Yan Hairong

Friends and interests: China's distinctive links with Africa

Abstract: Chinas expanded links to Africa have created a discourse of how to characterize those ties. Western political forces and media have criticized every aspect of Chinas activities in Africa, while Chinese, with significant support from Africans, have mounted a spirited defense. This article examines several factors that make Chinas links with Africa distinctive, including Chinas aid and migration policies, the distinctive “Chinese model” of foreign investment and infrastructure loans, and the development model known as the “Beijing Consensus.” It argues that particular aspects of Chinas links with Africa make the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) seem a lesser evil than the West in terms of support for Africas development and respect for African nations.

Chinese Farms in Zambia: From Socialist to “Agro-Imperialist” Engagement?

Participation by Chinese in Zambia’s agriculture has involved three modes of engagement. Two of these, agro-socialist cooperation until the late 1980s and agro-capitalist “win-win,” since the 1990s, can be examined. The third one, an “agro-imperialist” mode, is not an experience, but a speculation, one possible future based on the Chinese state’s potential to allow firms from China to join in the large-scale, export-oriented “land grabs” by big transnational firms that have occurred since food crises in the developing world in the late 2000s. This paper analyzes all three modes of Chinese engagement, but necessarily concentrates on the second, present-day mode, agro-capitalism. We argue that the present Chinese engagement with Zambian agriculture makes small-scale positive contributions to the domestic food market in Zambia. At the same time, its agro-capitalist production involves the exploitation of farm workers that is typically at the core of commercial farming regardless of the national origins of farm owners. We also contend that while Chinese in Zambia and Africa are not carrying out agro-imperialism, they will likely do so if Chinese leaders decide that this practice represents an international standard.

Debating the rural cooperative movement in China, the past and the present

Rural cooperatives appear to be flourishing in China. Yet this blossom has been controversial. Some contest whether specialized farmer cooperatives should be promoted. They are opposed to the implications and consequences that derive from the growth of such cooperatives. Many criticize that most of the cooperatives thus far developed are ‘fake’ cooperatives. Some propose comprehensive peasant associations in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan as a model for emulation. These contestations are about rural cooperatives, but also go quite beyond them. For those passionately involved in the support and critique of rural cooperatives, what is at stake is both rural sustainability and the possibility of China pursuing a third-way development. In the 1930s, rural cooperatives also blossomed in China, and it was accompanied by heated intellectual debates about the future of China. This paper will examine intellectual perspectives and debates both in the past and at present about rural cooperative development in China. Not only are there some remarkable intellectual parallels between the two, but also both movements have their own structural difficulties. In the face of the rapid agrarian change in China, the 1930s debate might still shed a light on todays conundrum.

“The Beginning of a World Empire”? Contesting the Discourse of Chinese Copper Mining in Zambia

A discourse fostered by Western politicians and media of Chinese copper mining in Zambia has been central to global discussions of China-in-Africa since the mid-2000s. Based in the West’s putative strategic rivalry with China, the discourse also invokes racial stereotypes about Chinese cruelty and disregard for human life. Focusing on Human Rights Watch’s 2011 attempt to prove China’s firms to be Zambian copper mining’s “worst employers,” we show that the discourse is highly inaccurate: methodological mistakes compound elementary empirical errors, even as the politics of the discourse serve up a synecdoche for the global rise of a monolithic China.

China's soybean crisis: the logic of modernization and its discontents

Lester Brown sounded an alarm in 1995: who will feed China? Against this backdrop, this contribution examines Chinas dramatic turn from having been a soybean net exporter, up until the mid-1990s, to being the biggest importer of genetically modified (GM) soybeans, since 2000. With Chinas growing soybean imports, domestic soybean production has experienced a drastic fall, creating an outcry about a ‘soybean crisis’ in China. This paper examines competing interpretations about Chinas soybean imports and how a wide arrange of heated debates and critical reflections have emerged about Chinas position in globalization, the role of the state in food security, the safety of GM foods, consumer rights, what constitutes scientific authority, and the power of transnational corporations. In these debates, Chinese critics have very different views about the US and South America, where significant GM soybeans are produced for export to China.

Bashing ‘the Chinese’: contextualizing Zambia's Collum Coal Mine shooting

The 2010 shooting of 13 miners at Zambias small, privately-owned ‘Chinese’ Collum Coal Mine (CCM) has been represented by Western and Zambian politicians and media as exemplifying the ‘neo-colonial’ and ‘amoral’ practices of ‘China’ and ‘the Chinese’ in Africa. CCM has been used to provide a sharp contrast to the supposed ways of the Western firms that own most of Zambias mines. Embedded in racial hierarchy and notions of strategic competition between the West and China, the discourse of the CCM shootings further shapes conceptions of global China and Chinese overseas. While examining all the oppressive conditions that have given rise to protest at the mine, we contextualize the shooting and subsequent conflicts. In analyzing CCMs marginal and troubled development, we discuss aspects of the 2010 shooting incident known to miners and union leaders, but ignored by politicians and media. We look at the shootings political fallout, focus also on the epilogue that was the 2012 CCM riot—in which one Chinese person was murdered and several others seriously injured—and trace the sometimes violent discontent manifested at other foreign-owned mines in Zambia since their privatization in the late 1990s. The empirical data for this detailed study derive from hundreds of documentary sources and interviews with union leaders, workers, officials and others in Zambia from 2011 to 2013.

Bottom-up capitalism as a challenge for social movements: a conversation with Tania Murray Li

In her book Land’s End (Duke University Press, 2014), Tania Murray Li examines how capitalist relations emerged among indigenous highlanders in Sulawesi, Indonesia. The book details the process through which highlanders privatized their common land, and kin and neighbors became differentiated into winners and losers. Far from signaling the march of progress, Li shows that when highlanders engaged in development efforts by planting cacao as a cash crop, those who lost out become landless and jobless. While this story is particular to highlanders in Indonesia, it has deeper implications and wider resonances. The “dead end” encountered by Indonesian highlanders not only challenges the mainstream narratives of development, but also presents a challenge for agrarian social movements. These movements focus their attention on the grotesqueness of corporate power, which can be called “capitalism from above,” but have remained silent about everyday capitalism that emerges from below. In this conversation, we discuss the implications of her book and its message for social movements.

Land reform in Zimbabwe, class dynamics and delayed Bandung: an interview with Sam Moyo

ABSTRACTInterviewers’ note: Land reform in Zimbabwe has caught the worlds attention. Its condemned by the mainstream in the West. It has also been highly controversial in South Africa, as post-apartheid South Africa has been unable to address the historical legacy of severe land inequality. What we find interesting and intriguing is that the land reform in Zimbabwe occurred at a time when neo-liberalism was raging in the world. What has been the historical and political context and dynamics of the land reform in Zimbabwe? Doe it bear any relationship with the earlier land reforms in some former colonial and semi-colonial countries around the mid-20th century? What are its implications for the understanding and challenging the current world system? On 19 April 2015, we had an opportunity to discuss these questions in person with Zimbabwe-based Sam Moyo, a leading agrarian political economist and a critical thinker in Africa. He was attending the Hangzhou Forum of Bandung/Third World 60 Years.ABSTRACT Interviewers’ note: Land reform in Zimbabwe has caught the worlds attention. Its condemned by the mainstream in the West. It has also been highly controversial in South Africa, as post-apartheid South Africa has been unable to address the historical legacy of severe land inequality. What we find interesting and intriguing is that the land reform in Zimbabwe occurred at a time when neo-liberalism was raging in the world. What has been the historical and political context and dynamics of the land reform in Zimbabwe? Doe it bear any relationship with the earlier land reforms in some former colonial and semi-colonial countries around the mid-20th century? What are its implications for the understanding and challenging the current world system? On 19 April 2015, we had an opportunity to discuss these questions in person with Zimbabwe-based Sam Moyo, a leading agrarian political economist and a critical thinker in Africa. He was attending the Hangzhou Forum of Bandung/Third World 60 Years.

The "Right Dissident": Liu Xiaobo and the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize

Since garnering the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo has been lionized, particularly by Western politicians and media, who now promote him as the leader of the “democratic forces” in China. Meanwhile, Liu’s politics and those of the award itself are studiously ignored. Liu, however, was chosen for the prize, over many other imprisoned dissidents (including Chinese) nominated for it, precisely because of his politics: he is a neoconservative/neoliberal in the U.S. mold. Not an advocate of peace, but of the wars waged by the United States and its allies, Liu also endorses the total Westernization of China and wholesale privatization of its economy. Despite the common conception of Liu as an advocate of democracy in the face of China’s authoritarian government, he seemingly does not even back universal suffrage. The award of the prize to Liu both continues the tradition of a small group of Norwegian politicians using it to advance Western elite ideological interests and represents a new stage of “soft power” warfare against China as the perceived long-term strategic competitor of the United States and its NATO allies.