[blog news: I’m traveling today and tomorrow, and unlikely to post again before Sunday or Monday.]
Earlier this week, Li Ruogu, head of China’s Import-Export Bank, suggested that China’s landless farmers relocate to Africa and become landlords. The comments, included in a speech that Li delivered in Chongqing, refer to farmers displaced by Chongqing’s long-term urban development plan, and were quoted by South China Morning Post [subscriber only]:
“Construction of the `experimental zone’ will relocate several million peasants,” Mr Li said, adding that Chongqing should consider organising migration to Africa … “Chongqing’s labour exports have just started, but they will take off once we convince the farmers to become landlords abroad.”
The same story points out that roughly 13,000 Chinese farmers have been relocated to Africa “in the past decade.” So, apparently, this is not new. But the scale seems awfully new: according to Li, 12 million farmers will need to be relocated in the next decade. How native Africans will feel about these migrants – many of whom aspire to be, with government backing, African landlords – is a question beyond my knowledge and competency.
Whatever happens with this proposed migration, the language used to describe and encourage it strikes me as rather impolitic, and very much at odds with the careful denials of colonial intent used by China’s other leaders. For example, this passage from a November 2006 story in China Daily:
… China’s closer economic and trade ties with Africa have also led to accusations of “neo-colonialism.” Chinese Premier Wen Jiabo refuted this during his visit to Egypt, stating, “The ‘hat’ of neo-colonialism simply doesn’t fit China. For over 110 years after the Opium War in 1840, China was the victim of colonial aggression. The Chinese nation knows too well the suffering caused by colonial rule and the need to fight colonialism … China supports the development of democracy and rule of law in Africa. But we never impose our own will on others.”
I’ll be curious to see whether this proposed migration is picked up by other news sources – particularly in Africa.
This sounds a little like an official speaking before he had time to take his brain out of the man purse.
That said, count me in that China’s policies–while nowhere near as destructive as European colonialism–are far from being altruistic and the Chinese in Africa seem willing to meander a path that would not have been wholly unfamiliar to 19th-century imperialists or 20th-century cold warriors.
Regarding the China Daily, not to diminish from the effects of European imperialism in China, but it should be noted that the Qing was itself a colonial/imperialist power whose policies and attitudes toward non-Han minority groups, especially in the west and southwest, were in some ways similar to those pursued by the United States government in the settling of the American west and has left its own legacy of “manifest destiny with Chinese characteristics.”
Great post. Hope you keep following the story.
Holy cow! How to get rid of your surplus of people Chinese style! Maybe they shall go to Zimbabwe since the last westerners have been expropriated from their farms and nobody takes care of the plantations.
An easy prediction: China will come to grief in Africa.
It’s rare that a Chinese Government official will be so frank and truthful. Perhaps he thought he was speaking to a closed audience. But everyone knows that China’s interests in Africa are not altruistic. Let history speak for itself, but today the West gives much more untied aid to Africa than does China.