The ‘Hat’ of Neo-Colonialism!
I’ve been tied up with overlapping deadlines for the last several days, and so I’ve only just gotten around to reading Caitlin Fitzsimmons’ widely touted South China Morning Post feature on Chinese emigrants to Senegal, published Thursday [subscriber only]. It’s a great piece, in that it not only covers the tensions between the Senegalese locals and the roughly 1000 Chinese in Dakar, but also the considerable and occasionally violent tensions that flare between the Chinese themselves. Still, to my eye, the most interesting news in the Fitzsimmons article comes down to a single sentence:
Many shopkeepers in Centenaire came from Hunan province and say they received funding from the Chinese authorities to move to Senegal.
Wow.
In September I blogged about a speech given by Li Ruogu, head of China’s Import-Export Bank, in which he suggested that China’s landless farmers should relocate to Africa and become landlords (with a special emphasis on the “12 million” who will need to be relocated in the next decade). No details were offered on how this mass relocation is going to proceed, nor the incentives that are being offered to achieve it. In fact, Li’s speech was so overarching in its ambitions that I hesitated to blog about it (though I did). Thus, I was both grateful and floored by the Fitzsimmons article and its single spectacular sentence on paid Hunanese emigrants – grateful that someone had broken this nut, and floored that the person who broke it wrote only a single sentence on the subject. That’s right: Fitzsimmons had nothing more – not a single sentence or even a trifling clause – to say about this.
In my September blog post I quoted a 2006 speech by Premier Wen Jiabo in which he had this to say:
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.
The Fitzsimmons story – and its most interesting sentence, if true – suggests that China is beginning to grow into its neo-colonialist hat, after all. Surely, paying your citizens to relocate – permanently – to another country is textbook colonialism (with much depending upon intentions, of course). Back in September, one of the most thoughtful commentators to visit this blog offered this:
… [C]ount 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.
… [N]ot 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.”
Those are strong words, but I suspect that we will begin to hear more like them if paid relocations become a permanent component of Chinese re-settlement policies.
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Hey Adam,
That’s a helluva sentence that begs to followed up.
Oh, and Granite Studio’s URL is http://granitestudio.blogspot.com, not granitestudio.org.
Comment by davesgonechina — January 23, 2008 @ 1:20 am
Hey Dave – Thanks for the comment! The Granite Studio blogspot address is still valid, but because it’s blocked over here, the .org address was added in the last couple of days. Anyway, thanks for stopping by -
Adam
Comment by Adam — January 23, 2008 @ 8:56 am
I guess you could call China colonialist, but what about this situation: The history of accounting in Hong Kong is that at first only the British were allowed to be accountants. This worked for a while, until they had a shortage of manpower, and then they taught local Hong Kongers how to do the accounting. Now that the mainland has bought into capitalism, the accounting firms have come here, and it is now the Hong Kong people as well as foreigners who are the senior partners in the mainland practices. It probably won’t be for another few decades before the local Chinese are in the positions of power. So what do you call that situation?
Comment by Anon — January 23, 2008 @ 11:53 am
The site is going to be up and down a little this week as I move it from the blogspot address to its own dedicated site (www.granitestudio.org). I’m working on it, so thanks for your patience.
Comment by Jeremiah — January 23, 2008 @ 12:02 pm
Just to reiterate (even though I think my original statement was pretty clear) because from Anon’s comment above I’ve got a fairly good idea where this is going: To suggest that the Qing and the PRC both pursued policies and actions that were colonialist and imperialist doesn’t in anyway minimize the horrific and devastating consequences of Western and Japanese colonialism and imperialism in China and around the world nor the legacies of those policies which remain to this day.
But when I hear arguments from Chinese saying, “Well, you guys did it first/still do it and were/are much worse” I am reminded of the saying from the Book of Mencius about the soldiers who retreated 50 paces in the face of danger mocking those who retreated 100 steps.
Comment by Jeremiah — January 23, 2008 @ 12:09 pm
I wan’t trying to take it down the direction of forgiving China–I was just intrigued by the seemingly unique situation of a former Chinese colony now fitting into the colonial pattern of colonizing China, even though it now is a part of China. But maybe that is just getting into HK/mainland history and off-topic for this post.
Comment by Anon — January 23, 2008 @ 1:27 pm
@Anon,
Sorry to jump the gun on you. I’ve just seen this topic degenerate pretty quickly in the comments section of other blogs. You’re right, though, what you’ve described is a fascinating situation and certainly worth watching.
Comment by Jeremiah — January 23, 2008 @ 4:02 pm
I’m surprised this has only been mentioned once in one publication- it certainly casts China’s involvement in Africa in a new light. On the other hand, it wouldn’t be much different from what we know China is already doing, that is, bringing its own workers over for construction projects rather than hiring Africans.
One of the things I found most disturbing about Chinese people’s politics was their Bismarckian view of the world. Morality should not play into a country’s foreign policy, they say, because its a dog-eat-dog world. They might acknowledge that China is colonizing Tibet and Xinjiang, but they feel no need to oppose it because that’s what China needs to do to get ahead. In the West, by contrast, morality seems to play a bigger role. You have a lot of people who also think morality has no place to in policymaking, but there are also people who oppose policies that hurt the poor or other countries. Even in the case of Iraq, most Americans who supported the war felt (mistakenly, I would say) that it was actually good for the Iraqis because it overthrew a cruel and vicious dictator.
Comment by J B — January 23, 2008 @ 7:46 pm
Even if the Chinese government encourage immigration to Africa, it is up to the African nation to impose their law. How can it be colonialism if there is no force or coersion. If they did it illegally, then it is a different matter. But if they immigrate in accordance to respective country’s law, then it is an immgration matter.
Comment by Asi — January 12, 2009 @ 10:26 am