Clifford Krause and Keith Bradsher have an excellent New York Times piece on China’s involvement in Ecuador. It’s a high level account of the impacts on Ecuador’s economy, politics, and ordinary people, of China’s $ megabillion investment in a country that struggles to keep up with almost everything, from infrastructure, to public service, to debt repayment. It’s hard for an American not to come away with a combined feeling of jealousy that China got it’s foot in the door in our hemisphere, nervousness that they’ll make a total mess of it, and schadenfreude that they’ll never recoup their investment. All these feelings amount to megahypocrisy. China is bumbling through a neocolonialist project that looks a lot like the sort of adventures the United States and Europe launched over the last 150 to 200 years. China has stepped in where the Northern contingent has retreated. That doesn’t make us heroes.
China is an equal opportunity colonialist. Their involvement in Africa is extensive as is their portfolio of investments in Latin America. China is willing to leverage weak regimes to invest in marginal economies. Just for starters, economist Ricardo Hausman has had a lot to say about China and Venezuela over the last couple years. You can find him quoted in any number of Financial Times articles on the subject such as here, or here, or his own column, here. I think it’s safe to say he’s not a China fan.
But, of course, this is just scratching the surface of a very big problem. And I’m not just thinking of China. The colonial project is something as close to pure exploitation as we have in our world. It is a collaboration between strong powers and weak powers that de-powers ordinary people.
I believe there is a way to push power and resources out to the people on the street, or in the fields, or in the mines. I believe every one will be better off when we find that way.
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