Perhaps the Africans get their act together this time around? Or do you think the fundamentals of HBD make this impossible?

No doubt you’re right, but I think I’ll wait a decade or four before I agree.

For whose benefit were the farm boards, judicial systems, and telegraphs built? If it was for the benefit of Africans, it failed on every level. We know the effects of the centuries of “White Man’s burden” and the decades of uplift by the World Bank: disaster. Wouldn’t it be amusing and bemusing if an unintended side effect of the rapacious exploitation of the Chinese actually resulted in a prosperous Africa?

If, as is likely, the Chinese leave behind misery, poverty, oppression and another century of lost opportunity, I will enjoy the work of thousands of theorists condemning them, just as the West has been condemned.

“The horror . . . the horror . . .”

If China can bring prosperity to Africa by using the methods which have–so far–worked in China, then all its sins will be forgotten

But they’re not. They’re just building stuff for their own enrichment and when they leave anything they built will crumble. We forget that colonialism left Africa with substantial infrastructure like roads, railroads, harbors, electrical grids etc. The problem was that post-colonial Africa simply lacked the political/social/cultural mechanisms to maintain and extended that infrastructure.

Even if they attempted to impose Chinese solutions on Africa, they would fail. China has a literally thousands of years of experience with large scale, centrally managed organization. The communist simply ruthlessly exploited deep seated cultural behaviors. No such culture exist in Africa. Any attempt to mimic Chinese behaviors will fail just as the attempts to mimic western socialism failed.

We are warned not to gain the world at the expense of losing our soul, but what about losing the world as we (try to) save our souls? When do morals become just moralistic? Do we help Africa, Africans, or ourselves by refusing to get our hands (and souls) a little bit dirty, when there are others, much dirtier, ready to fill the gap?

“Moyo argues for more innovative ways for Africa to finance development including trade with China, accessing the capital markets, micro financing, and job creation.”

http://en.afrik.com/article15848.html

I don’t know the answer to helping Africa, and I don’t know about Chinese development and business, but I don’t think our open-ended Western aid is really helping, overall. What do others think?

http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displaystory.cfm?subjectid=348951&story_id=14664647

The point overall of this story is that by not realizing that the Chinese are acting unilaterally all of our Western plans are for naught… we wreck our economies to curb carbon while they slap up new coal burning plants every day… we try to sanction African countries and tell our companies they can’t do business there (the way it is actually conducted) and then China just swoops in and takes all the contracts.

If China can bring prosperity to Africa by using the methods which have–so far–worked in China, then all its sins will be forgotten. A thousand years from now, the West will be denounced for its colonialism because it didn’t work.

BTW: Carl could you give us the URL for the Economist article.

Could well be. I knew a woman who wrote stories for one of the supermarket tabloids. Her employer would send her a picture and then she would write the story. Except her stories were so outlandish they had to move her to a “lower” quality publication ;) OTOH, it is unlikely that her stories were any more outlandish than those of, say, Walter Duranty.