To be clear, it’s Xi who must be obeyed

THE editor of the Wall Street Journal told a joke the other day that I am going to twist to my own purposes here. God calls US President Barack Obama, Chinese President Xi Jinping and South African President Jacob Zuma to a meeting. He tells them the world is going to end tomorrow and that they should go back and tell their people and prepare them.

Obama goes on TV and says: “I have good news and bad news: we were right about God but the world ends tomorrow.” Xi follows: “I have bad news and worse news,” he tells the Chinese. “We were wrong about God and the world ends tomorrow.”

Zuma announces that “I have got good news. God thinks I am one of the three most important people in the world.”

Watching Zuma preen himself next to the Chinese leader on his visit to South Africa last week was disconcerting. China’s human rights record aside, Xi is doing a very difficult job well and Zuma is doing a relatively easier job very badly. Xi will have known this. But, as Shane Warne used to say of Daryll Cullinan, Zuma is his bunny.

Without ineffective leaders like Zuma sitting on important resources, Xi would find it much more difficult to spread Chinese influence. Spotting Zuma’s inclination towards anything anti-Western, he has effortlessly exploited it. His invitation to South Africa to join the Brics, despite us being no match for the others in size, population or potential, was deeply cynical. Zuma misread the invitation as a measure of South Africa’s importance in the world.

Yet all we have become is an exporter of minerals to China and an importer of whatever the Chinese manufacture from them. It is an exact replica of the old colonial relationships this economy has had for centuries. Despite efforts to change this, we are what we are. Small, with minerals.

Obviously South Africa is right to extract as much as it can from China, but our trade has come with a reckless ideological shift that the Chinese are happy to milk but don’t care a fig about. Deals signed by the Chinese on this visit include one for a major Chinese car manufacturer to build a factory here. Not for export back to China. They’ll go into Africa. At least that’s the plan.

In the Chinese context, though — a one-party state that tolerates no dissent — Xi is impressive. He is a guarded reformer. He runs a ferocious anti-corruption programme, at great risk to himself, that targets senior communist party officials at all levels. The Chinese Communist Party central committee includes dozens of dollar billionaires. They didn’t get rich by freeing up the Chinese economy.

But Xi is determined to stop supporting loss-making state-owned industries, once the giants of the Chinese miracle. He encourages the private sector to flourish and has allowed a dramatic loosening of control of the Chinese currency. Zuma would never allow such risks. He is an unreformer. He misreads China’s success as the outcome of central control, not the undoing of it.

There is, though, a good African story to tell. Tanzania’s new president, John Pombe Magufuli, has outraged the local elite since he took office last month. He cancelled this week’s Independence Day celebrations and told Tanzanians to spend the day tidying up their country. He’s instructed parliamentary officials to limit his speech times to less than 30 minutes. He personally ordered beds for the country’s biggest hospital after finding patients sitting on the floor when he visited. He has reportedly banned foreign travel for ministers and officials, saying foreign invitations should be dealt with by Tanzanian diplomats on the ground already.

It’s a bit extreme, but it’s a new kind of populism that poor people can relate to. Xi will have taken the expensive pomp afforded him by Zuma with a pinch of salt. He has seen it all before. For a few deals he has bought an entire government.

The Chinese eye, instead, is on the very West that Zuma and his coterie posture to despise. Real Chinese investment is focused on the big economies run by cautious governments — in the US, its biggest trading partner by far, and Western Europe, where direct Chinese investments, not trade or loans, are $20-billion this year alone. That dwarfs all of China’s direct investment in Africa thus far. This is no New World Order. The Old Order’s just making room for a new arrival with money.