‘Johnny come lately’ on China

In the autumn of 2004 as a young student in the UK, I remember having an interesting conversation with my English landlord. The matter at hand was the emergency of china as a super power. At the time, China was the sixth largest economy in the world but was fast closing in on France and the UK. In fact projections were that they would be in fourth spot behind the US, Japan and Germany before the end of 2005.My excitable youthful mouth was uttering things that grinded a bit too close to the bone for my English host. I kept going on about how the oldest civilisation was finally taking its rightful place in the world. I even wondered out loud what role Britain and its Commonwealth had to play in the new world order.Blame it on naivety or sheer immaturity, but I soon saw a side to my erstwhile convivial landlord. He fought for his beloved Britain like a cornered tiger! He quickly dismissed China’s economic growth as simply a case of ‘catch up’ with centuries lost to Communism and insisted that nation’s wealth lacked grassroots reach.Mr. Skipley (for that was his name) went on remind me of the ‘sweat shops’ and lack of democracy in China.I soon realised we were getting nowhere! It was like the case of three blind men told to describe an elephant by just feeling it.The story goes thus; the first blind man felt one of its legs and declared, “It’s big, rough and round like a tree trunk”. The second blind man reached for its torso and protested “oh no! It’s much bigger than that!” The third blind man listened in total confusion! He was holding the trunk!With a GDP in excess of USD11 trillion, China now lies second to the US but is still growing at close to 8 per cent annually. For comparison, the European major economies of France, UK, Italy and Spain recorded zero or negative growth. The only exception was Germany, with 0.5 per cent growth in the first half of 2012.The US, on the other hand, continues to grow at about 2 per cent annually, keeping ahead of China albeit by a hair’s breadth for the next five years. By 2020, China will be well set as the undisputed global economic powerhouse.The statistics can only tell you half the story; you have to see it to believe it.In July 2008, I had the opportunity to see the elephant for myself. I visited China’s most populous and southerly region known as Guangdong Province. Shenzhen City, where I stayed for three weeks, has a population of over ten million people! I later learnt that China’s largest city, Shanghai, has a population of over twenty-two million.My experience in China was a real eye opener. I saw high-rise buildings lined up one after the other till my neck hurt; I travelled miles and miles only to be told I was still in only one of the twenty-two mainland provinces!I saw human traffic like never before; imagine the site at Stade Amahoro on days when APR FC play against Rayon Sport. Now imagine that on every street in Kigali everyday; that is China!Beyond China’s recent meteoric economic rise lies a complex socio-political history.An intermittent Civil war (1927-49) interrupted by the Japanese invasion (1937-45) meant that China was effectively at war for over twenty years. This was closely followed by Mao Zedong’s disastrous ‘Great Leap Forward’ that saw the neglect of agriculture and resulted in a famine that claimed over forty million lives.Every distraught nation needs a saviour and China was no exception. Theirs came in the name of Deng Xiaoping. Educated in France and Moscow in the 1920’s, Deng was a reformist who envisioned the ‘socialist market economy’ that we see in China today. He was the power behind the throne in China from 1978 to 1992 as the ‘Paramount leader of the People’s Republic’.In explaining his policies of opening up China to doing business with the world, he often quoted a Sichuan proverb that states “it does not matter whether the cat is yellow or black, what matters is that it catches mice”Rwanda has a lot to learn from the Chinese story.Last week, President Paul Kagame was in China to attend the World Economic Forum organised annual meeting of New Champions 2012. He met the Chinese Premier Weng Jiabao, Rwandan students in China, among others. To the students, he preached his message of Agaciro and the need to wean ourselves off Aid.His philosophy is no different from that of Deng Xiaoping, who believed that China’s future lay in the hands of economically better off ordinary Chinese. While Deng recognised the need to trade with the US and Europe, he refused to be pushed on wholesale democratic reforms that the West make a song and dance about being a pre-requisite for development.Deng modelled policies that worked for China much like Lee Kuan Yew who steered Singapore’s economic transformation into a modern economy between 1959 and 1990.Today Singapore is recognised along with three other ‘Asian Tigers’ namely; Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea, as economic powerhouses in Southeast Asia.China’s foreign relations policy engages the concept of ‘harmony without uniformity’. This means that they are able to maintain relations with nations with whom they do not share political ideology.Perhaps the US and Europe can pick a leaf here. You do not need to be the best of friends to do business.In the same vein, if you disapprove of someone’s political views, you do not have to start a protracted war that leaves both of you ruing the costs ala Iraq and Afghanistan!

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‘Johnny come lately’ on China