While China’s ties with Europe, the U.S., Japan, and other wealthy northern countries steadily worsen, Beijing is leaning harder on its relations with states in the Global South. The importance of those ties was on full display over the past week on a range of issues, everything from Xinjiang to online governance to infrastructure.
Shannon Tiezzi, editor in chief of the Asia-Pacific news website The Diplomat and a well-known China-watcher, joins Eric & Cobus for a wide-ranging discussion on current trends in Chinese international relations with a focus on Beijing’s engagement in Africa and other developing regions.
Show Notes:
- Reuters: Senegal aims for digital sovereignty with new China-backed data center
- Vox: China is buying Muslim leaders’ silence on the Uyghurs by Alex Ward
- Reuters: Tanzania considers reviving $10 billion port project by Shannon Tiezzi
About Shannon Tiezzi:
Shannon Tiezzi is the Editor in Chief of the Asia-Pacific news website and magazine The Diplomat where she writes on China’s foreign relations, domestic politics, and economy. Shannon previously served as a research associate at the U.S.-China Policy Foundation, where she hosted the weekly television show China Forum. She received her A.M. from Harvard University and her B.A. from The College of William and Mary. Shannon has also studied at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
Transcript:
Eric Olander: If you’re interested in what China’s doing in Africa and the global south, you’re going to want to subscribe to the China Africa Project. We’ve indexed every major news story going back years, and it’s easily searchable by country topic or keyword. Plus, we’re the only source for daily analysis on all of the big stories related to Chinese engagement in Africa and throughout the developing world. With a subscription, you’ll enjoy full access to the site, plus you’ll get our popular daily email newsletter that comes out every morning at 6:00 AM Washington Time. Subscriptions start at just $7 a month for students and teachers and $15 a month for everyone else. To sign up, just go to chinaafricaproject.com/subscribe. Once again, that’s chinaafricaproject.com/subscribe.
Intro: The China in Africa Podcast is brought to you in partnership with the Africa China Reporting Project at Wits University in Johannesburg. The ACRP aims to improve the quality of reporting on Africa-China relations through reporting grants, workshops, and other opportunities for journalists. More information at africachinareporting.co.za, and our dedicated training website at africachinatraining.com.
Eric: Hello, and welcome to another edition of The China in Africa Podcast, a proud member of the Sinica Network from SupChina. I’m Eric Olander, and as always, I’m joined by Cobus van Staden, the senior China Africa researcher at the South African Institute of International Affairs in Johannesburg, South Africa. A very good afternoon to you, Cobus.
Cobus van Staden: Good afternoon.
Eric: Cobus, it has been an incredibly busy week in China-Africa, China-global south, China developing world news. And normally this time of year, things do kind of slow down, but boy, over the past week or two, it’s been quite just hectic. And a big story crossed this weekend out of Tanzania that took a lot of us by surprise. President Samia Hassan, she was speaking at the 12th Summit of Tanzania’s National Business Council, and you can hear her there in the background
President Samia Hassan: I would like to request to share with you the good news that we have begun talks to start…
Eric: And she announced the resumption of talks with China over the Bagamoyo Port. And this is something that we did not expect. In her speech, she said, “Regarding the Bagamoyo Port Project, let me give you the good news that we have started talks to revive the whole project. We are going to start talks with the investors that came for the project that is the state of Oman and China, with the aim of opening it for the benefit of our nation.” Now, the reason why this was so surprising to everybody is because this was a negotiation between her predecessor, John Magufuli and China Merchant Holdings Group that famously exploded back in 2019 when John Magufuli slammed the Chinese for causing what they said was unfair and awkward deals. He said only a drunkard would take this deal. And in just really a lot of flair, shut down the talks.
And everybody, especially in places like Washington, took this as an example of, “Aha, you see. Somebody is standing up to China and sticking it to the man on the Belt & Road.” We heard a lot of that same rhetoric in Malaysia back when Mohamad Mahathir was prime minister, and he was fighting with the Chinese over a $20 billion Eastern Coast, eastern railway line that he said was hideously expensive. What was Mahathir doing? He was negotiating. He hit back. Everybody said the same thing. Sticking it to the Chinese. The Belt & Road is dead. Sure enough, a deal was struck at $14 billion. The railroad is back. And Mahathir was singing the praises of the Chinese. I was convinced at the time that Magufuli was going to do the same thing. He passed away earlier this year. President Hassan took over for him.
President Hassan has shown to be very, very close to the Chinese. Just a week ago, she had talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and one has to assume that the resumption of the Bagamoyo Port is tied to the conversations that she had with Xi Jinping. Very quickly, just to refresh you, here’s where we left off back in 2019 on the Bagamoyo Port. China merchants will get a 33-year lease instead of a 99-year lease that they demanded previously. This is the terms from the Magufuli government, remember, that brought everything to a standstill. There will be no tax holidays, and China Merchants will be subjected to all taxes as determined by the Tanzania Revenue Authority. China merchants will not be granted any special status and will be required to pay market rates for water and electricity just like any other investor.
So, you can see what China Merchants was gunning for and what Magufuli did not want. China Merchants will not be allowed to run any other businesses within the port without the government’s permission. The government will conduct regular inspections to ensure compliance just as they would with any other investor. And the government will retain the right to develop other ports even if those new facilities are in direct competition with the Bagamoyo Port. So that was where we left off. It will be very interesting to see if she can pick up there, if they’re going to get the least terms that they wanted under the Magufuli government or if they’re going to have to compromise.
I wrote today on our website and for our subscribers why I think that President Hassan has got an uphill battle. The world has changed a lot since 2019 and also since 2013 when this whole process began with the Chinese. And I’m not convinced that she’s going to get a very big deal. Go to chinaafricaproject.com and you can find out why. Let’s now go to Senegal. Very big story out of Senegal. And this came when President Macky Sall, who, he’s been getting, again, like President Hassan, moving closer and closer to the Chinese worldview. And we heard last week that they launched a new Huawei-built Chinese finance data center, where they are nationalizing data within Senegal. And this is very much an endorsement of the Chinese worldview on cyber sovereignty. Let’s hear what President Macky Sall had to say at the commissioning ceremony of the new data center.
Macky Sall: The data center in Diamniadio is another example of the cooperation between Senegal and China. Mr. Ambassador, please extend to my friend, President Xi Jinping, my sincere and gratitude for being so supportive. Since I was elected president of Senegal, China has not once hesitated to support our request.
Eric: Wow, Macky Sall giving the full embrace to Chinese President Xi Jinping. And more importantly, for the first time in Africa, we are seeing a government, again, fully align itself with China’s views on cyber sovereignty. And this follows, again, the topic we’ve talked about previously on the show with the Twitter band in Nigeria, where they too, political and governing elites, have really looked to China for inspirational on how to manage some of those issues on cyber sovereignty. Last point, Cobus, before we get to your take on this, on Xinjiang. Now, this was probably the most contentious issue of the past week or so. There was a very high-profile vote at the United Nation Human Rights Council. Wang Yi, Chinese Foreign Minister, he reached out over the weekend to Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry.
And the two talked about Xinjiang and the statements without actually mentioning the word Xinjiang. So, here’s from the readout from the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs from the talk with Foreign Minister Shoukry. “China appreciates Egypt’s participation in a joint statement supporting China at the 47th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council.” Now, if you recall, 44 countries, that number fell down to 43 after Ukraine flipped. We can talk about why later in the show today. But 43 countries signed a Canadian-led joint statement that was submitted to the UNHRC that expresses, “grave concern about the human rights situation in the Xinjiang-Uyghur autonomous region.” And the statement went on to call for the immediate meaningful and unfettered access to Xinjiang for independent observers, including the High Commissioner.
Now, as we’ve seen in the past, the signatories of these letters generally fall into two broad categories, wealthy states, and that’s kind of French for Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, and then a few remaining states who still recognize Taiwan diplomatically. So, for example, Honduras was on the list of signatories that was there. The most interesting signatory in the list was Israel, which I found a bit odd given that Israel’s own complicated history with human rights in the Muslim world and the fact that Israel has been trying to foster closer ties with China. So, I didn’t really understand that one, but let’s move on from that. We’re going to try and find an Israeli expert to join us on the show in the Future.
This issue on Xinjiang is as hot as it comes in the United States and Europe today. And the Xinjiang issue gained particular prominence this week in the United States when Axios reporter, Jonathan Swan, interviewed Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan for Axios’s Weekly News Magazine that’s broadcast on HBO. And it took the developing world position on Xinjiang and put it right into a lot of American reliving room homes who’s not used to hearing this, what Cobus, you and I talk about quite a bit, Swan put it straight to the Prime Minister about what he and many people in the West perceive as a total double standard when it comes to human rights and Xinjiang. Let’s take a listen to Jonathan Swan and Pakistani Prime Minister, Imran Khan.
Jonathan Swan: Prime Minister, why are you so outspoken about Islamophobia in Europe and the United States, but totally silent about the genocide of Muslims in Western China?
Prime Minister Imran Khan: What our conversations have been with the Chinese, this is not the case, according to them.
Jonathan: The evidence is just overwhelming.
Imran: Whatever issues we have with the Chinese, we speak to them behind closed doors. China has been one of the greatest friends to us in our most difficult times. When we were really struggling, our economy was struggling, China came to our rescue. So, we respect the way they are, and whatever issues we have, we speak behind closed doors.
Eric: Cobus, I think if Jonathan Swan had interviewed any leader in Africa, we would’ve heard the exact same answer. What do you think?
Cobus: Yeah, I tend to agree. I think it’s not surprising seeing the developmental impact that China has had in Pakistan, that Imran Khan is taking this stance. And I think that would be echoed by many African governments as well, including many of Muslim majority countries. What was interesting for me as well is this idea of kind of bilateral private, behind-the-scenes talks as the major way of interacting with China because that is obviously also the line that China tends to push. That behind closed doors bilateral talks is China’s preferred model of dealing with the rest of the world. So, it is interesting to see this also reflected back from the opposite side of that interaction, despite that interaction also being so criticized in the African case. But yeah, I’m not surprised that this is a stance that is taking. And I think Western pressure will find many similar echoes from other people as well.
Eric: As you can see, there is a ton going on off the headlines of, I think, of a lot of people in the U.S. and Europe who don’t follow what goes on in the global south as closely. So, we wanted to get a perspective on how China and the global South are fitting into also the U.S.-China, U.S.-Europe, and the standoffs that the G-7, for example, is having with China. So, we want to go back to Washington, D.C. to our good friend Shannon Tiezzi, who’s the editor-in-chief of the Asia Pacific News website and magazine, The Diplomat. She joined us from Falls Church Virginia outside of D.C. A very good morning, Shannon, welcome back to the show.
Shannon Tiezzi: Hey, Eric. Hi, Cobus. Always good to join you guys.
Eric: I’m sorry for the long wind up to get to you, but you can see there’s a lot going on right now. Let’s start to get your take on Xinjiang. Before the show started, you said you weren’t surprised by Imran Khan’s statements, but it was interesting because watching Vox and Axios and The New York Times and Washington Post cover the interview, the Jonathan Swan interview, there was a sense of a lot of pearl-clutching in D.C. over his take. As Cobus said, this is not an unusual position among many leaders in the developing world. What was your impression of this whole Xinjiang issue, both with the letter to the UN High Commissioner and then also the Jonathan Swan interview?
Shannon: I think what really caught people’s attention about Imran Khan’s statements was that he was saying the quiet part out loud if you will. Generally, countries like Pakistan, countries in Africa, and many Muslim countries in the Middle East, for example, they just don’t talk about Xinjiang, right? Their way of taking a stand on it is to not say anything. Imran Khan was pushed on it in an interview. He had to say something, and so he did. He said, again, as Cobus was saying, this is not surprising at all that the leader of Pakistan would essentially say, “China’s a good friend to us and we are not going to be critical about them in public.” That’s essentially what he said. It shouldn’t surprise anyone, but the fact that he actually said it so bluntly, I think is what is surprising to people.
When you look at these letters at the UN Human Rights Council, we call them dueling letters since 2019. And it’s interesting to look at the signatories and how they’re shifting. You can call it the greater global West, as you said, it’s almost all Western Europe, the United States, Canada, Australian, New Zealand, Japan, right? The countries that generally claim human rights defenses as a part of their foreign policy. You can obviously debate whether or not that’s true in practice, but they talk about it quite a bit on the one side. And that’s gained traction. They’ve managed to convince some more partners in Western Europe and a little bit in the developing world, as you noted, generally countries that don’t have diplomatic relations with China, to begin with, to join their ranks.
The countries that have signed China’s list are a little bit more interesting, in my view, because we’ve seen some change there. There’s quite a number of African countries that are signing on to letters supporting Chinese’ Xinjiang policy. A large number of Middle Eastern countries, Pakistan, again, Muslim majority countries that you might assume would be very concerned about what’s happening to their Muslim brethren in China, their leaders are signing these documents saying nothing’s going wrong. But the central Asian countries are interesting because they have quite a number of people who are of their own ethnicities. It’s not just the Uyghurs. Some people are not aware of this, but there’s also ethnic Kazakhs, ethnic Kyrgyz, ethnic Uzbeks in Western China in Xinjiang, and they’ve also been caught up in these camps.
So, it’s a much more difficult political issue for the leaders of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan to sign these letters when they have their own ethnic people who they’ve really centered themselves as we are the home of the Kazakhs or the Kyrgyz being caught up in these crackdowns, and there’s some domestic pressure there. And that brings me back to Pakistan because Pakistan also has some skin in the game. This is not just an abstract human rights issue. There are Pakistanis who have Chinese Uyghur spouses and children who have been talking to the government saying, “We haven’t been able to contact our family members for years. What are you doing about this?” They’re raising a little bit of awareness.
And then there’s also a Uyghur diaspora community in Pakistan. As Uyghurs were starting to flee China, even back in the early 2010s, Pakistan became a home for some of them. It borders China, it’s Muslim majority. They felt safe there, and now they no longer feel safe. There’s worries about detentions and deportations from this Uyghur community that’s settled in Pakistan. And we actually just today had an article on this, on how Pakistanis are being caught up in this question of Uyghur and other repression of Muslims in China, and how the Pakistani government has become complicit in this as part of its relationship with China.
So, it’s a bigger issue than just making some sort of principled stance on abstract human rights issues. For Pakistan in particular, there are actual Pakistanis who are saying, “My life is being impacted by this.” And I would imagine that that is what Khan is alluding to when he’s talking about private backchannel discussions with the Chinese. We saw this example in Central Asia as well. The government is probably not talking to China about how they should shut down these reeducation camps or concentration camps. They’re probably saying, “These are the specific examples of Pakistani citizens who have… their wives or their husbands or their children are in your camps. Can we please get them out and help to save a little bit of face for the government domestically?”
Cobus: And Shannon, if you look at the two different coalitions centered around Western countries and the pro-China one, which one seems to you the more robust one? And I was wondering, related to that, is one of the problems on the Western side that people are just like, well, the people who run Guantanamo Bay, they’re already in a difficult position in relation to Muslim human rights. So, it’s not a kind of a perfect place to start this kind of campaign from.
Shannon: Well, I think there’s some interesting threads going on here. One is that the, just for shorthand, we can call them the U.S. and the China coalitions because that’s how we really conceive of this battle anyway. But the U.S. coalition has been more stable and it’s been gaining momentum. If I am recalling correctly, I don’t think it’s lost any members since the original letter in 2019, but it’s continued to add slowly to the size of its coalition. Whereas the China grouping, it’s larger in numbers, but countries will drop out and reappear. And we have three issues of the letter now. So, it seems that in that sense, the China coalition is not quite as robust. I think that’s a good word that you used. They have more numbers on their side, but the support is a little bit shakier if that makes sense.
I think it’s very clear that no country is signing onto this letter for China because they wholeheartedly believe that what China is doing is the right thing, and there’s like a strong moral conviction there. It’s convenient diplomatically for them to sign. And there’s also a large number of these countries, I think, just don’t want human rights issues at home to become an international political issue. So when you’re talking about Iran and probably Egypt as well, and certainly Russia, many of these countries are joining not only because they have good relations with China and Chinese investment is important. Of course, those are factors in their calculations, but also they don’t want to set the precedent that their human rights abuses at home can become the subject for international criticism.
And that’s really one way I conceive of what China is doing is they’re trying to change the norm that the UN Human Rights Council should be weighing in on this sort of thing at all. Which, of course, if the UN Human Rights Council is not doing this, what is even the point of having one? That’s a different point of discussion altogether.
Eric: Yeah. And the Chinese have been very good at maintaining a coalition. Again, the numbers, as you pointed out, do fluctuate, but there is a core group that is there and couple notable things — not a single African country signed onto the most recent letter against the Chinese and not a single Muslim-majority country. And I think that is a key talking point. My take on the Imran Khan interview was quite the opposite of the perception of what it was in the United States. I think it was a big win for the Chinese. Because here you had, on American television, a head of state pushing back on the issue of Xinjiang and defending what he was doing.
Again, a lot of people saw this as a loss for the Chinese in terms of the optics and the perception, but I think probably in Beijing, my guess in the foreign ministry is they saw this as a win, and overall, that they held the core of their coalition together. Let’s move on to vaccines. Time is very limited here. Lots of concern is going on right now, and you’ve been writing about this extensively in The Diplomat with your team there as well, about the efficacy of Chinese vaccines. This at the same time comes as there are reports coming out of Indonesia that 10 out of 26 doctors who passed away after receiving two shots of Chinese vaccines, they died. So, 10 died after receiving two shots of Chinese vaccines.
In this case, it was Sinovac. This was reported by both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. It was reported by an Indonesian medical association, at the same time, in places like the Seychelles. And other countries that have been heavily reliant on Chinese vaccines, infection rates have been going up. Interestingly enough, death and hospitalization rates, not necessarily. Let’s talk about the debate right now over the efficacy question amid the emergence of the new Delta variant that has been sweeping across Africa.
Cobus, you are in lockdown now because of the delta variant. We, too, here in Vietnam are as well. So the question for you, Shannon, is the question for many public health officials in the global south, it’s not a question as to whether or not a Chinese vaccine is the most effective vaccine out there. Even the Chinese admit that it’s not, but it’s better than nothing. And that’s the gamble that a lot of global south public health officials are taking. What’s your assessment from the coverage you guys have been doing at the diplomat on this issue?
Shannon: Yeah, this is a very difficult issue because a lot of times in the Western media it’s kind of framed as, oh, why are these countries relying on the Chinese vaccine when there’s better options out there? Well, the answer is there’s not better options for them. The U.S. just recently started giving vaccines away, and they’re still very limited numbers. Obviously, every single shot is of crucial importance to the person who receives it, but you’re not talking about billions and billions of doses. The entire G-7 has only promised 2 billion doses for pretty much the rest of the world,
Eric: Which is a billion people on a two-shot dose.
Shannon: Yes, exactly. So, these countries want to vaccinate their populations. And really, China, now that India is kind of turned inward to deal with its own huge wave of COVID with the Delta variant. China’s really the only one offering. And so, as you said, for a lot of these countries, it’s Chinese vaccines or nothing. And these countries, very understandably, said, “We’ll take a vaccine where the efficacy is not really known,” because there hasn’t been very transparent data coming out from these Chinese companies. But let’s say, just for the sake of argument, it’s 75%. That’s better than 0%. The problem is that we’re seeing now that this delta variant may not be very well protected against by the Chinese vaccines. And I think some of the countries in Asia that we’ve been following that are having sharp rises in their case counts are countries like Mongolia, they have very high vaccination percentages, but largely with the Chinese vaccine, and they’re still seeing their cases rise.
Now, I think we can assume that it would’ve been even worse than what it is now. I don’t think we can say that the Chinese vaccine is worth worse than nothing, but it’s clearly not good enough for these countries to make it to herd immunity and they no longer have to worry about COVID and they can reopen. And honestly, we’re seeing a little bit of reflection of that in China as well. I think it’s very telling that China, with all of its prowess in vaccinating its people and the rapid rate that that’s going, they still don’t have any concrete plans to reopen their borders or in their…
Eric: At least another year, maybe. I mean, we’re talking another year.
Shannon: Yes, exactly. And I think that is essentially an admission from the Chinese government that they don’t think even if they vaccinate 70%, 80% of their population, that that’s going to be enough for them to be able to reopen safely. And so you can think about these other countries, Mongolia, Cambodia, Chile, the countries in Africa that haven’t even gotten close to vaccinating those numbers of their populations. How are they going to be able to reopen safely while also relying on the same vaccines? And again, that’s not to say that China was promoting a bad product. This is the same vaccine that it’s giving its own citizens. This is just the best thing that’s available to citizens in China and much of the developing world.
Frankly, the evidence is showing that it’s not good enough, and that’s a serious problem because the rest of the world, the U.S., the UK are not doing a good enough job of sharing the vaccines that might be good enough. So, that’s where we are right now and it’s very concerning, but I do not have an answer, unfortunately.
Eric: Okay. Cobus, let me put the same question to you. It’s concerning, and I kind of walk away from this issue thinking Americans and Europeans and people in the global north may poo-poo the Chinese vaccines, but my God, they better pray that they work and that the Delta variant doesn’t cut through. Because if the Delta variant cuts through these vaccines, you look at countries like Zimbabwe, they’re defenseless then because Zimbabwe has been takings Sinopharm. What is Zimbabwe going to do if it’s not the Chinese vaccine? Hundreds of millions of people now depend on the Chinese vaccines, and if they don’t work, this thing is going to get messy quickly.
Cobus: Yeah, I mean it’s already messy. It’s interesting you mentioned Zimbabwe. In South Africa, we have a situation where, on the one hand, Zimbabwe has received quite a lot of Chinese vaccines, and they’re using them as a wide rollout. South Africa has so far mostly focused on Western vaccines, and they’ve actually received, just this week, they’ve received their first COVAX shipment, months and months after ordering it, by the way. And that was Pfizer vaccines. And that’s actually being rolled out in South Africa at the moment. But what we are seeing is also that there’s increasing popular kind of movement in support of the Chinese vaccines in South Africa. So, there was a big protest march, late last week by the left-off center opposition party, the Economic Freedom Fighters in South Africa, who they’re now campaigning actively for the approval in South Africa of both Russian and Chinese-made vaccines.
So, it’s interesting to see the two countries going in the different directions and it’ll be interesting to see what the effect is. Shannon, from your side, is there any fallout for G-7 countries and the larger Western countries from the kind of lack of support that they’ve given to the COVAX alliance? Is there any indication that this is diminishing global buy-in to their agenda at all?
Shannon: It’s still a little bit early to tell. And it’s complicated because a lot of the really crucial countries that the U.S. really wants to stay on their good side, so to speak, are getting special shipments of the vaccine directly from the United States. And you saw that when Biden first announced that the U.S. was going to start donating some of its excess supply of vaccines. Some of it went to COVAX and some of it was just going directly to bilateral partners. South Korea got about half a million doses to, specifically, to give to its military, but that’s still, we’re talking about a fungible commodity. So, every dose that’s not going to a South Korean soldier from South Korea supply is going to someone else. I think the U.S., for all of its talk about poo-pooing vaccine diplomacy and not having an agenda, has been targeting countries that it wants to keep support in or win support in with these vaccine doses.
And so, it’s hard to tell what the general impact is going to be on the U.S. and the G-7 image in other countries because perceptions of them were already more mixed, or just no one in the United States is courting Zimbabwe on any sort of realistic level, right? I don’t know if you can say that they’re taking a hit more than it’s reinforcing the perceptions that were already there, that they’re not on the agenda of the G-7 in any meaningful way.
Eric: The U.S. may not be courting Zimbabwe, but Vietnam should be on their map. Vietnam is a country that’s in play. It’s where I live right now. Last week I got my vaccine, and it was an AstraZeneca dose that was given by the Japanese. And there, at the vaccine center, there was a nice little Japanese flag saying, courtesy of the people of Japan. And I just thought, “Wow, what a missed opportunity for the Americans.” What a missed opportunity. I mean, how easy would it have been to bring the vaccines here? And at the same time, there was a woman who I was waiting in line with, and she was just livid over the fact that children in the United States get a vaccine. And here in Vietnam, there are none for frontline workers. I mean, just, you cannot say how pissed off she was.
How is it possible that a 12-year-old kid gets a Pfizer dose and the hospital workers here are dying on the front lines and nothing? And she just couldn’t get out of her. So, I think the United States has an optics issue that it has to overcome. And Japan, by the way, is now stepping up on vaccine diplomacy quite a bit. Another million doses are coming here to Vietnam. They shipped to Taiwan. They’re talking about shipping to other points in Asia. But that’s all filling a void that 25, 30 years ago probably would’ve been filled by the United States at the time. Very quickly before we go, let’s move on to B3W BRI, the Belt & Road. A lot of people talking about the Belt & Road in Washington these days.
Anthony Blinken, he brought it up at the G-7 Summit, Build Back Better World. That’s a take from the Biden Administration’s own infrastructure agenda. What’s your reading of the possibility that B3W will actually come to life and be more successful than, say, let’s see, the Clean Network. Remember we had a Blue Dot Network. We’ve had so many failed American programs trying to take on the Chinese. What about B3W?
Shannon: Yeah, B3W is very ambitious. It’s not at all clear how it’s going to come together in practice, especially because it places such a heavy emphasis on private funding. And traditionally, if you’re building a railroad infrastructure, hard infrastructure like that, it’s generally not very profitable, right? At least in the short term. So, it’s very hard to get private companies that are willing to step in and finance this sort of thing without government support. So, yeah, it’s not clear in practice if it’s going to live up to the grand rhetoric. But that being said, I think the fact that this is an official G-7 initiative gives it a little bit more help than… It’s not just the U.S. Clean network, something that the United States is doing alone. The Blue Dot Network is just a Quad thing.
So, there’s a little bit more buy-in from the fact that it came from the G-7. And also, not just the G-7, but you also had four invited guests on the sideline there who presumably are at least going to be involved in talks with this and might take part themselves. So you had South Korea, India, South Africa, and I’m blanking on the fourth one now.
Eric: Oh, I’m blanking on the fourth one too. Okay, we’ll look it up. But keep going.
Shannon: Yeah, so I think there’s a little bit more hope there, but I don’t… People are billing this as an alternative to the Belt & Road. This is not an alternative to the Belt & Road. This is another way to plug that massive hole in financing that exists for the developing world, and it’s going to be taking place alongside the Belt & Road. I think what makes it interesting is the way that these two initiatives can potentially compete with each other to make things better for everyone in the developing world. So, obviously, China’s Belt & Road has inspired the B3W, as they call it.
And that’s good. If the G-7 is going to give more financing for infrastructure development in the developing world, I think we can agree that that is a positive thing. Obviously, there are some questions about what it will look like in practice, but in general, that’s the hopeful sign. And then meanwhile, you just had China just held its Asia-Pacific Belt & Road Cooperation Conference with about 30 foreign ministers in attendance, and they emphasized the exact same things that the G-7 emphasized, which is we’re going to make our Belt & Road greener and we’re going to focus more on health cooperation, both vaccines for COVID and building health systems stronger for the future.
So, if the U.S.-led initiatives like B3W are encouraging China to make the Belt & Road cleaner, more sustainable, and focus a bit more on these softer issues, then that’s also good for the developing world because those are things that are desperately needed. So, I think that’s what I’m taking away from this initiative versus the Blue Dot and the Clean network is it seems a little bit less focused on just one-upping China and more focused on how can we actually help the developing world. Obviously, the competition with China is very much there, very much in the background, but if there’s more focus on actually doing things that will benefit these other countries, then that I think is really what we have been waiting to see. And not just how can we one-up China.
Cobus: And from your perspective, as someone in D.C., how is domestic support, particularly bipartisan support just shaping up for B3W, particularly with the midterms coming up next year?
Shannon: Yeah, I will say that it hasn’t really been a factor in the broader domestic political conversation. Right now, there’s a ton of focus on the domestic Infrastructure Bill that Biden is trying to hammer out a bipartisan consensus on. There’s been more talk about the bill that passed the Senate and is currently working its way through the House to boost U.S. technology competitiveness with China, because that’s again, even though it’s got this China competition component, it’s directly focused on U.S. domestic inputs and funding. So yeah, the B3W hasn’t really factored into the broader foreign policy conversation, but there’s a general bipartisan consensus on the need to compete with China, including in kind of the race for hearts and minds in the developing world to borrow a line from China.
So, I think at the elite political level, if you’re talking about Congress people, and senators, there’s probably buy-in and a general level of support for this. But of course, there’s going to be disagreement on hammering out the specifics. The B3W has a specific focus, for example, on gender equity and equality. And that might be something that it’s harder to convince some Republicans in Congress to get in line with.
Eric: I don’t think anybody in Congress cares right now simply because there’s nothing to the B3W. The only thing that they’ve promised to do is to get, wait for it, a task force together. I mean, holy cow, if that is the opening shot in competing with the Belt & Road, it’s exasperating because, as you pointed out, by giving really legitimate competition to the Chinese on the BRI would force the Chinese to up their game. But when the main takeaway out of the G-7 Summit was we’re going to form a task force, and then next year at the G-7 Summit we’re going to start talking about this, meh. Call me when something actually happens. No money tied to it, no firm commitments tied to it, no sense of urgency. So, no wonder nobody in Congress really cares because they’re not on the hook for anything.
Sure. I love the B3W until there’s money behind it. And then it’s going to be interesting to see, will congresspeople from, particularly red states, and I’m predicting that the house next year will flip back because that’s normally what happens in off years, will Red State Republicans really get lined up, say, for example, to put $10 billion down for the Port of Bagamoyo in Tanzania? Which will have a 30-year time horizon to get repaid? I’m not entirely convinced that they will. I just don’t see an enormous appetite in a culture of America first where Trumpism is still very much alive. That the idea of spending billions of dollars to finance infrastructure in developing countries just doesn’t seem… It doesn’t add up for me. They would rather fight the Chinese with an industrial policy like the Senate bill that you’ve talked about, that’s a quarter of a trillion dollars that goes into their districts. It pays for jobs in their districts. They can stick it to the Chinese that way. But building a port in Tanzania, I’m not convinced that that’s going to catch on. What do you think?
Shannon: I mean, honestly, they’re not even putting that on the table. They’re talking about, we’ll line up, somehow magically line up private financing for these projects that have been in the offering. If a Western company wanted to bid to build that port in Tanzania, they could have. So, it’s not really clear why private companies are suddenly going to join in. What sort of incentives are the G-7 governments going to be offering? Are they going to actually be ponying up any money of their own at all? That’s literally the billion-dollar question.
Eric: There’s no way that’s going to work. And I wrote a column for our subscribers back when the B3W first came out. Here in Ho Chi Minh City, when I moved to Vietnam in 2012, they had just broken ground on the Japanese-financed and constructed subway. We are now 2021 on the downward slide into 2022 — still no subway, though they’ve been doing construction for 10 years. Because building infrastructure in these frontier markets is really freaking hard. And I don’t think that has sunk into a lot of Americans in that discourse. I don’t think they get how difficult it is. Very volatile political environments, lots of corruption, very little governance, very little infrastructure. The human resource challenges are enormous in these frontier markets. It’s difficult to do, which is why it’s taken the Japanese almost a decade to build two lines of a subway, which is not really that much. And I think it’s so easy for them to be throwing around like, we want to take on China around the world. I don’t know if they have the skills to do it, to be honest with you.
Shannon: Yeah, if you want to talk about delayed construction lines, Washington, D.C. has been trying to build a metro line to its airport.
Eric: Right. Your subway is just as bad.
Shannon: Its capital International airport for about 10 years, and it’s still only halfway done. So, it’s not even just a question of these markets are difficult to operate in, which, of course, they are. The United States infrastructure companies are just not frankly that competitive with the Chinese and the Japanese in terms of speed and efficiency.
Eric: But to your point, though, that this isn’t uniquely a United States effort. It is a G-7 effort. So, the Japanese, again, they’re here in Vietnam, they have been more successful in other parts of the world in terms of building infrastructure. So, they are a force to be reckoned with. Portugal has the world’s strong infrastructure companies; Italy as well. The French have been building infrastructure in Africa for a number of years. In that sense, there is some expertise that’s beyond the United States. My only thing is that when you get seven, 11, 12 countries together, it’s hard to make a decision. And the Chinese have that advantage of, there’s one guy at the top who makes the decisions, and they could move superfast.
I thought it was interesting that, looking at President Hassan in Tanzania, I was kind of thinking that she might try and take advantage of the moment by saying, “Listen, China, if you don’t want to build the port here, I can bring it up to the Americans in the G-7 to see if this can be the first B3W project.” Building ports is not a bad project for B3W because it’s pretty much optimized for public-private partnerships. There’s almost an instant revenue stream that comes in. There is a path to profitability on this. She hasn’t done that as far as we know, but it does seem like a card that countries can play to try and play each other off one another and to say, “Okay, China, I’m going to go to the B3W instead.”
Shannon: Right. Yeah. And I think that’s really what the developing world needs is they need alternative options on both sides. So, if they don’t like the terms that one country is offering them, they can go to another group for financing. And I think part of what gets lost in all this discussion of Chinese debt traps and shoddy infrastructure and lack of transparency is, again, it’s not that countries think China is the best option. For a lot of them, it’s the only option. If you want to get a highway construction or a railroad or a port, there’s not enough World Bank IMF funding to go around, so it’s China or nothing for a lot of these countries. There hasn’t been a lot of interest shown from the G-7 and the developed world.
So, if there’s more interest and more opportunities for them to say no, realistically, someone else might fund this project, then that’s going to help sort of raise the bar for every country that’s doing these projects.
Eric: And even if it is a World Bank, IMF, or eventually a B3W project, doesn’t mean that the Chinese won’t be involved because they may actually be hired as the contractors simply because they are able to compete at prices much lower than other contractors are. And the World Bank and the IMF now have open bidding processes in order to make it more transparent. And the Chinese have taken advantage of that to basically undersell everybody else. So, the Chinese could actually profit from B3W. That would be just rich, wouldn’t it? Let’s close our discussion on the Belt & Road. That is, again, a very popular topic in Washington where you are. Lots of people are wanting to take on China in the Belt & Road. Now, the idea that a lot of people have been talking about, and this has been a theme coming out of the think tanks in D.C., is that the Belt & Road is on the ropes.
And what they’re using as a metric is the precipitous decline in overseas development finance lending to countries in South America, in Africa, particularly in the energy sector. We’ve covered that quite a bit here, but Stella Hong Zhang, who is a scholar at George Mason University, she said by looking only at that one metric, you’re missing the bigger picture. She wrote that the actual BRI is healthier than a lot of people give it credit for in Washington if you measure it based on trade, diplomatic engagement, and she listed a whole bunch of other metrics that show an evolution of the Belt & Road away from development finance lending led to one more of technology, the Health Silk Road, the Digital Silk Road, more diplomatic engagement, trade volumes are going up.
Trade between Belt & Road countries, not necessarily going through China, also is another metric. So, all of these things together show a much more robust Belt & Road than I think a lot of people in D.C. give credit for. And I want to get your take as somebody who studies this quite closely for The Diplomat, where do you see the Belt & Road right now in terms of its health?
Shannon: I think the Belt & Road is changing. And it’s weird to say it’s changing because it was never one solid thing to begin with. It’s not like there’s a very clearly defined Belt & Road and now it’s becoming of something else that’s very clearly defined. It’s always been this sort of amorphous blob where really anything that you wanted could be put under the Belt & Road rubric. And you saw a lot of Chinese entrepreneurs taking advantage of this in the early days by pitching anything and everything as a Belt & Road project to try and get more funding and buy-in from the local governments. But yeah, I think China’s days of kind of printing out money and giving it to almost anyone who asked for it are coming to an end. With the economic slowdown in China, there’s just been a little bit more control paid to these loans.
I think there’s a little bit, which is something Chinese scholars have been asking for forever. There’s a little bit more scrutiny of, is this likely to actually be paid back? If not, is it strategically important enough for us to not care so much that it’s being paid back? Just a little bit more thought being put into these loans. And in place of that, you’re having some of these other issues crop up, right? Like we think of the Belt & Road in terms of hard infrastructure because that’s really what it was to start out with. But it’s branched out into, as you said, the Digital Silk Road — Huawei expanding into these countries in terms of 5G networks and also other types of technology, fiber-optic cables, and just the general norms of what should the internet look like and what should cybersecurity look like.
Those are now, China is a part of the conversation. In many of the Belt & Road countries, it’s dominating the conversation, and that’s important. It’s much harder to quantify than China spent X amount to build a railroad, but it’s important and it needs to be paid attention to. Also the Health Silk Road I think is a little bit more nascent but certainly the pandemic proved how important that concept is, of these unified health initiatives across borders, particularly in the developing world. So that’s something to keep an eye on as well. And with an eye toward the future, I think the concept of the Green Silk Road is also going to be very important. China has a long history of talking big on environmental projects and not really living up to the promise. But this is a strategic industry for the Chinese government.
On the lines of AI and big data and other things that get a lot more presses, China needs renewable energy, electric vehicles, all of this sort of clean-tech as a strategic industry that’s important for its national future. And so, I think there’s a real chance that the Green Silk Road, because of that strategic impetus behind it, kind of blossoms and blooms, and that is going to have implications for the entire world. If China can offer a path to developing countries that is they can have their development and have clean renewable energy, that’s a game changer. And that’s something that I think definitely the B3W talks about and an area where we can have cooperation and collaboration with the developing world. But again, the Chinese are already doing it. So, there’s a lot of catch up work to be done there if the G seven is serious about it.
Eric: And it’s interesting to note that the Green BRI Institute in Beijing just issued a new report that showed a dramatic plunge in Chinese overseas development finance lending for coal-powered power plants. So, the Chinese are cutting back on their support of coal power around the world. So that is something encouraging as well. Shannon Tiezzi is the editor-in-chief of The Diplomat and one of my favorite China Watchers. You can follow her work at The Diplomat. And Shannon, you’re also on Twitter. Where can the good people find you on Twitter?
Shannon: Just my name’s Shannon Tiezzi.
Eric: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to join us. It was great to catch up again.
Shannon: Yeah, it is always a pleasure to join with you guys and talk about China and the global South.
Eric: Cobus, Shannon is one of my favorite China watchers, and I’ve been following her work for years. Listen, she’s been doing this for a very long time, and I love the nuance that she brings to the discussion. And you don’t hear that, even from a lot of China watchers in D.C., where it is this more polarized environment. And I just wish that more people like Gregory Meeks, who’s the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, would be listening to people like Shannon and that nuance. Gregory Meeks, he wrote a piece that came out this week in Foreign Policy. Let me read you the title right now, and I think you’re going to get a big groan. The Build Back Better World Partnership Could Finally Break the Belt & Road. And then the subheading, and this is from a quote from the piece, “When nations are freed from China’s oppressive debt practices, economies across the world can achieve sustainable growth through trade, stability, and collective prosperity.”
He goes on to restate the highly debunked, widely debunked debt trap theory about asset seizures, and he calls it oppressive debt enforcement. Again, here we go again. We’re not making progress in the U.S. understanding of so many of these issues. And I think when the U.S. goes out into the world with information that is so out of date, as we talked about with Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, 10 years out of date on terms of exporting labor and the debt trap narratives, and these things that are debunked, I think it really sets the U.S. back because people in places like Africa, who they’re negotiating with, aren’t recognizing what the U.S. is saying. So, when you see this rhetoric coming out of people like Gregory Meeks, not in the administration, but on Capitol Hill, what do you think?
Cobus: Well, the first thing, obviously, Meeks probably didn’t write that headline, but my first reaction to the headline was that that’s probably the last thing that many global South government wants is they don’t want a broken BRI. They want additional options. For me, what it also struck me as is that, and this is the point of the column that I sent out to our subscribers this week as well, is that there’s so many good intentions in there. There’s so much thinking around how it should be done, like the kind of standards there should be, the space the environment should take up in infrastructure, and so on, and so on. It’s all very laudable.
However, it leaves out to the reality that in a lot of cases, those high standards have already been used in the past to stop certain projects from going forward. That’s the kind of interaction that many global south governments have had with those very high standards in the past. As those standards being cited as a reason for a project not going forward. And I was in a kind of a high-level discussion between U.S. stakeholders and a bunch of different African researchers recently in which that same kind of like point was made where they were saying, and this person was from East Africa saying that, for example, all of the very legit reasons why there’s problems with some of the big dam developments, for example, the, Grand Renaissance Dam that Ethiopia’s pushing, those problems are real, but they don’t take away the need for the dam.
Frequently then it only ends with Western powers being like, “You know what? This dam is very problematic. We’re not supporting it.” The end. And that still leaves the country without the dam that they were planning to have and that they built entire development plans around. In that sense, I keep wondering whether these, laudable as these standards are, whether they’re essentially are on the ground, just going to be exclusionary mechanisms.
Eric: You keep bringing this up over and over again, and I find it very interesting. You sent me a link a couple of weeks ago to how the United States killed an undersea marine cable crossing the Pacific because Huawei was involved. and you brought this up in saying that rather than have something with Huawei, the U.S. would prefer that people had nothing. And you hear that theme on, not just on Huawei, but again, in the context of the dam. There is no secondary solution beyond the fact that, okay, we don’t want you to do it with China, but we don’t have a follow-up plan. And then on vaccines, you hear this over and over again. They will talk about how Chinese vaccines suck, and they will talk about how Chinese vaccines are not effective, but yet they really don’t have a plan. And even today, the amount of vaccines that the Americans are exporting is still relatively small.
We’re talking 80 million is the first batch. That’s 40 million people around the world who are going to get a two-shot dose of Pfizer in a market that demands up to 11 billion vaccines. And so, when the Americans, or even the Europeans, but this is mostly Americans will say, don’t use Chinese vaccines because there are strings attached, they’re not very good, all the different criticisms that the Americans bring to this, they don’t have a follow-up plan. There does seem to be this consistent theme that you keep raising in a lot of your critique of the U.S. criticism of China’s engagement in places like Africa.
Cobus: Yeah. It’s a combination of, in the first place, no one in Western countries is shocked or surprised by the fact that Africa’s poor, right? Africa, as a site of poverty or underdevelopment, plays its own very prominent role in the way that the West thinks about the world. So, it’s a kind of a normal situation for them. China, for all its faults, doesn’t come from that same space. China comes from this position in which it sees African countries as proto developed, as essentially like it was in the ’80s, but lots of potential and lots of potential future development. That is just a different worldview. That’s the one thing.
The other thing is that a lot of this discussion takes place in this extremely isolated kind of echo chamber in which assumptions are never challenged, right? And Shannon pointed this out too, a lot of Western journalists writing about this is framing it in terms of like, why would these global south countries go with Russian and Chinese vaccines in the first place? Point, like period, the end of there. Never saying like, well, there are certain very key reasons, and global north countries are key and central to that decision. The fact that COVAX doesn’t work despite all of these commitments to it. The fact that all of the vaccine hoarding, these are real reasons, but they never kind of enter into that kind of echo chamber. So, it becomes this self-reinforcing conversation the West is having with itself.
Eric: Very quickly before we go, I want to bring everybody up to date on the latest Chinese vaccine numbers. This comes from Bridge Consulting, which is a Beijing-based consultancy. They produce a weekly vaccine tracker, which, if you are not following it, you should. You can go to bridgebeijing.com. They’re an independent consultancy and they have the best numbers on Chinese vaccines. Some very interesting observations from their latest dataset. 845 million doses have been sold worldwide. That means they’ve committed through contracts. They have not delivered all of that. They’ve only delivered 343 million. But of the 845 million that have been sold, only 25 million of those have been donated. So, we’re looking at 3% of Chinese vaccine distributions have been donated. So, every time we see a tweet or a Facebook post or some kind of Chinese propaganda post about China donating vaccines, keep in mind that only 3% of Chinese vaccines distributions are donations.
The vast majority, 97%, are sales. Also very quickly in terms of the distributions in Africa, according to Bridge, the latest numbers put it at 23.8 million, about 16 million of those 24 million vaccines, however, go to just three countries — Morocco, Egypt, and Zimbabwe, with Morocco taking almost 10 million of those. So, highly, highly distorted distribution. Africa’s vaccine problem is not just access, but also equitable distribution. So, vaccines may be coming into the continent, but again, they’re only going to a select few countries. I have no idea how those countries were selected to get so many vaccines. Cobus, do you have any insight as to why Morocco, in particular, would be getting so many more jabs than pretty much anywhere else, or why the Chinese would have such inequitable distribution of their vaccines in Africa? Do you have any thoughts? I know you probably don’t, but I’m just wondering if you have some insights on that.
Cobus: Unfortunately, nothing beyond what’s in the press. Yeah.
Eric: Yeah, yeah. No one really does. It was a long shot just to find out. But isn’t that interesting, though, that two thirds are just going to three countries. And that just doesn’t make a lot of sense. And this is why Africa need strong institutions like the Africa CDC, where they could demand that the vaccines are routed through the CDC and then distributed equally. It’s a little bit of a surprise, Cobus, because I was expecting after what they did with the Jack Ma Foundation and the PPE distributions, which were equitable, and they got so much great press on that, I had the assumption that with the Cainiao distribution deal that they brought up, so Cainiao is the logistics arm of Alibaba. They have this deal with Ethiopian Airlines. There was all this hype that they were going to create this air bridge, and they have, this air bridge from Guangzhou to Addis Ababa, and then they were going to distribute vaccines.
A lot of us made the assumption that they were just going to use the same playbook that they did in distributing PPE equitably to all 54 African countries, and they would do the same with vaccines, even just a modest number. But they haven’t done that. The Democratic Republic of Congo has not gotten any Chinese vaccines. It’s just an interesting observation. Any reflections on that?
Cobus: Yeah, it’s very interesting. It’s really striking. And I would love to read more research into why it’s rolling out this way. This issue of how little of the Chinese vaccines has actually been donated, I think, it’s a really important point. Not least, as you said, all of this fearmongering about Chinese vaccine diplomacy, I mean, most of these are commercial transactions not handed out. And it’s also then interesting that so much of the discourse around like… of Western vaccines going to the rest of the world counts in terms of donations rather than in terms of what it actually is. This is like frequently commercial, just delivery schedules. That’s another interesting thing. It’s as if there’s default assumption that dealing… What we’re talking about is charitable donations both from China and from the West, when what we’re seeing actually is commercial transactions delivered by China and a breakdown of commercial delivery schedules in the West.
Eric: And just quickly before we go, two more points on vaccines. Out of the 343 million total vaccines that have been sold to date, half of that has gone to Asia, 181 million. Latin America is second with 97 million. Europe, and that’s mostly Eastern Europe, is third with 40 million, and then Africa with 23 million. So, you see the disproportionate emphasis that they’re placing on Asia-Pacific and on Latin America and Africa really is a latecomer and just not that important in the overall distribution strategy for the Chinese, given the fact that so few of those vaccines are making it there. One other point that we’re covering a lot in our newsletter, and that is core to the question about Chinese vaccines, is this debate as to whether or not it is able to withstand the new delta variant. The delta variant is the variant that came from India, and there are a lot of conflicting opinions on this.
One of the things that we’re doing in our newsletter and on our website is trying to bring everybody some of the different perspectives. The Chinese scientists are saying, ‘Yes, it does have some problems, but it’s still holding up.’ Western scientists are saying, no. This is, again, part of the polarization that we talked about with Shannon, but it is a very interesting discussion to see how these variants are holding up. We are going to try and find a vaccine specialist who can talk to us about this because really, the world had better pray that the Chinese vaccines hold up, given how dependent so many countries like Brazil, Chile, obviously, Morocco are on the Chinese vaccines, and if they don’t hold up, this pandemic just goes on a whole lot longer and people suffer a whole lot more. That’ll do it for this edition of the show. Again, we’d like to invite you to subscribe to the China Africa Project.
We do daily journalism on Chinese engagement in the global south. We’re broadening our focus every week to include more of the global south beyond Africa, so you can see how it all fits together, not just looking only at Africa. Go to chinaafricaproject.com/subscribe. Subscription start at $7 a month for students and teachers, and $15 a month for everybody else. Any questions, feel free to email me directly, Eric, eric@chinaafricaproject.com, or you can find Cobus, cobus@chinaafricaproject.com. We will be back again next week with another edition. Until then, thank you so much for listening.
Outro: The discussion continues online. Head over to facebook.com/chinaafricaproject to share your thoughts on today’s show or follow the guys on Twitter — Eric’s @eolander and you can find Cobus @stadenesque. For more information about the China-Africa Project and to sign up for our free weekly email news brief, go to chinaafricaproject.com.
