Xi Jinping - Britain - Africa
Iwas fascinated by the ‘’sound and fury’’ that signified the ‘’golden’’ arrival of the President of China in Buckingham Palace. Queen Elizabeth met him in person, apparently because a protocol spook warned that Prince Charles had once expressed rude thoughts about China’s governance and had not yet become ‘’born again’’. Before hearing Xi Jinping quoting Shakespeare, I had recalled a pungent documentary telecast by China Central Television (CCTV) about British colonial troops vandalizing and smashing porcelain of classical beauty and excellent craftsmanship adorning China’s ancient imperial palaces. It was a documentation of barbarism by foreign invaders who had borrowed China’s invention of gunpowder and brought it back as marauding military power. Now what also came rushing in was that British wit that in international politics ‘’there are no permanent friends, only permanent interests’’.
In an address to the British parliament, Xi Jinping recited Shakespeare’s quip that ‘’What’s past is prologue’’. The CCTV documentary mentioned above had been a prologue about a deeper prologue. Onto Shakespeare’s wit Jinping laid a Chinese wit to the effect that no mountain is too high and no ocean too deep to be conquered. The British may have erected a mountain of decay over the ancient China she invaded with brutal colonial occupation combined with opium grown in India and exported to China - a war weapon later borrowed by the Taliban targeting American consumers with heroin - but Xi Jinping had come to climb tame her economic peak and dive to its political bottom.
In anticipation of critics like Paul Powlesland -a private lawyer who told a group of Chinese students that many British people were ‘’frankly disgusted at the welcome’’ Xi Jinping was getting - the Chinese leader asserted that China’s legal system would ‘’ensure that all people are equal before the law’’ while accelerating the growth of ‘’the socialist legal system with Chinese characteristics’’. To that sector of Africa’s intellectuals who had felt orphaned by the collapse of socialism in the former Soviet Union, here was a welcome assurance that this man who was bringing 1.4 billion pounds sterling for RollsRoyce ‘’to design new jet engines’’ for the market, still had his eyes on empowering a non-European version of socialism.
For those in whose minds the sun of the British Empire never sets, and socialism is foul, the ‘’golden’’ strut by Xi Jinping as a Santa Clause from the Orient - and not ancestral lands of Scandinavia - drums in their minds must have lost beats. Prime Minister Cameron was brutal to them with lavish utterances like: ‘’This visit is taking our relationship to the next level’’; while a 1.7billion pounds sterling agreement with Chinese developer Advanced Business Park to redevelop a 35-acre site at the Royal Albert docks in east London will ‘’create up to 30,000 jobs’’.
The Chinese leader also sounded messianic, pushing the Confucian notion of the leader as a humanizer of history with his love; ensuring that ‘’a ray of sunshine was dawning on the world economy’’, and promising guaranteed economic growth to ‘’people as the foundation’’ of Britain. This image of Britain as an aid beneficiary neodeveloping country, may have stirred the Chairperson of the African Union Commission, Dr DlaminiZuma to convene a ‘’UKChina-Africa Collaboration Forum for Investment and Growth’’, held in London on 23 October, 2015. It would ‘’come up with a workable strategy’’ for grabbing some of the money dripping off fingers of a UK-China partnership and ‘’see how the financial and business establishments of the UK and Chinese governments could best be combined to stimulate investment and inclusive growth in Africa’’.
Africa too should share China’s model of a home grown power migrating north.
A cheeky strand of genius runs through British diplomacy. It was a puzzle that during American paranoia about Chinese communism, Britain had maintained an embassy in China. She, however, did not pass that ‘’long view in diplomacy’’ to African leaders. Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta and Uganda’s Milton Obote showed a rare allergy to China despite her territory lying a narrow Indian Ocean away from them. Chou en Lai, Mao’s Foreign Minister, aroused hysteria when in 1964 he toured eastern Africa and declared that the region was ripe for revolution. The atavistic violence which later hit the region was avoided by only Tanzania whose leader , Julius Nyerere, believed in the people as anchor of development.
China is to build high-speed train routes from Southampton and Manchester in the north to London in the south. Donald Kaberuka, as president of the African Development Bank, had pleaded with African governments to give him a slice of foreign reserves held in foreign vaults to invest in infrastructure. This ‘’new sunshine’’ should silence British diplomats who lobby against his vision.