LRB, Vol. 43 No. 6 · 18 March 2021
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Growing Pains
Laleh Khalili
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The Emperor’s New Road: China and the Project of the Century
byJonathan E. Hillman
<https://www-lrb-co-uk.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/search-results?search=Jonathan%20E.%20Hillman>.
/Yale, 294 pp., £20, October 2020,978 0 300 24458 8/
In a short story called ‘The Chinese Road’ written in the 1970s by the
Yemeni-Ethiopian Mohammad Abdul-Wali, a Yemeni man befriends a Chinese
construction worker on the new road from the port of Hodeida on the Red
Sea, ‘cutting through the mountain’, to the capital, Sanaa, more than
two hundred kilometres away. Abdul-Wali describes the competent and
friendly Chinese labourers who live in tents with the Yemenis. They all
learn Arabic, unlike an earlier group of foreigners: the British, sweaty
and florid, with their colony in Aden, who remained aloof from the
locals, and departed ‘leaving nothing behind but the hatred of [the]
people’. The Chinese construction workers, by contrast, leave a lasting
legacy.
The completion of the first paved road in Yemen in 1961 was commemorated
in a series of stamps that also celebrated the building of a modern port
in Hodeida with the help of Soviet engineers. By that point 1100 Chinese
construction workers and engineers were building roads in Yemen. Work on
the Sanaa-Hodeida road had begun in 1959, the same year China started
blasting through the Himalayas to build the Karakoram Highway to
Pakistan. In 1967, China completed the sky-high ‘friendship road’
between Lhasa and Kathmandu, and between 1970 and 1975 it built a
railway between Tanzania and Zambia. Chinese railway experts were
remembered respectfully by their local counterparts for passing on their
skills.
These postcolonial Chinese construction programmes were intended to be
different from the European schemes of the preceding decades, which were
launched by colonial powers to enable the transport of extracted raw
materials. As the Guyanese historian Walter Rodney wrote in/How Europe
Underdeveloped Africa/(1972), roads and railways
were not constructed in the colonial period so that Africans could
visit their friends. More important still, they were not laid down
to facilitate internal trade in African commodities. There were no
roads connecting different colonies and different parts of the same
colony in a manner that made sense with regard to Africa’s needs and
development. All roads and railways led down to the sea.
In the exuberant but brief period immediately after decolonisation most
postcolonial states looked to the Soviet Union or China to help with
industrialisation and infrastructure, often trying to play these
countries off against theUSand Europe in order to secure better deals
with fewer strings attached. At the height of the Cold War, the Soviet
and Chinese politics of aid resulted in the construction of
hydroelectric dams, steel mills, cement factories, ports and airports,
as well as road and rail networks across Asia and Africa. There were
more direct forms of aid too. After the Bandung Conference’s call in
1955 for Afro-Asian solidarity, China granted $4.7 million in hard
currency to Egypt just as Britain, France and Israel were attacking it
over the Suez Canal. China extended credit to a number of recently
independent African states – Ghana, Mali, Tanzania, Kenya, Guinea – and
gave millions to Nepal, Ceylon (soon to become Sri Lanka), Indonesia and
Cambodia. It also provided military aid and armaments to anticolonial
guerrilla groups across Asia, Africa and Latin America.
At the same time, theUSArmy Corps of Engineers was building roads,
communication systems, airports and other infrastructure in Libya,
Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. These were always designed to
meetUSmilitary and strategic needs, often connectingUSbases to major
transport facilities. In the 1970s I lived in Mashhad in northern Iran,
in a neighbourhood next to the recently opened Cento Road. The road was
funded by the Central Treaty Organisation, formed in 1955 and modelled
after Nato. Its founding members were Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and
theUK, with theUSpulling the strings in the hope of preventing southward
Soviet expansion. TheUSwas happy to fund transport routes because, as
the acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Curtis LeMay, put it
in 1962, ‘inadequacies of road and rail facilities in Iran’ limited the
ability of theUSmilitary to travel easily near Iran’s border with the
Soviet Union. We understood, as other collateral beneficiaries of such
roads did, that theUSnever built a road unless its forces might one day
travel along it.
There is a temptation in Washington policy cliques to see China’s Belt
and Road Initiative as a continuation of Cold War politics. TheBRI,
which was launched with great fanfare by Xi Jinping in 2013, has two
components. On land, multiple train routes are planned to cross the
Eurasian landmass via Central Asia, Russia and Iran, with termini in
Singapore, Isfahan and Budapest, from where it would connect to the
railways of Western Europe. The maritime branch wraps around South-East
and South Asia and from there extends to East Africa or through the Suez
Canal to the Mediterranean.
The numerous road, rail, port and airport projects that form the spine
of these new Silk Roads are certainly strategic vectors of alliance like
their mid-20th-century counterparts, but there is much less of the
discourse of South-South solidarity that emerged out of Bandung, and
more of an economic calculation. The China of the 1950s and 1960s was
very different from the China of the 21stcentury. In 1959, when work
began on the Karakoram and Hodeida-Sanaa highways, China had aGDPof $55
billion and was in the throes of famine. In 2013, when theBRIwas
announced (initially under the name One Belt, One Road),
itsGDPapproached $9.5 trillion. In real terms, the Chinese economy grew
twentyfold over that half-century.
After China opened up to foreign direct investment in the 1970s, first
from Japan and later from Europe and North America, it quickly became
the world’s factory. In the last decade of the 20thcentury, numerous new
manufacturing centres grew up along its coasts. Its ports expanded in
number and capacity to receive raw materials – coal, oil, ore, bauxite,
copper – from all over the globe, and to dispatch in turn huge container
ships laden with manufactured goods. By the early 2000s, Chinese ports
dominated every top-twenty maritime list.
China’s response to the global crisis of capital in 2008 was a massive
stimulus programme. Its central planners encouraged the movement of
capital inland and used the state-owned banking system to cultivate
manufacturing centres along China’s long land borders with South-East,
South and Central Asian states. They also invested in extensive land
transport infrastructures, accumulating expertise and manufacturing
capacity in railway technologies, which are now being deployed in
building the rail components of theBRI. This alternation between mobile
capital and its immobilisation in infrastructure – a ‘spatial fix’, in
the words of the geographer David Harvey – is one progenitor of Xi’s
grand initiative. China’s treatment by theUSis another.
In October 2011, Obama’s then secretary of state, Hillary Clinton,
announced the birth of ‘America’s Pacific Century’ in an article
for/Foreign Policy/, and boasted that the Asia-Pacific region was ‘eager
for our leadership and our business’. Although the Clinton manifesto
made gestures to allay China’s fear of a new Cold War, only a few months
later the Pentagon issued Defence Strategic Guidance which included a
‘pivot to Asia’. To the jubilation of armchair and actual generals, the
strategy document declared the end of the boots-on-the-ground
counterinsurgency era and warned of ‘the growth of China’s military
power’. The document’s familiar jargon – it called for ‘credible
deterrence’ and the need to ‘project power despite anti-access/area
denial challenges’ – was followed up with action in the region: new
military exercises with Japan, the decision to baseUSMarines in
Australia, arms sales to the Philippines, and a range of other
activities. All this built on the Clinton and Bush administrations’
placement of additional naval and air weapons systems in Japan and Guam,
the deployment of another aircraft carrier to the Pacific and the
construction of a naval base in Singapore.
Trump’s trade wars against China and his unabashedly racist response to
Covid showed aUSitching for a revival of Cold War rivalries. In his
first days in office Biden declared that the term ‘China virus’ would be
expunged from federal documents, but while criticising Trump’s approach,
Biden’s new secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said that the former
president ‘was right in taking a tougher approach to China’; the new
secretary of commerce, Gina Raimondo, has said that she will continue
Trump’s policy, using ‘the full toolkit at my disposal...to protect
America and our networks from Chinese interference’. Such attitudes have
become firmly entrenched amongUSpolicymakers.
All this means we should be grateful that a long-established Washington
think-tanker like Jonathan Hillman is downplaying the threat of China’s
projects toUSinterests. Hillman is a senior fellow at the centre-right
Centre for Strategic and International Studies. His research for/The
Emperor’s New Road/included visiting a number of countries
whereBRIprojects are underway in order to measure the gap between
promise and reality. He aspires to a tone of gravity even when his
fieldwork largely consists in finding out whether the trains run on
time. The effect is disconcerting: in places, his reports read like
stories from a Lonely Planet travel guide – trains are missed, there are
troubles with Russian border guards, ferries don’t depart from their
advertised docks.
Predictably, the book’s cover has a red star on it, and there are
further clichés inside: from the travels of Marco Polo, to Central Asian
Muslims who both pray to Allah and drink vodka, to the multiple urban
centres branded ‘the new Dubai’. He sees China as undergoing an
‘education as a rising power’; it is in need of instruction, presumably
from more experienced imperialists. But the imperialists that should
serve as paragons and warnings, he thinks, are France and Britain, not
theUS. The Persian kings Xerxes and Darius are mentioned several times,
but the pivot to Asia is not. He portrays theUSas a well-meaning,
bumbling giant whose best efforts are undermined by its being too nice,
too concerned with democratic institutions, arriving too late on the
scene in places like Pakistan, not understanding the locals, and not
spending enough dollars to compete properly with China. On the ‘dangers’
of China toUSnational interests, Hillman is equivocal. While the overall
message of the book is that the Chinese are too incompetent and their
Asian clients too venal to endangerUSambitions in these contested
spaces, we nevertheless hear about violent smuggling gangs in the port
of Piraeus, Huawei’s supernatural reach, the Chinese military presence
in the South China Sea, the Horn of Africa and Central Asia, and the
corrupting influence of Chinese money whereverBRIprojects are found.
Where Chinese infrastructure projects seem to have failed, Hillman tends
to blame corruption and the machinations of local actors. He contends
that it was a lack of principles and foresight on the part of Djiboutian
politicians that led them in 2018 to invite the Chinese to take over the
container terminal of Doraleh after they had seized control of it from
the Dubai-based companyDPWorld, which had held the concession. There is
nothing here aboutDPWorld’s predatory practices in Indian Ocean ports,
which resulted, for example, in Yemen buying back the concession for the
port of Aden (only for it to be decimated by the Saudi-Emirati
coalition’s war on Yemen). Hillman portrays China’s expansion in Piraeus
as the Asian hordes at the gates of Europe, but doesn’t tell us that the
European troika’s forcible privatisation of Greek state enterprises in
the wake of the financial crisis offered the port on a platter to
China’s Cosco Shipping. (During the same fire sale, airports on many
Greek islands were sold to the German airport management company FraportAG.)
Belt and Road investments are leading to the development of
infrastructure long denied to African and Asian countries. China lends
money on favourable terms to its allies, including states that otherwise
fail to secure such loans as a result of unforgivingUSsanctions. As well
as investing in roads, railways and ports, China now manufactures
technologies – especially in the field of telecommunications – that
challengeUSand European hegemony. Its less costly products are easier
for countries of the global South to afford. And China’s ‘no
interference’ policy means that it has largely avoided the crude
regime-change politics emanating from Washington; its military
expenditure is still only a third of America’s, and much lower still as
a percentage ofGDP. China is now at the centre of global capitalism. No
longer economically peripheral and with no pretence of being a communist
state, China uses itsBRIprojects to consolidate and expand capitalism
‘with Chinese characteristics’.
Data from Boston University’s Global Development Policy Centre show that
between 2008 and 2019, China extended overseas development credit of
$462 billion, only slightly less than the $467 billion provided by the
World Bank in the same period. The money advanced by the China
Development Bank and the Export Import Bank of China reached a peak in
2016, half of which was spent on infrastructure projects. Ten countries
– including Venezuela, Pakistan, Russia, Angola, Brazil, Ecuador and
Iran – received the lion’s share of the loans.
The terms under which these loans have been offered, and their economic
effects, have differed from place to place. To finance development in
the Pakistani port of Gwadar, China offered loans at zero interest,
perhaps because of Pakistan’s strategic importance. In Sri Lanka, it
signed a 99-year lease on the port of Hambantota, in which it has a 70
per cent stake. Hillman isn’t alone in regarding the Hambantota
concession as a coercive debt-equity swap: China gets control of the
port in return for forgiving some of Sri Lanka’s debt. But the story is
more complicated. In 2016, Sri Lanka owed financiers $65 billion, $8
billion of which was owed to China. But 75 per cent of the debt was in
government bonds bought up primarily by funds in theUS, and much of that
debt was accrued not to build infrastructure but to finance the
counterinsurgency war against the Tamil Tigers. Ports, airports and
other facilities that were built were the vanity projects of the then
president, Mahinda Rajapaksa: they were badly situated, poorly designed
and overpriced. The money from China intended for the port concession
went instead to service interest payments. Rajapaksa, who was booted out
of office largely because of the strength of popular feeling against the
port, found his way back to power as prime minister in his brother
Gotabaya’s administration. The reduction in China’s financing of
projects in 2016 was perhaps influenced by its embarrassment over Sri Lanka.
Leaked documents show that, in 2013, Kenya used the port of Mombasa as
security on loans taken out with China’s Exim Bank to finance the
construction of a railway from Mombasa to Nairobi, with a branch – some
of it as yet unbuilt – to the Rift Valley and the Ugandan border, a
project that involved murky deals between different factions of the
Kenyan elite. The loans Kenya has received from China amount to nearly
$5 billion. Given that the railway is yet to turn a profit, Kenya may be
forced to cede the port to China. More likely, China will renegotiate
the debt, extending the repayment schedule.
Transport infrastructure has historically served to bind fractious
peripheral territories to the centre. America’s Pacific Railroad, built
in the 1860s, allowed businesses protected byUSgovernment troops to
expand into Indigenous territories in the West. Where infrastructure
goes, commerce follows – but so, often, does war. The China-Pakistan
Economic Corridor, which terminates at Gwadar on the Gulf of Oman,
crosses Balochistan, where the Pakistani state has for decades
disappeared or assassinated activists and waged a brutal war of
pacification against those fighting for the region’s autonomy. In
Myanmar, the corridor passes through Shan and Rakhine states, where
counterinsurgency measures have led to mass killings and the expulsion
of minority communities. This year the Shanghai International Port Group
will take over the running of the port of Haifa, with the full
co-operation of Israel’s security state. In China itself, theBRItrain
routes across Central Asia pass through Xinjiang, where millions of
Uighurs are interned in re-education camps and forced to work in textile
and electronics factories.
Although China has a large number of citizens working overseas, it has
just one military base beyond its own periphery, in Djibouti. (The
former French colony also hosts military personnel from France, theUS,
Italy, Germany, Japan, Saudi Arabia and theUAE.) China has relied on
private security firms to protect personnel and facilities in Africa and
Asia. Chinese logistics firms in East Africa or South-East Asia can
secure the assistance of, among others, the Frontier Services Group, a
Hong Kong-based company backed by the Chinese state-ownedCITICGroup,
with offices in Kenya and Dubai. The founder and chairman of Frontier
Services is Erik Prince, whose firm of mercenaries, Blackwater, became
notorious for killing civilians in Iraq. Frontier Services is rumoured
to have set up training camps in Xinjiang and has acted for Chinese
firms working in the oilfields of South Sudan and Mozambique, the jade
trade in Myanmar, aviation in Kenya and coltan mining in Congo.
Most accounts of theBRIfocus on its geopolitics or geoeconomics. But
large infrastructure projects have wider ramifications: lives are
affected, connections forged and knowledge circulated. Chinese workers
have a long history in Africa and Asia, going back well before the
postcolonial period. At the end of the 19thcentury, the British Empire
relied on Chinese labour to keep many of its mines and plantations
going. From the 1850s onwards, Chinese workers toiled in South African
gold and diamond mines, tapped rubber and extracted tin in Malaya,
harvested Cuban sugar plantations, traded and farmed in Java and
Sumatra, extracted guano on islets off the coast of Peru, and prospected
for gold and built railroads in theUSand Canada. Chinese merchants were,
and still are, everywhere in the Indian Ocean basin. By the mid 2oth
century, China was spreading its engineering knowhow across Asia and
Africa and making its presence felt through sheer force of numbers. As
Abdul-Wali wrote in ‘The Chinese Road’, many thousands of Chinese
workers lived with and trained local labourers.
The Belt and Road Initiative has had a more mixed reception. Praise for
its transformative effects is met by criticism of its meagre impact on
local capacity building and knowledge transfer. Authorities in areas
where projects are in progress often disagree with central
administrations over the implementation and efficiency of the schemes.
Unless theBRIhost countries have the capacity to negotiate, the
percentage of local workers on many construction sites is relatively
small, relationships are hierarchical, and the interactions between
local and Chinese workers are often fraught. The capitalist system of
labour management has travelled along the Belt and Road. In Zambia,
Kenya and Tanzania, Chinese administrators manage casualised and
precarious African labour in mines and on construction projects, with
workers’ collective bargaining rights recognised only in cases where
mass protests have eventually led to state intervention. Decisions made
by lower courts in favour of local workers have often been overruled by
central governments. The lack of transparency in contracting and
employment on the Mombasa-Nairobi railway project has led many Kenyans
to complain not only about being shut out of well-paid, skilled jobs,
but also about outright racism. In many places where Chinese
construction firms employ both Chinese and local workers, the Chinese
have better living quarters and don’t interact with the locals outside
work. Something has changed since the age of anti-colonial solidarity.
Trouble along the Belt and Road reflects the transition from state-led
co-operation to the international public-private partnerships so
characteristic of this era.
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