China bashing

I started think about this entry back in my first weeks here. I jotted down a few notes at the time - and since, but it's been hard to feel comfortable with how to approach the topic. Since I'm running out of time, here's what I've come up with. I'm curious what others have seen elsewhere in Africa and in other parts of the world. I'm not sure that China is doing anything different from the earlier imperialists. At the same time, I'm quite wary of the long-term concessions being made here (such as land and other resource access) for what seems like relatively short-term development assistance. Capacity-building for African prosperity doesn't seem to be the priority, as much as "developing" Africa as a consumer market (again, a phenomenon that echoes the continent's colonial history). China's role in Africa is a much discussed and debated topic. I found this short book interesting and informative: China in Africa (2007). Please send along any articles and books that you recommend.

The past few weeks have been plagued with more frequent power outages than usual. From my observation, a definite issue is the rapid growth of the city. Even though the power cuts are not limited to our relatively new area, it seems a lot to ask – at least in such a relatively resource-limited country – for reliable infrastructure and service delivery to keep up with the growth. A recent newspaper article blamed, at least in part, a cut-back in transmission line maintenance. Some power lines (and transformers, etc.) are aging, and others seem to have been of dubious quality in the first place. Here in Addis, nearly everything that breaks down, doesn't work properly, or is otherwise of dubious quality gets blamed on the most common place of origin: China. 
 

This issue of cheaply-made goods and material extends across the Ethiopian economy. Like in other African countries, the markets here are awash in cheap (and cheaply-made) product, largely plastic but metal too. Well-made and durable products are too expensive for most consumers here, so instead they buy the less expensive and poorly-made alternatives: products that break quite fast and then need to be replaced. In our compound, we’ve experienced this short product lifespan quite a few times (a tea kettle, a couple of brooms and dustpans, pots and pans, some cleaning brushes, a power strip), and the waste produced by this cycle is evident in the ubiquitous mounds of trash that plague many neighborhoods here.  

 

Since most of these products come from China, that is where the blame gets placed. “Chinese-made” or “Made in China” are used as short-hand for anything cheap or shoddy or that doesn’t last. This includes many of Addis’s new main roads, since Chinese companies secure most of these construction contracts and thus provide the bulk of the design and engineering, as well as much of the materials, equipment, and even labor. Whether through willful negligence or more innocent inexperience, these roads are clearly not well-designed for the local conditions. They are, for example, buckling or subsiding in many places, and they are rife with potholes. Further, because they are not able to drain off the water that accumulates during the rainy season, entire sections of road all over the city become impassable due to literal lakes of standing water. This is in part due the volumes of mud that clog the drains (mud that the highway department could and should do better at removing), but there are clear design flaws as well. This was evident a few days ago when we drove through deep standing water on an overpass!

Just like with the shoddy household products, the state of the roads frustrates drivers here on a daily basis. It makes an already strained transportation situation that much worse (especially in the rain), and it must put a significant damper on both personal and general economic productivity. At the same time, it’s hard to imagine either Addis or Ethiopia being able to develop as quickly without the considerable Chinese investment. The biggest current such project is the urban light rail network (the cause of – or at least the scapegoat for – the chronic traffic jams in the city’s center). There are also numerous other Chinese construction projects in the city (such as a big new hotel at the AU compound), and I have seen a couple of big Chinese industrial sites on the outskirts of the city.  The Chinese are also rebuilding the historic rail connection between Ethiopia and Djibouti.     

 
Although the frustration here is legitimate and there is a technical truth to the origin of the poorly-made products, the frequency and derisive ease with which the Chinese are blanketly blamed feels both racist and unfair. While policies and decisions at the highest levels of government and business could certainly be more responsible, the masses on both ends of this exchange are pretty powerless. Ethiopians can only buy what they can afford, and it’s hard to imagine that the factory workers somewhere in China have any control over the quality of their output nor any conception of where the products they are making are going to end up. Nonetheless, hardly a day goes by here without someone (Ethiopian or Western visitor) blaming the poor quality of something on “the Chinese.” As a result, despite frequent media images of beaming officials sealing deals and embracing one another, the Chinese people here seem to be somewhat excluded, at the street level, from the warm hospitality that other foreigners enjoy.