If it’s about leadership, then China wins

Joram Nyathi Group Political Editor
Eddie Cross MP has written a piece comparing the fate of two countries since 1980 — China and Zimbabwe. It is a piece reeking of melancholy. But that is not its most remarkable aspect. What’s remarkable is that in 1980, according to Cross, China’s GDP was less than half that of Zimbabwe, its Red (Cultural?) Revolution had killed millions while millions of others starved to death.
Zimbabwe had a thriving industry and agriculture, its GDP per capita was the second highest in Africa and it was a darling of the West which immediately pledged $5 billion to a debt free country emerging from 15 years of civil war and United Nations sanctions.

Leap forward. The melancholy sets in. China has the second biggest economy in the world growing at rates of more than 10 percent per year for the past 30 years, while Zimbabwe has collapsed into heap with 70 percent of the population living in “absolute poverty” to quote Cross. The cause of this reverse process, says Cross, is leadership or lack of it.

I will not contest any of Cross’ figures. I will also leave Zanu-PF to account for the parlous state of the economy. What I want to do is simply to expose a few fallacies in Cross’ analysis, foremost of which is the attempt to convince us that we were better under white rule and sanctions and that independence has been bad for Africans who were and are probably still not part of what Kanyenze and others call Rhodesia’s thriving “enclave economy”.

Cross leaves a critical issue unexplained in his rush to tell us that the single factor to Zimbabwe’s economic collapse is lack of leadership. How has China become the second largest economy, overtaking the rest of the world except the United States of America, currently its greatest debtor? How did the rest of the “free market economies” get left behind? Does it mean the leadership thing afflicts all the nations of the world or it’s a peculiarly Zanu-PF phenomenon or an African disease?

Cross also makes a claim which has repeatedly been exposed to be one of the greatest scams of recent economic theory. He says China and Zimbabwe joined the IMF and the World Bank in 1980, whose membership “is accepted as an essential step towards growth and stability”. For a start China was never under a structural adjustment programme. China went on to grow its economy at the annual rate of above 10 percent which, by Cross’ own admission, “most economists would have said were unobtainable”.

We know the “growth and stability” which came with IMF’s Esap in 1992.
Cross will not mention that it was paramount leader Deng Xiaoping’s government which ordered the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 4 1989, against Western backed so-called reformers who wanted to influence the political and economic direction of China. The usual suspects responded with sanctions but China insisted on its “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and its “socialist market economy <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_market_economy>”.

China could not be bullied by either the IMF or the US and went on to expose as fake economists who never dreamed its annual economic growth rates were possible.

We have similar economists here who will tell you nothing will come of the land reform and economic empowerment. We should abandon everything because there is corruption.

The US could not impose sanctions on China over so-called millions killed during the Cultural Revolution but is quick to play global policeman on human rights when it comes to small nations like Zimbabwe.

What China did in the period until Deng took charge was to take full control of its economy and political processes. It restricted emigration of skilled labour, it set up economic zones, it restricted the use of foreign currency to key sectors and the Chinese people were given time to copy and improve on foreign technologies so that they could grow their own industries.

The Chinese people endured low quality products while they developed their skills to drive their country to be a world leader. In a nutshell, if it’s all about leadership, then it is the Chinese who have demonstrated how best to beat capitalists at their own game, and, as Cross acknowledges, these dramatic economic changes took place under the command of the Communist Party.

I wonder what happened to the $5 billion which Cross claims was pledged to Zimbabwe at independence! But that is beside the point.
The point is that Zimbabwe is constantly being advised by neoliberals to go the IMF way, to do the opposite of what put China where it is today. The result is that you open your textile sector and the next day Cone Textiles is gone.

Everyday there is pressure to privatise and retrench. The result is massive unemployment and 70 percent of the people living in “absolute poverty”. Scarce foreign currency is wasted by people importing trinkets in the name of freedom of choice. The result is that you can’t import essential farming and medical equipment or spares for industry. You can’t create employment.

Instead of growing drought-resistant crops according to ecological regions, people have been brainwashed to believe that civilised people grow maize and tobacco. The result is crop failure and food insecurity. You can’t cure such emergency through foreign direct investment.

In its journey to where it is today China opened its doors to foreign investment in a guided way, and allowed only limited private competition. The state was always at the centre, not the IMF or market forces. To his credit though unwittingly, at least Cross has helped to show that a Communist Party was able to drive an economic boom that went on to overtake all Western nations. China is still led by the Communist Party but has lifted its “people out of poverty and created an economy that is busy not just reshaping China but the whole world”. That is what I call leadership, not market forces or handing over strategic state enterprises for a song to so-called foreign investors.