Letters to the editor
Flawed reasoning
Healthy competition,
D+C/E+Z, 6/2007, p. 232
Heribert Dieter makes the classic logical fallacy known as ad hominem tu quoque in his argument that the West has no right to criticise China’s behaviour in Africa due to past misdemeanours. He states that the West’s critique is false not because it is right or wrong, but because of where the critique originates and is inconsistent with what the West has practiced in the past. This is a very basic logical error taught to first year students.
Moreover, Dieter is ignoring the growing and widespread criticism of China’s behaviour by Africans themselves. Many Africans understand very well that not all of the implications of China’s relations with the continent are favourable. My own research suggests that the Chinese may “go down well with African elites”, but the ordinary person has some big issues with the notion that democracy and human rights have to be suspended until some never-never time in the future until “development” is attained. That, after all, was how despots used to reason in the 1960s and 1970s regarding single party rule in Africa – and look what happened.
Dieter also suggests that the international financial institutions (IFIs) “failed” in Africa, but he does not demonstrate why they “failed”. Was it because of faulty policy prescriptions, or because of inadequate implementation? There is a wealth of literature on these questions, but Dieter only states that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund “imposed economic policies of doubtful success”. He goes on: “Just consider the privatisation and liberalisation programmes many countries had to implement.”
In fact, what is notable about these “impositions” is the widespread taming of structural adjustment that took place across the continent. Of the roughly 2,300 privatisations between 1991 and 2000, only about 66 involved higher value, economically important firms. Less than seven percent of privatisation sales touched upper-end infrastructure firms. Why? Because the elites did not let it happen, and the supposedly omnipotent IFIs could not force them to.
Research proves that African elites have been successful in not only resisting wholesale privatisation, they have also retained control of those parastatals and state-owned concerns that are of higher value and economically important. This makes perfect sense if we understand that economic policies and decision-making in Africa is, on the main, based on the need to distribute resources to furnish clientelistic networks, but not geared to development. This has been shown time and time again in what has been termed the partial reform syndrome: symbolic gestures, rhetorical commitments and promises of change mask – and further lubricate – the diffusion of largesse and patronage. I do not see Chinese involvement improving matters in any way.
Dieter remarks that “according to Beijing, overcoming poverty is the most important contribution to securing human rights in poor countries”. Sadly, a number of states that enjoy Chinese support (Angola, Sudan and Zimbabwe to name but three) not only trample on civil and political rights, but also subvert their citizens’ economic welfare. In such cases, China generally resorts to a fundamentalist insistence on sovereignty, according to which every government is basically free to decide what it considers human rights and how to ensure them. The danger of this is that socio-economic development does not figure, something which undermines China’s repeated claims to be “different” from the West in its interactions with Africa.
Professor Ian Taylor,
University of St Andrews
and University of Stellenbosch
Reply by Heribert Dieter:
Ian Taylor criticises my article on China and Africa, but his arguments do not hold water. First of all, I did consider the legitimacy of criticism expressed by Western institutions, and I did not pass judgment on “the West”, but only on “Western donors”. Professor Taylor should know that precision matters in academic debate. His claim that I denied the entire Western World any right to criticise Chinese activities in Africa is widely off the mark.
Second, Taylor makes a standard mistake, typical of many “regional experts”. They tend to assume that developments in “their” region are unique, ignoring that similar developments are underway in other parts of the world as well. Such parochialism leads to under-estimating fundamental changes in the international system, to which the rise of China (and India) is contributing. My point was that China’s influence is rising not only in Africa, and that there are good reasons for that trend. Of course, as I clearly stated in my essay, Chinese activities are not altruistic, but interest-driven.
Third, Taylor expresses himself with vigour in the defence of the international financial institutions’ engagement in Africa. Beyond doubt, that position is ignorant of a wide body of literature that has analysed the faulty policy directives of the World Bank and the IMF (for instance, Joseph Stiglitz in “Making globalisation work”, 2006), as well as the less-than-convincing implementation of those recipes (for instance, William Easterly in “The white man’s burden”, 2006). Of course, African elites must bear responsibility for the decline of the continent’s economies. However, the advice given by the international financial institutions with their emphases on “small” government, macroeconomic stability and unconditionally opening economies, has obviously been harmful. None of the economic success stories of the past decades, many of which took place in Asia, went along those simplistic liberal lines. That fact is worth stressing, and it explains why China’s increasingly good reputation in the developing world is partly due to Beijing’s shunning of Western advice. An expert on China and Africa like Professor Taylor should be aware of these highly relevant perceptions.
The editor reserves the right to shorten readers’ letters.
