As far as I'm aware, China has been giving loans to various countries in Africa and building infrastructure in exchange for money and maybe some stuff like recognizing Taiwan as part of China. But why do people say China is imperialist for doing this? Is there truth to it or is it another strain of radlibs eating state department propaganda?
Basically: loans with terms and debt collection are essential parts of neocolonial imperialism, and since China is a member of the IMF and the World Bank and participates in those enterprises they have been culpable in many of the same crimes as capitalist countries when it comes to pushing their national interest abroad to poorer ones. A big part of the protests in Myanmar, for example, is pushback against the Chinese bourgeoisie which own a lot of the capital in that country, and have the same incentive structure as any capitalist institution has when overseas to crush labor organization and capture government oversight.
Now I think it's essential in these conversations to have a sense of scale. China forgives a lot of debt, attaches fewer conditions to its loans, and builds lasting infrastructure which will build a country up (as opposed to most colonial infrastructure which just exists to get the resources out of the country as cheaply as possible). Most importantly China doesn't invade other countries, bomb every building taller than one story and prop up a China-friendly dictator. So I would never equivocate China with America or Europe, even while recognizing that China isn't always good.
Are the bad things that China has done and continues to do required in order for it to build itself up against capitalist encirclement? I don't fucking know, but they are an inevitable outgrowth the of the current SWCC system and the capital that China has exported abroad is something that it will eventually have to reckon with if the CPC is indeed a dictatorship of the proletariat and their society is indeed on the path to a transition to socialism.
tl;dr: read Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
I really enjoyed your post, but I just wanted to expand on one point:
attaches fewer conditions to its loans
Because this one is huge. The "conditions" attached to these loans are often incredibly invasive and really challenge the notion of how much sovereignty the receiver nations have, all to ensure western capitalists are the ones benefitting. These conditions can be anything like forcing countries to enact brutal austerity, privatize state industries, or make natural resources easily available for extraction to the west at low prices.
I think the brutal austerity is key to understanding this. Chinese investment has never resulted in people losing their healthcare or government subsidies for their homes. It has never turned people into slaves in sweatshops. Western countries through the IMF constantly utilize austerity when restructuring loans and inflict massive punishment on regular people, clearly to extract the most wealth they can from a country. The Chinese would rather forgive an unpaid debt or restructure the terms of a loan without harming people. Whether it is out of the goodwill of the Chinese government or in pursuit of some sort of Machiavellian "soft power" is largely irrelevant to the people whose debts are being forgiven. Thus we see Chinese loans are viewed more favorably by the third world even if they're kind of the same thing as the West's.
in Graeber's Debt book, he talks about the history of debt in relation to the Middle Kingdom and it's relations to other spheres of power and trading entities. Basically, the take home as I recall it, is that there is a long memory of understanding that it's much more optimal to buy up your trade partner's shitty debt (knowing you can't really collect in full), take a haircut on payments, or otherwise forgive loans than it is to destabilize trade relationships because desperate (politically unstable) neighbors are unpredictable. this was the basic sovereign debt policy between the middle kingdom / imperial court and other countries it did business with.
when i read that, i remember realizing that China buying up lots of the US' foreign debt wasn't some power play as it was consistently reported in western media (because why else would someone buy up another's outstanding debt, but to fuck them)... rather it was china doing it's thing and keeping us at the table, because the overall trade relationship was working for them.
like, if China ever just plain decides to be half the dick economically that our media insists they are, we would be dead in the water.
It's also because US debt is a really solid investment, and if your trading partner is getting rich through trade with you it makes sense to buy into their success.
In 1953, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. went to the United Nations as the United States ambassador. He was horrified by the way in which the new nations that came out of colonialism had a positive attitude towards the USSR. Lodge created a Psychological Strategy Board to advise him in how to make the Soviets appear like the imperialists. Arthur M. Cox, who would later head the Brookings Institute, wrote negatively of Lodge’s plans. ‘I think we have made a great mistake as a nation of assuming that because Soviet power and subversion is the greatest problem facing us today,’ he wrote in a memorandum in 1953, ‘it is therefore the greatest problem facing everybody else.’ Cox was a liberal who respected reality. ‘No amount of horror stories demonstrating the crimes of the Kremlin will convince millions of people in the free world that Soviet-inspired Communism is their main problem because they know,’ he said sharply, ‘that it is not.’ Lodge was deaf to this. He understood that if the United States battered the USSR by using its vast cultural apparatus – from the media to the films – it could succeed. Paint the Soviets as the imperialists, went the final programme of the Psychological Strategy Board, call them the ‘new colonialists’. ‘While the Soviet Union preaches its concern for the liberation of dependent peoples,’ the US officials wrote, ‘it has ruthlessly converted every territory over which it has acquired domination into a vassal of the Soviet state.’ This was written in August 1953, while the CIA overthrew the democratic leader of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh.
from Washington Bullets by Vijay Prashad
Twitter "leftists": You can't just say that everything is US propaganda!
Me: :screm-a: HHHHHHHH
Mainly radlibs eating state department propaganda. China was very bad in the past in Africa under the Deng era where they took Kissenger's foreign policy advice, supporting colonial regimes and all. Modern China is not like that at all. Relations are much better, and they've done a lot of good. So yeah criticism of current programs by Americans is just regurgitation of state department propaganda
Yanis Varoufakis explains how this respect and solidarity for expanding “progressive forces” works out in practice:
When I was Minister of Finance I had a very interesting experience with COSCO, one of the Chinese national companies that in the end bought the Port of Piraeus.
When I moved into the Ministry I found the contract from the previous government, that had already sold the Port of Piraeus for a pittance and other ridiculous conditions to the Chinese, under the guidance of course of the European International Monetary Fund. In other words, as a minister, I was bound to a particular deal that was terrible for Greece. And I went to the Chinese, and discussed it with them, and I was really astonished.
I said to them: Look, you’re paying too little, you’re not committing to a sufficient level of investment, and you are treating our workers as fodder. You’re effectively subcontracting labor to horrible companies that exploit the workers, and I can’t deal with this effectively. I proposed to them we to renegotiate the contract. So instead of getting 67% of the shares of the port, they would get — with the same price — 51%. The remaining shares would go into the Greek pension fund system, in order to bolster the capitalization of the public pensions. Secondly, I want you to commit to 180 million euros of investment within 12 months. And thirdly, proper collective bargaining with the trade unions and no subcontracting of labor. And to my astonishment, this is okay!
Can you imagine if that was a German company, or an American company? That’s what I’m saying.
This is not an isolated anecdote. London School of Economics research concludes an Ethopian case study with the discovery that “Chinese Investment In Africa Has Had ‘Significant And Persistently Positive’ Long-Term Effects Despite Controversy.” Dr. Deborah Brautigam from Johns Hopkins University concurs:
The Chinese ‘Debt Trap’ is a myth. The narrative wrongfully portrays both Beijing and the developing countries it deals with. … Our research shows that Chinese banks are willing to restructure the terms of existing loans and have never actually seized an asset from any country, much less the port of Hambantota. A Chinese company’s acquisition of a majority stake in the port was a cautionary tale, but it’s not the one we’ve often heard. With a new administration in Washington, the truth about the widely, perhaps willfully, misunderstood case of Hambantota Port is long overdue.
Why can’t capitalists replicate these strategies, even cynically, in pursuit of long-term profit? As per Lenin, “the degree of concentration which has been reached forces [capitalists] to adopt [imperialism] in order to obtain profits.” These strategies are only available to China because the CPC — China’s sovereign, the political authority — is able to check the power of capital.
from https://redsails.org/china-has-billionaires/
The infrastructure seizure thing is one they go on and on about.
They have one example, Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka.
Sri Lanka built the port with a loan from China, after which Western debt was still the majority of their debt. Western debt was also higher interest rate than the new Chinese debt, so they leased the port to China for a very long time and used the proceeds to pay off the higher interest debt.
People will tell you they did the lease to pay off the Chinese debt, which they couldn't afford to service, but they'd never missed a payment, and again, it wasn't the most expensive debt they had anyways.
There's a long article in the Atlantic of all places that debunks in detail the Sri Lankan port thing and explains there is no Chinese debt trap https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/02/china-debt-trap-diplomacy/617953/
Yeah, I think this is where I first found out exactly why the debt trap idea was bullshit. I mean, I assumed it was because it was a western "China Bad" meme, but this is where I found out exactly how they were lying.
Yeah, I guess I get socialists being wary about that. China's loans have much lower interest rates and they frequently forgive or reduce the amount if a country can't pay. They're very different than IMF loans, which also typically have additional strings attached like requiring the privatization of parts of a country's economy.
Surprisingly, mining.com has some really solid articles about this stuff
Exactly. Both the IMF and China are using financial mechanisms, but they function very differently and clearly have opposing political goals.
The western countries are used to having Africa all to themselves and exploiting the shit out of it. Along comes China with the nerve - the nerve - to offer better deals than they are. Thus all the rage. The fact that China is getting shit done is outrageous. Africa needs to be kept poor and needy - not have railroads, highways and ports built so Africa can stand on its own two feet. Next they're going to figure out they don't need exploiters any more! What will the bankers do then?
Everything that "they" do is bad, even if it looks like they're doing good, in reality there must be some bad motivation behind it that we just haven't found out about yet....
Most of those takes rely on the claim that China is putting Countries in "Debt Traps", aka giving them loans so large they will never be able to pay them off and then leveraging that debt to secure unfair contracts or transfer state property over to the Chinese government/company. If that were true, it would be a form of Imperialism. Most people never double check this so it's their go to argument, but its been debunked numerous times. Here are some examples from Lib outlets if you're trying to convince a lib
It's not true as you noted. I watched a Yale lecture on the subject for the more academically inclined.
Edit: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wMCF2eu1D0E
remember that orthodox lenin is useless. youre basically making it impossible for fdi to not being considered imperialism. an example is intra-trade in the eu, where all parties fit lenins criterion perfectly. what, are all the eu countries intra-imperializing themselves? polecon has moved on, read zak cope or john smith or something. or the neoimperialism article on monthly review sidebar
eu countries intra-imperializing themselves
is there not a case for that from west europe visavis former warsaw pact?
Their argument largely hinges upon the export of capital/loans; however, economists have already shown that the People's Republic of China has always been an active international lender even in the 50s, 60s, and 70s under Mao.
The Soviet Union under Stalin also played a critical role in developing China with massive loans to build its infrastructure and the industrial foundation that was key to China's economic independence. These Soviet loans were certainly not an altruistic giveaway and had to be paid back. According to Deng Xiaoping:
Stalin, on the other hand, did some good for us. After the founding of the People’s Republic, he helped us to build up an industrial complex that is still the foundation of the Chinese economy. He didn’t help us for free — fine, we had to pay him — but he helped us.
Numerous Marxist economists and scholars including Michael Roberts, David Kotz, Junshang Liang, Zhonglin Li, Lijun Su, Guglielmo Carchedi, and Minqi Li have shown that China is not an imperialist country in a Marxist sense. China's focus on mutually beneficial state-led projects for direly needed infrastructure, industrialization, schools, hospitals, manufacturing, and power generation are all critical developments required by the global south to break out of their state of underdevelopment and dependency inflicted upon them by the western imperial core. China's international loans and trade deals do not impose neoliberal structural adjustment programs of privatization and austerity or other harsh conditionality measures that are utilized by western capitalist countries and western-dominated financial institutions like the IMF.
According to Marxist economists David Kotz and Zhongjin Li:
More importantly, Horn et al (2019) also find that unlike other major economies, almost all of China’s external lending and portfolio investment is undertaken by the Chinese government, state-owned companies, or the state-controlled central bank, not by private investors that follow the logic behind profit-oriented decisions.
Chinese official lending programs, such as the more recent Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), function as a vehicle for China’s economic statecraft and international cooperation, rather than a search for state domination. Moreover, the investment and loan decisions are mainly channeled through two policy banks, the Chinese Development Bank (CDB) and the Export-Import Bank of China (Chexim), which are largely development-oriented and policy-oriented financial agencies still controlled by the state that aim to achieve the policy objectives of the party and state, rather than originating from private capitalists in pursuit of profit.
By investing and lending largely to developing countries, especially low-income countries, and promoting industrialization in the global South, China is seen as supporting initiatives to address development problems not solved by neoliberalism’s corporate initiatives. While China’s current approach is more commercial than formerly, it continues to support state-run projects in industry and agriculture, which contrasts with the insistence in Washington Consensus on the conditionalities of structural adjustment programs (Sautman and Yan, 2007).
The evidence suggests that China’s strategic lending programs are aimed at reaching mutually beneficial deals rather than at securing conditions for extracting extra-high profits by Chinese capitalists abroad.
Chinese capitalists have treated local workers similarly to the treatment by capitalist investors from other countries, while by contrast Chinese SOEs have been more responsive to requests from the host government regarding more job creation and better labor conditions (Oya & Schaefer, 2019).
Other research also has found that Chinese projects create net employment for national workers and crowd in domestic firms as well.
A new Monthly Review article by two Marxist economists on more recent developments in imperialism: https://monthlyreview.org/2021/05/01/five-characteristics-of-neoimperialism/
Thank you, it's not always easy to find sources that counter the western regimes' propaganda.
I'm not trying to be a smartass here, but how is it not?
If a government is enacting a policy with the intention of gaining influence in foreign countries, that would seem like imperialism to me.
Imperialism isn't just "when the government influences another country".
The basic features of imperialism Lenin identified in Imperialism:
(1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; (2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this “finance capital”, of a financial oligarchy; (3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves, and (5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed. Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.
Mutually beneficially trade deals or infrastructure investments are not imperialist. Doing things for other countries in order to gain support from them is just diplomacy.
What do you call it when a government is trying to increase its hegemony over other governments?
Hegemony is a loaded term. Trying to influence other governments is just trying to influence other governments. China is a relatively powerful country, but the underlying logic behind its support of African economies isn't imperialist due to the structure of their state and economy (i.e., not being controlled by a capitalist oligarchy). It's more similar in nature to the relationship between Cuba or the DPRK and post-colonial African governments, but takes the form of large infrastructure projects because China is actually capable of funding them. And obviously it's not purely altruistic, because China's still a developing country and still needs allies to support it in the struggle against American imperialism, etc., but that doesn't make the relationship exploitative.
China doesn't impose particular economic policies on the African countries they deal with, frequently forgives debts and offers interest-free loans, doesn't invade or sanction African countries, etc. Basically, they aren't doing any of the things colonial and neocolonial powers have done to subjugate African nations. They're just making mutually beneficial deals that both undermine predatory imperialist international financing institutions and drive the development of both China and Africa.
Check out this interview with a Zambian socialist presidential candidate where he talks about China's relationship with Africa: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CYKEq0fCggI
To me, imperialism is when one government tries to increase its own power and influence, usually by getting control over countries (be it outright or with regards to certain policies).
Ok, but that's literally all governments. Not even just every state - every polity has a stake in strengthening itself. That doesn't seem like a very useful definition.
I didn't word it very well initially. Namely, I updated the comment to include that another part of it getting control of other countries.
I think so.
Now, I fully acknowledge that they aren't forcing anybody to join them (although its often a case of a government having to choose between BRI loans and worse IMF loans, so they have to do something).
This may not be the most accurate comparison, but I think it would be analogous to the Marshall Plan, in that something beneficial to governments is brought forth, but the recipient cedes hegemony to the lender.
No it's not.
However, that is likely not the case when one government is a hegemon and the other is much weaker.
Isn't that just "politics" though?
If a country was critically short on food and another country gave them food, no strings attached, it would still gain influence with the nation receiving aid.
I'd imagine that there are ways in which an imperialist country can help another country in one way, while demanding something in return that far exceeds the value of the amount of "help" that was offered. Things like tax exemptions for foreign nationals, low/zero interest loans directed to outside business interests, permission to use airspace for military/intelligence purposes, forcing the country in need to take loans with conditions that they cannot possibly hope to adhere to...
I think the latest headlines I've seen use the phrase "debt trap". Might start skimming some articles with those search terms.
I'm not a big enough geo political economics nerd to speak with any confidence. Most of what I've read is a bit of a mystery to me, so ya know, take a pound of salt with this comment.
But one headline framing that I've seen was that China was setting up these African nations with some kind of debt trap.
I've also seen headlines that frame it as, China is giving credit but doesn't seem to be using it to control those nations in a way that we'd expect the USA to do, the debit trap isn't a thing that China is doing.
The only, probably useless analogy, that I can think of is going to the bank and trying to get a loan.
There are loans where the bank will just give you some money with only the normal conditions you'd expect, there will be interest payments on top of the principal, you will forfeit your collateral if you default on the loan, etc.
But there are other loans, like Mortgages, where the bank will get to make way more conditions regulating specific actions you can take. For Mortgages, if you ever lose your home owners insurance for any reason, including because the insurance company fucked up, the bank can immediately send you a letter telling you that you've defaulted on your loan (this happened to me, the insurance company unfucked everything before the sheriff's kicked us out but it was still pretty fucking scary) and you've got "x" amount of days to pay up or lose your house to the bank. I think Agri loans probably fit this example too. Go in with a busniess plan asking for a few thousand dollars in start up money and you might be told no outright. Talk about buying a CAFO and contracting with Tyson and the bank will give you a several million dollar loan they know you aren't going to be able to pay back before filing for bankruptcy.
I would hardly call myself an expert on BRI. As I understand, the terms that get offered to governments are better than what they would get from the IMF.
In either case, I find it hard to believe that China is doing that and expecting nothing in return.
... nothing in return.
Quid pro quo is fine so long as the terms of what is being expected in return aren't outside what the less "powerful" nation is able and wanting to accept.
Like, lending a neighbor some cash and expecting the cash back at some point in the future as well as maybe being able to ask for help later with a better chance of being told "yes" versus lending cash to my neighbor on the condition that I get to roll around naked on top of their car.
Both scenarios, I ask/expect something in return. Only one of those scenarios do I do something "allegedly" weird and "allegedly" uncomfortable for the other party.
I would still say that if you are doing something increase your influence, it is doing just that.
Depends on what you mean by "influence".
Being a person that can be relied on by others to help them, increases your influence with those people you help. Proving yourself a valuable friend can increase your influence among the people you hang out with.
You can gain influence both through subterfuge/coercion or just by being a decent creature.
The USA could increase its influence by trying to have a good reputations with other nations, but usually can't keep the need for dick swinging in check long enough to do so. Sure, the PRC could have some nefarious scheme going on... or it could just being trying to work with other countries that could use the help.
I don't disagree that BRI policies benefit or have benefitted various countries.
All I'm saying is that China isn't likely doing this just out of the goodness of their heart and they have the goal of gaining influence.
Okay I have a gut feeling that they are doing it out of the goodness of their heart... if that's your only standard here
why is that imperialism to you and not diplomacy? whats the difference to you?
Diplomacy is reaching out and improving or having good relations.
Imperialism is when you try to increase your power, often by gaining influence.
You really just need to spend some time reading and learning about imperialism, because you're incorrect about what that word means. Try reading Lenin's Imperialism to learn more about it. There's far more to imperialism than "trying to increase your power"
I agree with Lenin's description of imperialism. Essentially, finance capital is created in a country and expands to other places, where it becomes dominant and everything there is subservient to it.
However, I don't think its wrong to say that a government ceding its hegemony, in whole or part, would be an example of imperialism, independent of Lenin's description.
Do you think that "reaching out and improving or having good relations" isn't being done to build or utilize influence?
No, you applied my definition to a specific function, one that I didn't bring up.
I guess we're miscommunicating here. My first comment, to clarify, was intended to ask, what do you think the goal of
"reaching out and improving or having good relations"
is for a state other than to gain or use influence with other states?
EDIT: Also, you did bring up the idea of states cultivating influence with each other (to gain power) as imperialism.
"Imperialism is when you try to increase your power, often by gaining influence."
I'm saying that to me the definition you gave for diplomacy and the one you gave for imperialism seem almost identical but one of them uses more negative sounding language.
