I’m writing to you shortly after recording a podcast episode with the technology expert John Lee about the ramifications of the U.S.-China tech dispute for the rest of the world.
That conversation will reach your inbox next week, but it made me think of how huge as the standoff between China and the United States is, it maps on top of and increasingly affects an even bigger challenge: the challenge of national development across the Global South. This challenge, which affects the majority of the world’s population, is further exacerbated by the growing climate crisis.
The scant development choices open to Global South policymakers are further being narrowed by the increasing geopolitical pressure reshaping the development landscape. Tech choices is one example. Choices around critical minerals is another.
In addition to our long reads below, I’d like to suggest another: Angela Tritto’s recent paper for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on the complications of Chinese investment in Indonesia’s nickel sector. It provides an interesting example of how these development conundrums play out on the ground.
It also provides an interesting counterpoint to my conversation with Lauren Johnston (see below) on the trade in donkey skins from Africa to China, where they’re turned into sought-after wellness tonics marketed to China’s emerging middle class.
Even though the donkey can be seen as a form of ancient technology, it is also part of the natural environment and human society. Indonesian nickel will be used in much more futuristic tech, but the imposition of global supply chains on a local landscape has similar environmental and social effects on Indonesian villages as the donkey trade imposes on Tanzanian ones.
In both cases, the role of China as an extractive force and a powerful market is increasingly fraught with geopolitics. However, these geopolitics also have the effect of obscuring the wrenching choices the global market imposes on poor countries in the context of massive global development gaps.
The global conversation about a ‘new cold war’ has so far largely avoided these realities, and policymakers in Washington, Beijing and other major capitals seem indifferent to them. However, they will in the long run shape the very world in which these geopolitical disputes are taking place – I fear largely for the worse.
