Lots of countries have long and adversarial relationships. it would be hard for China and Japan to work together as an example.
Funny, when I was a kid we talked about the yellow menace of China and Japan. We were unaware of their histories and animosity.
When I was a kid we knew WWII had happened…
Then you were around when they warned of the yellow menace. The Japanese atrocities were not well known until long after the war was over.
I think that kids these days run out of school year before finding out what happens.
That’s kind of my point - China or whoever needs to implement long-term education and training programmes (i.e. universities & technikons) *before *coming in and looting the riches.
That’s not my experience of how things work. In general, some people get manual labour jobs, but they don’t really get paid enough to drag themselves out of poverty, certainly don’t get to send their kids to university, and when the (mine closes/all the trees are logged/another country offers cheaper labour) even the manual labour goes away anyway.
*Some *of their people. I can’t think of a dictator of a “wealthy” country offhand, who didn’t remain that way without demonizing *some *of the population.
Is there something *inherent *in those illiterate people that prevents them being trained to do more technical jobs?
Again, that’s not really my experience. Shitty manual jobs don’t pay well enough to raise your kids out of poverty. All they do is create slums where the poverty becomes intergenerational.
At least on the face of it, it sounds a lot like the Japanese approach towards the rest of Asia during the 70s-80s.
Hah, when I was a kid they never even got to the 20th century.
This week’s Economist has an expose of the China International Fund a Hong Kong syndicate cutting cozy inside deals with African elites of dubious legality, offering billions in infrastructure investment, then renegging on their promises with no sanction. It’s a complicated operation which doesn’t release its accounts and refused repeated requests for comment. They are big backers of Mugabe’s thugs (pretty directly).
Then again, this operation has grown to be a monster over which the Chinese state has little control. The China International Fund even outmanouvered two state-owned oil firms in Angola.
Well, the thing is either way you need a school system. School systems cost money. If rich and powerful countries have a need for your natural resources, you are more likely to get money, and more likely to have a school system.
The “training first” mentality is problematic because without some form of massive outside investment an extremely poor country is highly unlikely to be able to develop the educational infrastructure to train engineers, project managers, business leaders and etc.
If you have a powerful government that recognize education as important, then it can start to come into play regardless of the economy. China has been heavily training and educating its populace for generations. However many of the most impoverished African countries aren’t in a similar place to where China was a few generations ago, some of them are worse off than China was in 1840.
Building a single road that can carry heavy freight to the coast is a huge deal for many african countries where the cost of just doing that can be several times the cost of manufacturing / mining. And the benefits spread to other countries: it can be a lifeline for a landlocked country, of which africa has many.
And being able to set up a factory knowing their won’t be frequent blackouts is a big deal, even if only the wealthy few can take advantage of this.
Basically it’s nice to imagine we can help africa by helping small farms and communities. But economies don’t grow that way. China itself is a good example of that.
Africa needs to grow to survive. It’s too unstable while it’s this poor.
This is not by coindidence. China has designed their aid programs around their experiences as an aid recipient and the lessons they have learned from being on the other side.
:facepalm:
Oh, I understand what’s in it for the rich countries.
I get this. I just think that massive outside investment *should *be made.
I bolded the problem. They don’t think education is important - why should they, as things stand, they make the money while their people do the work. An educated, better-off populace, though - that’s a lot more dangerous to oppressive regimes.(which is most of them)
China started from a better situation before colonialism, too, historically. So it’s no surprise they’re more advanced. Plus Confucianism and the old imperial exam system kind of laid the foundations there. The closest equivalent in Africa would be colonial-era mission schooling, but a lot of that was training for clerical work, not technical (similar to India)
I’m not saying the roads don’t have value, I’m saying they’re completely selfish in origin.
I’ve bolded the problem.
Of course they can. You only have to look at the SE-Asian self-help groups, which allow poor people (mostly women) to access microcredit for small-scale enterprise or infrastructure improvements. That money is often development aid money.
Oh, I agree completely. But Africa isn’t going to grow while it’s treated as a coffer for the rest of the world, and its people as nothing but cheap labour.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t give that kind of aid; it works fantastically well for raising individuals out of poverty and helping the country to feed itself and import less.
But it isn’t very effective for growing a country’s economy. And I firmly believe that it’s growth in African economies, and market expectation of such, that will make the biggest difference long term.
You mean like China was? I’m old enough to remember a time when everyone felt sorry for the hard-working chinese factory worker. And scoffed at the idea that china would ever become a wealthy country…
If Africa has a problem it’s that china was lucky enough to be exploited first. The labour market won’t swing hugely in africa’s favour until china is significantly wealthier per capita.
Let a hundred flowers bloom!
Don’t you think that the real question is: “What will China do 50 years from now, when the chickens come home to roost with regard to its financial relationship with the U.S.?” Right now, it’s all about practicality for China in Africa, but isn’t it very possible that China could evolve into something very similar to what the U.S has been in relation to neo-liberalism in Africa?
I think China’s role is necessary-most of sb-saharan Africa cannot generate developemnt capital.
Even Nigeria (blessed with oil exports) finds most of its capitat flowing abroad.
So, even if you are an African nation with $30 billion per year coming in, you are going to need foreign investment.
Or perhaps Mongolia is a more stable country (compared to Sudan, e.g.) and thus is more attractive to investors from North America and Europe.
Unless African nations reach the point where they are able to maintain a stable government as well as a modern infrastructure without a great deal of foreign involvement, nothing will have changed for the better.
You won’t have a sustainable version of the second bolded statement without the first bolded statement. All you’ll have is a ever-widening gap between the rich beneficiaries of foreign largess and the poor rest. The “economy” may improve, the lot of the people, not much. I don’t favour a “growth above all else” economic model. Growth has to be viable in the long term.
People aren’t coming to Africa for the sweatshops, they’re coming for the natural resources.
And was China lifted out of poverty by people coming in and taking its riches for just manual labour jobs? No. It lifted itself out of poverty when it stopped itself being exploited. I think it’s fallacious to say the Chinese were exploited, and now they’re wealthy, so one lead to the other. Correlation is being confused with causation.
I still do.
“China” may be a wealthy country. “China’s” GDP may have tripled or whatever. Millions upon Millions of Chinese are still dirt-poor peasants. China is not a model I would want Africa to follow.