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That's pretty bad. Yet another sign of increasing Chinese dominance. I can't imagine an autocracy like China becoming the greatest superpower will work out well
by mooseburger 8y ago
That's pretty bad. Yet another sign of increasing Chinese dominance. I can't imagine an autocracy like China becoming the greatest superpower will work out well for anyone.
- gxs 8y agoI know a few people in the clothes design industry and they all say manufacturing is moving out of Asia and into Africa. According to them, by next year most of their stuff will be made there. China has made a huge investment in Africa - so they will get a piece of that action. Feels like the US is resting on their laurels. Why the downvotes? This comment got a few reasonable responses and is within HN guidelines. Help me understand what is so offensive about this post
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ryanmarsh 8y agoI recently had dinner with a friend who spent 8 years working for the US State dept all over Africa. His take was simple. When the US shows up offering to build a road to the oil refinery we want to build we first ask them to make human rights reforms and so forth. The Chinese just start handing out cash until they get what they want. This strategy will result in the wholesale ownership of several African states by China if it hasn’t already happened.
- anigbrowl 8y agoMaybe, but it's also likely to accelerate human rights development although it will at first result in concentrations of wealth..
- zwkrt 8y agoIt is very interesting to me how the perspective of the Chinese government seems to be that they should run their entire sovereignty like a business. Some politicians in the US claim to want to run /government/ like a business, but China seems happy to run the entire country as one. In China we effectively have a CEO in Xi Jinping, beholden to the board of investors that is the global economy. And the same forces are at play. China can punt on ethics so long as the return is good, and they have pressure to keep growing. So long as the banks are happy the game continues. The global investment-backed economy is efficient for allocating resources for the purposes of increasing monetary value but it will always introduce a moral hazard since short term returns will usually be better when corners are cut.
- talloaktrees 8y agoXiang?
- wonderwonder 8y agoChina runs it's country exactly like a business. People are just widgets they make. If the widget is defective they throw it away. If an entire batch of widgets is defective, they will throw away (kill or put in camps) the entire assembly line rather than risk it damaging the other widgets.
- tivert 8y ago> In China we effectively have a CEO in Xi Jinping, beholden to the board of investors that is the global economy. I don't think Xi or the Communist Party view themselves as "beholden to the board of investors that is the global economy." Maybe they have use for those investors now, but they're working to make that temporary.
- ptenk 8y agoYou should ask him about the World Bank and IMF debt traps to developing countries that have stricken those nations in poverty for decades. The Chinese are building critical infrastructure in many of these African countries, where there was none and immensely increasing ease of business and trade. Africa's going to be the next economic boom despite the West having done all they can to suppress African growth.
- DenisM 8y agoWill it do them a lot of good though? Soviets ended up controlling East Germany, but the didn't capitalize on that. US did much better with the culturally identical West Germany. This isn't exactly Socialism / Capitalism battle we have here, but if China ends up controlling most corrupt states while the West ends up with the least corrupt states the long-term outcome might be similar.
- dhh2106 8y agoThe Chinese have made massive infrastructure investments around Africa, in ports and railways, etc. These have massively increased china's influence in the region They've also sparked fears of a debt trap (https://www.npr.org/2018/10/08/641625157/a-new-chinese-funded-railway-in-kenya-sparks-debt-trap-fears https://www.npr.org/2018/10/08/641625157/a-new-chinese-funde...) and scenarios where countries default on debt so China will control major components of the infrastructure.
- r3bl 8y agoThat isn't Africa-specific. They're doing the same in Europe outside of the EU. Montenegro is on the same boat[0]. Serbian autocratic regime seem to get along with China's regime pretty well. Bosnia became the most western visa-free country for Chinese citizens last year. [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-silkroad-europe-montenegro-insi/chinese-highway-to-nowhere-haunts-montenegro-idUSKBN1K60QX https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-silkroad-europe-mon...
- pegasus 8y agoLatin America too: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/world/americas/ecuador-china-dam.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/world/americas/ecuador-ch...
- reaperducer 8y agoI know a few people in the clothes design industry and they all say manufacturing is moving out of Asia and into Africa. There was an article on HN a few months ago about clothing manufacturing moving out of China back to the U.S. because fashion changes faster these days, and China's advantage in price becomes a disadvantage because of lead times.
- gxs 8y agoThat may be the case for more fashion forward retailers but not all retailers worn st the same clip
- tinza123 8y agoBad for whom? For the kids getting to know a new language, for increased trading activities, or just for the American?
- jobigoud 8y agoIf it's at the expense of learning English it's certainly a bad thing. The lingua franca of the World should be taught first.
- jacobmoe 8y agoEnglish is one of the official languages of Kenya. I doubt it'll come at the expense of learning English.
- bilbo0s 8y agoThe issue is that for these people the rest of the world doesn't matter. These are not the elites of Kenya we're talking about. These are Kenya's poor. It's running or education. Those are the means by which you can get out of your situation in Kenya. Chinese is just an increasingly important facet of the education option. In sub-saharan Africa, different places will have different languages that are important to economic success. For instance, if you're Senegalese, you're far better off perfecting your French than learning Chinese or English. That's just the raw, ugly, and unfortunate economic reality in which impoverished children in Senegal live. So the government has set things up so that children can get a small chance at making themselves impressive to Francophone companies. Because a slim chance, is better than no chance. Obviously those mandatory french classes come at the expense of English, but who cares? These kids need jobs. Now in more and more parts of Africa for young people there is what is essentially a chance at a lottery ticket going around out there. An education visa to China. And the way they work, most business done with Africa will flow through you if you get one of those visas. If they perfect their English, the same is not true. The business that America does with Africa will not start flowing through you just because you speak English well. (And that's even ignoring the fact that America doesn't do business with Africa the same way China does.) So, yes, impoverished kids who are smart, ambitious, and tired of being hungry are going to work their rear ends off trying to get one of those visas. You or I would do the same. And good on them. They're out trying to make a way for themselves in life. That's to be commended. It sounds like the Kenyans simply see what is becoming common knowledge in sub-saharan Africa. China is a ticket out of poverty for a lot of their more bright kids who may not be as privileged as people in the rest of the world. It's easy for us to say, "Hey, that Chinese is a bad thing." But what's the kid supposed to do with our idealism? Sure it can be a bad thing, so is diamond mining, but it pays, and for poor people in Africa these days, not many things do.
- normal_man 8y agoDepending on where you're sitting, the US being the greatest superpower hasn't worked out that well either.
- syrrim 8y agoThe salient point is that china as super power is negative independent of where you're sitting.
- thereare5lights 8y agoNo it's not. There are plenty of places where it's either neutral or positive outside of China. Russia for one is neutral. Other authoritarian governments would view it as positive/neutral. The salient point is that people here have rose tinted glasses when it comes to the negative effects of American military actions since the Spanish–American War. For the vast majority of the world, America, China, two sides of the same coin. Just another foreign government telling them what to do and taking things from them under the veneer of helping them.
- yellowapple 8y ago"Other authoritarian governments would view it as positive/neutral." That ain't exactly helping your case. "Just another foreign government telling them what to do and taking things from them under the veneer of helping them." Right, but one of them is literally a totalitarian dictatorship, and the other is the United States. The US is by every measure the lesser of the two evils.
- sctb 8y ago> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html