China,Africa and the Bandung Idea,Then and Now

China is rising. Some say the active verb is no longer necessary. China, they flatly assert, has risen. In the Western world, where China’s global ascendance has in some circles caused anxiety, even panic, the notion of rising, or risen, as if from death, is redolent with deep implications—historical, cultural and, of course, religious. Accordingly, a veritable cottage industry has grown up around China’s rise. There seems to be broad consensus that China’s rise is unstoppable, even predestined—whether by nature, nature’s god, history, the Asian ethic or the spirit of state-directed capitalism is unclear. In this generally zero-sum conception, China’s rise is twinned to the decline of the West, a view often expressed in apocalyptic language reminiscent of Oswald Spengler (1926–28), who, in the aftermath of World War I, predicted the end of world white supremacy. China’s economic dominance, the argument goes, must inexorably bring in its wake geopolitical dominance. ‘When China rules the world’, one author announced futuristically in the title of a book several years ago (Jacques 2009). ‘Restless empire’ headlined the concurrence of a more recent scholarly prediction of China’s impending global dominance, economic and geopolitical (Westad 2012). Some claim doomsday has already arrived. ‘Eclipse’, another tome recently and bluntly announced, referring to China’s alleged besting of the West (Subramanian 2011). China, it is further said, has now gone on a shopping spree for reputed iconic Western companies, most recently the US industrial hog producer Smithfield Foods and the French resort company, Club Med. Some doomsayers indict China’s model of economic development, claiming that Chinese state capitalism poses a grave threat to so-called Western free-market capitalism on a global scale (Araujo and Cardenal 2013). Consulting their crystal balls, the most pessimistic of the doomsday analysts foresee rivers of blood in the ‘coming China wars’, as the West gears up for ‘confronting the dragon’ (Navarro 2007; Navarro and Autry 2011).

Others are not so sure. The ‘logic of strategy’, some of the naysayers contend, will frustrate China’s ability to convert economic power into political hegemony worldwide (Luttwak 2012). Rather like the mosquito in the realm of nature, this view holds, China has no real friends in the world, least of all in Asia, where alarm bells are already ringing over China’s rise, thanks in no small part to China’s revanchist bluster towards its neighbours over territorial issues, to the glee of those in the United States who seek to build around China a web of hostile neighbours. The encirclement strategists take comfort, too, in China’s ham-handed and heavy-handed posture towards internal minorities, from Tibet to Xinjiang. Others are even more dismissive, waving off China as a ‘partial power’ and a ‘stumbling giant’ (Beardson 2013; Shambaugh 2013). Some go further, predicting the imminent economic and political collapse of China, with dire consequences for humanity as a whole (Chang 2001; Gorrie 2013). In short, the global implications of China’s rise remain a subject of heated debate in the Western world, where China is variously feared and loathed, dismissed and derided.

And what of Africa? What is Africa to China? What is China to Africa? What does China’s rise portend for Africa and Africa’s place in the emerging, potentially Sino-centric, new world order? Will China’s engagements with Africa—economic and political—redound to the mutual benefit of both parties? Alternately, will Africa remain a downstream supplier of energy and raw materials, only now more and more to China? Put another way, does the road to African development run through China? Or will future writers, as Walter Rodney (1972) did some four decades ago in respect of Europe, be moved to essay on how China perpetuated Africa’s underdevelopment? These, today, are burning questions, much debated in African intellectual, political and policymaking circles, and also in Chinese ones (Adem 2011; Bangui 2012; Chan 2013; Harneit-Sievers et al. 2010; Kitissou 2007; Manji and Marks 2007). To pose the question in the language of another era, an era that may have implications for the current one, what role has the Bandung idea in contemporary Sino-African relations?

It was a momentous event in world affairs, the Bandung Conference of 1955. According to its host, Indonesian president Sukarno, Bandung was ‘the first international conference of coloured peoples in the history of mankind’ (Wright 1994: 136)! Whatever the veracity of this claim—and it can be challenged—many of the most prominent representatives of coloured humanity, governmental and non-governmental alike, were on hand for the Bandung Conference. Among the attendees, non-governmental in this case, was the US African American writer Richard Wright, who was then living in exile in France. Wright’s travelogue-cum-analysis of the Bandung Conference is an incomparable gem of a document. ‘A meeting of the rejected’, ‘judgment upon the Western world’—these were among Wright’s characterizations of the conference (ibid.: 12). And Wright, variously a Methodist, Seventh Day Adventist, and communist, all of which he later forsook, knew a thing or two about judgment. Westerners, unused to being judged by ex-colonial subjects and others of the world’s wretched, as Frantz Fanon (1965) would later call them, reacted to the Bandung challenge with indignation. Some Westerners protested that they were being given a dose of their own bitter medicine. ‘But is not this Asian–African Conference merely racism in reverse?’ a white American asked Wright. ‘I think that the Asians and the Africans are trying to gang up on the Western world’, added another of Wright’s white and Western interlocutors (Wright 1994: 16). Western policymakers seemed to agree. The Americans, frantic as always and fearing an anti-Western colouredcommunist consensus, as best exemplified then by growing ties between India and China, groused about a potentially ‘segregated’ Asia. Of an actually segregated Alabama, and other US jurisdictions where African Americans groaned under the jackboot of Jim Crow, the US system of apartheid, the American authorities seemed less concerned. Accordingly, the Americans looked for ways to wreck the upcoming Bandung Conference, or else to neuter it (Jones 2005).

Then, as now, much suspicion fell on China—Red China, as it was then called in certain circles. China, went the canard, was stirring up anti-Western feelings among the darker nations. In fact, China had little or no part in the conception of the Bandung Conference, Chinese premier Chou en-Lai (Zhou Enlai) having been persuaded to attend the conference only at the last minute by Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, the moving spirit behind Bandung, alongside Indonesian President Sukarno. Sir John Kotelawala, Prime Minister of Ceylon, as Sri Lanka was then called, had powerfully stated the case for the third way in world politics that the Bandung Conference unofficially inaugurated. Sir John opined:

[w]e the nations of the new Asia and Africa, whatever our language, whatever our faiths, whatever our form of government, whatever the color of our skins—black, brown, or yellow—have one thing in common: we are all poor and underdeveloped. (Wright 1994: 143–44)

Chou en-Lai, whom the containers of communism hoped would wreak havoc at Bandung by preaching communist orthodoxy, thereby alienating the non-communist majority at the conference, instead fell in behind the emerging third world consensus. Echoing Sir John, Chou said: ‘[w]e the Asian and African countries, China included, are all backward economically and culturally’ (ibid.: 159).

That is no longer the case. First Japan, then the Asian tigers, and now China, with India in tow—all speak to the development, or increasing development, of the greater part of Asia. By contrast, the greater part of Africa remains very much underdeveloped. Speaking at the Pan-African Conference in London in 1900, the iconic US African American intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois famously offered that, worldwide, the problem of the twentieth century would be the problem of the colour line—that is, the problem of white supremacy and the consequent struggle between the West and the rest of humanity (Lewis 1993: 251). The Bandung Conference was, among other things, a reckoning with the colour line, as individuals on both sides of that line readily grasped (Prashad 2007). As we approach the sixtieth anniversary of the Bandung Conference, much has changed. Much also remains the same. Conspicuous among the things that have changed is the rise of China. Conspicuous among the things that have remained the same is Africa’s underdevelopment.

Richard Wright (1994: 203), in his Bandung travelogue, had made his own Du Boisian-like prediction:

[w]hen the day comes that Asian and African raw materials are processed in Asia and Africa by labor whose needs are not as inflated as those of Western laborers, the supremacy of the Western world, economic, cultural, and political, will have been broken once and for all on this earth and a de-Occidentalization of mankind will have definitely set in.

The day foreseen by Wright has arrived, in part. Asian, along with African, raw materials are now being processed in Asia, most notably in China, by workers whose material conditions remain far below those of their Western fellow proletarians, whose own standards of living have in recent decades also been deflated by neoliberalism. Concurrently, China’s rise has sparked debate worldwide about de-Occidentalization, as Wright called the decline of the West relative to the world the Bandung Conference showcased, namely the Third World. Yet, amid such transformations, there remains a stubborn consistency—the consistency of African underdevelopment. Far from being processed at the points of origin, African raw materials are still being largely exported, even if the destinations of those exports are increasingly changing, with China and Asia now receiving greater proportions in relation to the West.

Colonialism, the post-colonial underdevelopment theorists never tired of noting, oriented African economies outward, away from Africa and towards the West (Amin 1973; Rodney 1972). The essence of this external orientation was the export of raw materials, which in turn required an externally oriented infrastructure, with roads, railroads, riverine and air traffic making a bee-line from the originating points of the raw materials in the African interior to the coast, from where deliveries were made to the West. From the standpoint of African development, therefore, the litmus test of the expanding Sino-African engagement is the extent to which it reorients the colonially designed political economy and leads to the emergence of a different model of development—one in which more and more of Africa’s raw material will be processed, repurposed and transformed in Africa.

So far, the capitalist phase of the Sino-African engagement—which admittedly is barely a quarter of a century old—has not produced such an outcome. Indeed, China’s relations with Africa are attracting increasing scholarly and journalistic attention, not all of it positive. Some of the criticism is carping, and emanates from predictable sources. Chief among such sources are Sino-sceptics in the West who warn unsuspecting Africans, the gullible natives of yesteryear, variously of the ‘pander threat’, the ‘hidden dragon’ and Chinese engaging in African ‘safaris’. The Chinese, this logic continues, possibly have an eye towards re-colonizing Africa; they definitely have a visible hand in extracting Africa’s resources, above all oil, and in capturing market shares on the African continent (Alden 2007; Alden et al. 2008; Michel and Beuret 2009; Wild and Mepham 2006). Wright had spoken of de-Occidentalization, but this is re-Orientalization with a vengeance. It is the old Sino-phobic ‘Yellow Peril’ updated and applied to contemporary Africa: the ‘Middle Kingdom’ has evil designs on the ‘Dark Continent’, which once again seems ripe for the picking as ‘a new scramble for Africa’ commences (Chan et al. 2009). In some African circles, such Sino-scepticism, and at times outright Sino-phobia has been met with an antithesis of Sino-philia, which celebrates China as ‘a new partner for Africa’s development’ (Bangui 2012). More sober African and African-centred analyses seek a jaundiced synthesis, fully aware of China’s naked commercial interest in Africa, but angling for the ‘African agency’ that would seize the opportunity presented by China’s entry into Africa to power indigenous development, which is precisely what has eluded colonial and post-colonial Africa’s entanglements with the West (Corkin 2013).

The case against China in Africa has been made repeatedly, both in the scholarly and journalistic literatures. China’s economic activities in Africa, it is said, are shrouded in secrecy, as if Western ventures in Africa, then and now, are models of transparency. Mostly, though, the critics maintain, China’s interests in Africa centre largely on Africa’s natural resources, as seen in the concentration of Chinese investment in the energy and transport sectors. Chinese imports, it is further noted— correctly—has undermined indigenous manufacturing and driven African firms out of business, with a consequent deskilling of African labour. Furthermore, many Chinese-built infrastructure projects in Africa have been shoddy in design and execution, with roads washing away after the first rainy season and hospitals and schools cracking soon after completion. Chinese companies, observers also creditably point out, have largely been oblivious to the rights of African workers—that is, when Chinese companies have bothered to hire African workers, since much of the labour those companies use in Africa is imported from China. Similarly, Chinese economic activities in Africa pay scant attention to the environment, even less so, allegedly, than their Western counterparts, and presumably Africans ones as well. Again, and reputedly to an even greater extent than the Western powers, China is faulted for supporting undemocratic and corrupt African regimes, thereby undermining good governance on the continent. The new Chinese migration to Africa, some of it extralegal, has also been met with much suspicion (Harneit-Sievers et al. 2010; Power et al. 2012; Africans migrate to China on a much smaller scale, while China generally has better migration control than do African states).

Altogether, the case against China is impressive. In China’s defence, if defence it is, it may be noted that Chinese businesses have done nothing in Africa they have not done elsewhere in the world, including in China. Chinese capitalism is nothing if not an equal opportunity exploiter. In the hunt for raw materials and markets, in the degradation of labour and in the despoliation of the environment, Western capitalists apparently have nothing on their Chinese counterparts. Indeed, as industrializing capitalist powers historically have tended to be, the Chinese currently may well be worse. But, as always, the rule of capital is never uncontested. Everywhere, from the copperbelt of Zambia to the factory floors of China’s industrial heartland of Guangdong, labour is pushing back against Chinese capital, as exemplified by strikes, wildcat actions, and industrial and political protests, among other forms of resistance. Meanwhile, Beijing currently has the dubious distinction of being perhaps the most polluted major metropolis in the world, the sun struggling, largely in vain, to break out of the dense cloud of smog engulfing China’s capital city on any given day. Even amid this dismal environmental swamp, however, the struggle for ecological sustainability in China goes on (Tilt 2010; Zeng and Eastin 2011).

As befitting its new status, China is a power with global interests. Currently, its primary relations, economic and political, are oriented towards the global North, North America and Europe. Increasingly, however, China is turning to the global South, largely for economic but also for geostrategic reasons. In some ways, this southern pivot is reminiscent of Bandung and what its most ardent exponents advocated, namely an era of Afro-Asian solidarity.

The iconic expression of China’s solidarity with Africa in the post-Bandung years was the Tazara Railway, China’s most ambitious foreign policy undertaking since its entrance in the Korean War. Previously, the World Bank had declined to fund the railway project, rejecting it as unfeasible. The Tazara Railway, dubbed the Freedom Railway by its more radical supporters, was a major contribution to the struggle against white-settler colonialism in Southern Africa, economic and political (Larkin 1971; Monson 2009; Shinn and Eisenman 2012). From the Chinese perspective, Tazara was a genuine act of idealism, with no pecuniary strings attached. A concrete example of Afro-Asian solidarity, the railway also differentiated China from the dominant two blocs in world geopolitics: the Western neocolonial powers seeking to tighten their grip on the post-colonial Third World and their chief competitor for global hegemony, the Soviet Union—or, in the always jolly Maoist locution, ‘Soviet social imperialism’.

The restoration in post-Mao China of capitalism, reputedly with Chinese characteristics, has put paid to such commercially disinterested undertakings as the Tazara Railway. Henceforth, China’s investments, in and out of Africa, would be made largely with an eye towards the market. Talk of solidarity, the language of revolutionary internationalism, quietly disappeared from Chinese discourse on the Third World. In the new capitalist China, relations with the Third World acquired the more market-friendly lingo of ‘South-South cooperation’.

The changing nomenclature is evident in the forums of Sino-African engagement. In the era of revolutionary internationalism, the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organisation, founded in 1957—a red-banner year for Africa, the year of Ghana’s independence—served as an important vehicle for China’s relations with Africa, including with African liberation movements engaged in armed struggle (Larkin 1971; Neuhauser 1968). Under the new capitalist dispensation, the Forum on China–Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) has emerged as the preeminent venue for large-scale meetings of Chinese and African leaders, chiefly heads of state and government. Founded on China’s initiative, and funded by Beijing, the triennial FOCAC meetings have attracted the vast majority of Africa’s leaders. Five such summits have convened to date, the first in 2000 and the most recent in 2012, the venue alternating between Beijing and Africa. (The two meetings in Africa were held, respectively, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 2003, and Sharm el Sheik, Egypt in 2009.) Predictably, the main topics at FOCAC summits are matters of state and matters of market, which is to say business, not revolution (Power et al. 2012).

It remains to be seen what impact, if any, FOCAC will have on South–South cooperation generally, and specifically on BRICS. The latter officially began life in 2009 as BRIC, an association consisting of Brazil, Russia, India and China. BRIC received its ‘S’ the following year, in 2010, when South Africa joined the group. Emerging economies all with regional or global influence, the BRICS nations seek to coordinate their strength to act as a counterweight to the Western powers and Japan in the world economy (Cassiolato and Vitorino 2011). Concurrently, all the BRICS nations are members of the G20, the association that includes the world’s most powerful economies, including the Western powers and Japan.

As with FOCAC, so too with BRICS: China is its moving spirit and indispensable member. A recently proposed addition to the BRICS portfolio, a development bank, with China as the leading shareholder, would bring with it the prospect of upsetting a major pillar of global capitalism that has been in place since the end of World War II. Presumably, a BRICS development bank would pose a challenge to the Bretton Woods formula, bounded by the World Bank, on the one side, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), on the other. So far as Africa is concerned, the crucial question is whether a China-led BRICS bank would be any kinder than the World Bank and the IMF. If we proceed from the assumption that power is as power does, which assumption China’s rise has to date done little to unsettle, then there may be scant basis for believing that Africa necessarily would fare better under a BRICS regime than it has under the Bretton Woods one. It is not a foregone conclusion either that South Africa’s presence will ensure a strong pan-African voice at the BRICS table. The demise of apartheid in no way laid to rest the issue of South African ‘sub-imperialism’ in the southern African region, and indeed on the African continent as a whole. If anything, black political rule in South Africa has greatly strengthened the country’s position in Africa, the more agreeable post-apartheid dispensation reinforcing South Africa’s position, continentally and globally (Martin 2008). It is impossible, for instance, to think of apartheid South Africa as a member of FOCAC, BRICS or the G20.

Meanwhile, there is Bandung, and the legacy of Bandung, which at once boosted and was boosted by the global campaign against apartheid. The spirit of Bandung remains something of a touchstone for contemporary South-South cooperation, alluded to if not invoked outright by Chinese and African actors alike (Power et al. 2012: 60). FOCAC itself is offered as evidence of the persistence of that spirit. For sure, open assertions of international coloured confraternity, Bandung-style, are largely absent from the rhetoric of the current generation of Chinese and African leaders. There remains, however, much talk of mutual victimization by Western colonialism and imperialism, and of the attendant need to ensure history does not repeat itself through South–South cooperation in the sphere of economic development, seen as the ultimate guarantor of national sovereignty. Yet, for their all growing economic prowess, it has been noted, the BRICS powers have been rather timid in challenging the hegemony of the Western powers, above all the United States, in the global arena. Instead, that task has been left to lesser powers, such as Iran and Venezuela under the leadership of the late Hugo Chavez (Palat 2008). The NATO military intervention in Libya is, perhaps, the most glaring example of the failure of the emerging powers to make a creditable stand in world politics (Campbell 2013). All of which leaves begging the question of whether there will be a new Bandung and, if so, what form it will take and who will lead it. In China’s South–South relations, and especially in Sino-African relations, it remains to be determined if the imperatives of twenty-first century capitalism can be reconciled with the cry for social justice heard today everywhere in Africa, and in China too. If not, alternative models of development more consistent with that cry must return to the arena of politics and policy. There may yet be a future for the ideals enunciated at Bandung nearly six decades ago, the demand for social justice in the context of Third World solidarity.