in the bush in northwestern Zambia. We’re now on our second attempt, having reversed a few miles (the signalling’s broken and I hope there isn’t a following train) to take a faster run. Locals have emerged from huts to assist by throwing sandy earth under the loco’s wheels — so I doubt it’s the first time this has happened, though our 15-carriage train hasn’t been helped by the incapacitation of one of its (originally) two locomotives.
I don’t mock. This is a beautiful journey in a comfortable carriage and the friendly railway staff are working desperately hard to keep everything on the rails. The Tazara (Tanzania-Zambia Railway) is in urgent need of huge investment: it was built incredibly fast; the Chinese rolling stock is inadequate and the locomotives (of which the Tazara is short) keep breaking down. After Zambian independence the landlocked country, throttled by conflict further south, needed a transport link to the port of Dar es Salaam. Beijing, meanwhile, wanted to stuff the British who seemed better at survey and assessment than spades in the ground. White governments across southern Africa threw wobblies at what they called the “yellow peril”: this dastardly Chinese thin end of the wedge.
Some wedge. The line was under-specified, tonnage carried never approached the projections, Zambia’s road haulage industry fought back hard, the equipment failed and the Zambians couldn’t pay the debt they’d been manoeuvred into, and are now asking Beijing for a lot more money. If you’re reading this, Xi, go on, “lend” them another half-billion and see if we care. You won’t get it back and it won’t buy much goodwill or influence but Zambia could get the splendidly revamped railway it needs.
The tremendous Chinese pipe-dream is that you can exert imperial power without needing to bother running an empire to back it up. Even the Americans have failed at this. True, under Chinese influence Tanzania did try “village socialism” but it failed. Zambia, whose mentality China has failed to understand, was never going to snuggle long under China’s wing and has recently been distancing itself sharply. Debtors don’t love creditors; electorates don’t like leaders saddling their economies with debt for prestige projects that don’t put jam on the shanty-dwellers’ bread; and the day will come when the African mob sees China’s anti-colonialist colonialism for what it is. We and the French built the Suez Canal. Gamal Abdel Nasser took it off us.
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China’s interest, meanwhile, in securing third-world support at the United Nations is sweetly old-fashioned. British Foreign Office officials tasked with caring about these things may squawk about the next big general assembly vote at the UN but who among the big players is overly bothered? It’s all rather 20th century.
“Ah,” a BRI-alarmist might reply, “if China’s aim were only to be loved, or to suborn a few extra votes in some toothless general assembly vote on Ukraine, your scepticism might be right. But what about the diamonds? The lithium? The copper, for instance, from Zambia? The cobalt, and all those increasingly sought-after commodities? The Chinese can secure their own supply and potentially threaten our own access to these 21st-century essentials — placing a foot on the West’s windpipe.”
The idea has instinctive imaginative grip, but think it through. Beijing may secure cheaper, easier supplies through baiting the BRI hook, just as the British cashed in by simply colonising commodity-rich territories, but a metaphor involving feet and windpipes is overblown. There exists a world (plus black) market where every commodity commands a price. By state fiat a big player like China may for a while distort that price but the market will find a way through. Don’t we who believe in market-economics think this cannot be permanently bucked? I question whether the non-China-aligned world will ever run out of lithium or cobalt, let alone diamonds, copper or iron ore. As price rises, new sources or alternative technologies are found.
The experts know a lot. But beyond getting information, there are judgments to be made. Make your own. Mine is that Beijing’s ride will be just as rough as the track I’m trying to type this on.
