tdaxp

Enterra has at least three great bloggers on their payroll: Barnett, Deichman, and of course CEO Stephen DeAngelis, writing at Enterprise Resilience Management Blog. ERMB's latest post, on China in Africa, contains this paragraph:

African countries will not experience sustainable economic growth by relying on the export of natural resources. One of the reasons that Tom Barnett and I came up with the idea for Development-in-a-Box™ was to break this cycle of reliance and help countries develop the diverse economic base and create the jobs they need to prosper. Until China understands which of their programs are helpful and which are harmful, their ventures in Africa will continue to bear the rogue label.

The reason that things are labeled in political discourse is, of course, political. China is a pro-business capitalist state, and it is no surprise that she draws attacks from anti-business and anti-capitalist groups. It's chic at best and harmless at worst to have a quirky ideology that ruins your productivity and kills millions of your citizens. But become productive and compete? That makes you rogue.



That said, if we wish to criticize Beijing for not doing enough, we surely can. Perhaps the greatest technologies in the history of man are the police and ecological homogenization. The benefits of police are clear: a drastic reduction in violence and associated reputation-/pride-/face-/honor- related killings. Ecological homogenization, the reduction in diversity in a climate region, reduces the pathogenic load on a population, increasing average intelligence as the body has to spend less effort resisting diseases during development

If we really wanted China to help in Africa, we would encourage Chinese police to patrol African cities and Chinese industry to engage in continental climate change.

Of course, that would be labeled "rogue," too.

"A Morsel of Goat Meat," by Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times, 23 March 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/23/opinion/23kristof.html.

At the beginning of the century, the British Empire was engaged in the largest nations-building campaign in human history.

Two deadly European civil wars nearly bankrupted the Empire and so weakened London that it lost the will to remain. Everywhere it lost to native thugs, settler racist, or (in the case of Zimbabwe) both.

This is the price of that failure.

The hungry children and the families dying of AIDS here are gut-wrenching, but somehow what I find even more depressing is this: Many, many ordinary black Zimbabweans wish that they could get back the white racist government that oppressed them in the 1970's.

"If we had the chance to go back to white rule, we'd do it," said Solomon Dube, a peasant whose child was crying with hunger when I arrived in his village. "Life was easier then, and at least you could get food and a job."

Mr. Dube acknowledged that the white regime of Ian Smith was awful. But now he worries that his 3-year-old son will die of starvation, and he would rather put up with any indignity than witness that.

An elderly peasant in another village, Makupila Muzamba, said that hunger today is worse than ever before in his seven decades or so, and said: "I want the white man's government to come back. ... Even if whites were oppressing us, we could get jobs and things were cheap compared to today."

His wife, Mugombo Mudenda, remembered that as a younger woman she used to eat meat, drink tea, use sugar and buy soap. But now she cannot even afford corn gruel. "I miss the days of white rule," she said.

These are not normal beliefs. These are not what you would hear in a function post-colonial state, like India, or an integrating post-colonial state, like Vietnam.

A combination of local thugs of all races, misguided western leftists, isolationist western rightists, and insane European policies lead to the abandonment of Africa.

Not that it is America's turn for world leadership, we cannot fail like the British before us. Shrink the Gap.