China at 70 and the Caribbean

EVEN WITH its current challenges, only the extremely bold might have contradicted Xi Jinping’s declaration yesterday of the improbability of upending China’s status as a “great nation”. “No force,” Mr Xi said , in a speech to mark the 70th anniversary of the founding of the modern China, “can stop the Chinese people and nation from forging ahead.”

Mr Xi, the evidence suggests, has facts on his side. In 1949, when Mao Zedong, from the same spot in Tiananmen Square, launched the new communist state, China was a battered, weary country after years of occupation and two decades of civil war, in which Mao’s Communist party had defeated the nationalists, forcing them from the mainland to today’s Taiwan. Very few in colonial Jamaica, then in a rising fervour of pre-independence nationalism, would have contemplated China as a potential economic benefactor. It might, at best, for some, been an ideological beacon, but the island’s hard Left then looked primarily to Moscow for inspiration.

In the seven decades since Mao’s announcement, China has had an uneven, circumlocutory road to development. Mao’s Great Leap Forward, with its aim of rapidly transforming a largely agrarian economy to an industrial one, while collectivising agriculture, triggered food shortages and the starving of millions of people. The attempts at ideological purification through the Cultural Revolution led to the deaths of millions more. The events at Tiananmen Square in1989, when the military cracked down on student protests, remain a dark, unexplored episode in the country’s history.

But these blotches on the last 70 years notwithstanding, it is hardly debatable that any country has, in such a relatively short period, accomplished the transformation achieved by China. It is now the world’s second-largest economy after the United States. With a population of more than 1.4 billion, its per-capita gross domestic product is heading towards US$9,000. It was less than US$90 in 1960. When launched, modern China’s literacy rate was estimated at between 15 per cent and 25 per cent; it is now more than 96 per cent. Life expectancy over the last 60 years has moved from below 44 years to more than 60. Critically, China has lifted hundreds of millions of its citizens out of poverty.

What is perhaps more significant, from our vantage point, starting with economic reforms of the past 40 years that modified communist orthodoxy for many of the principles of the market, is China’s emergence as a technological, economic and global political power. Its tentacles stretch throughout Asia, and into Africa and the Americas, including the Caribbean. In Jamaica, in recent years, as is the case with African and Asian countries, China has been the largest source of foreign capital, either by way of foreign direct investment, or low-interest bilateral loans to finance infrastructure development. These have reached more than US$2 billion.

UNDERSTANDING POLICY IMPERATIVES

It is hardly surprising that the Americans, whose geopolitical influence has been challenged by China’s rise, are wary of the motives behind Beijing’s largesse and have urged scepticism of the Sino-economic embrace. This newspaper doesn’t share those fears of China, but nonetheless appreciates the need for a deep understanding of Beijing’s policy imperatives, thus placing us in a better position to understand and respond to them.

In other words, as we have suggested before, the analysis of China’s policy in the Caribbean shouldn’t be only the purview of foreign ministries, but ought to be the subject of rigorous academic attention, taking account of the historic and cultural dimensions of policy formulation in China and Southeast Asia. In this regard, the Caribbean Community should urge The University of the West Indies to establish a Centre for China and Southeast Asian Studies, focusing on developments in that increasingly pivotal part of the world. This would be beyond the undertakings of the Confucius Institute, such as exists in Jamaica, whose primary focus is cultural relations and is primarily funded by China.

Such a move wouldn’t be unique. Last month, a Chinese foreign ministry delegation, led by a former ambassador to Suriname, Zhang Jinxiong, made a swing through the Caribbean to, in part, assure regional governments of Beijing’s relations with the Caribbean and to assess regional opinion of China. Their report, no doubt, will find its way into policy. Significantly, one of the members of that delegation was Song Junying, director of the new Department of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, which is part of the foreign ministry-related China Institute of International Studies.