I saw China for two weeks in August 1992. Here is some of what I remember 25 years later (the pictures are from Google Images but are like what I saw):
Hong Kong – I saw people walking down the street talking on mobile phones like it was no big deal, a thing not yet common in the US. Hong Kong had people from all over. My girlfriend and I met a family from Mali, for example. It was the most crowded city I have ever seen. Even the harbour was more crowded than New York’s. We went to the top of Victoria Peak at night and got a wonderful view of the city.
Macau – all I remember is seeing some big old church built by the Portuguese hundreds of years ago (São Paulo Cathedral, built in 1602) and, on its steps, talking to a Black man who lived in Macau.
Crossing into Red China – the customs officials seemed stern, but not nearly as suspicious of me as in communist East Berlin in 1985. Or in Sydney, Australia when returning to the US in 2007. Or as suspicious of me as the police in the US.
Guangzhou (Canton) – We did not see much of it. We were there to catch the night train to Shanghai. No bullet trains back then! The train we were on could have been built in the 1950s for all I knew.
Shanghai – bigger than Hong Kong but not as rich or cosmopolitan. There did not seem to be any Black people there. Sometimes if you stood in one place for too long you started to draw a crowd. Black people were that rare. They did have a McDonald’s. The style of women’s hair and dress was markedly plainer than in Hong Kong. Even as a foreigner I could tell the language was different too. Everywhere people were riding bicycles. The habit of spitting was common. Even rich women did it. Maybe a tenth knew English. I went to my first karaoke bar. The best part of seeing Shanghai was walking down the boardwalk along the river. Shanghai has changed hugely since then: what I remember as warehouses are now skyscrapers!
Beijing – seemed like the Emerald City of China, if that makes sense. Beijing has wide streets and the police did not seem as arrogant as American police, though there were more of them. We saw a Chinese opera, Mao’s body, Tiananmen Square, and the old red palace of the emperors. We took a bus and saw the Summer Palace, a donkey pulling a cart (I was surprised to see something like that so close to a big city) and:
The Great Wall of China. The thing they do not show you in all the pictures of the Great Wall is that when you get to the top there are souvenir sellers everywhere! I bought a Great Wall hoodie.
In general China was way less glitzy than what you see of it now in Google Images:
– Abagond 2017.
See also:
- China
- Seeing:
- Seeing Turkey
- Seeing Texas
- New Zealand:
- Australia
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This was a great post. It actually makes me want to see China.
Other than thinking you were a celebrity or athlete, how were the locals towards Black people?
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Wow, Guangzhou has certainly changed a lot. My dad has talked about how much Boston has changed since he was a kid, but that growth was more gradual.
Boston in the 1960s:
Boston in the 2010s:
Boston has kept its skyscrapers in one designated “High Spine” strip, in order to avoid ruining historic neighborhoods. I wonder if Guangzhou has a similar city planning concept, since most of their skyscrapers seem to be concentrated in one area. Overall though, Guangzhou does not seem to be planned much like Boston.
Boston is centered around Faneuil Hall Marketplace:
Guangzhou does not appear to have a clear center:
Boston has an area of about 90 square miles and a population of about seven hundred thousand. The urban area around it is much larger, with a population of several million that is divided amongst many self-governing municipalities (I think there are about 40 encircled by Route 128). Keeping populations limited helps with traditional New England representative government.
Guangzhou has an area of about 2,900 square miles and a population of over fourteen million. Its urban area is smaller than the city itself.
Oddly enough, one of the best ways to understand your local area is to learn about other places!
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Is there a way to edit your comments after you make them? I tend to be a space case, and I sometimes post my last name by accident (as in the comment above) or post using a different account that I recently made for local stuff. I wish I could change those mistakes without having to ask Abagond.
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Maybe you should write Canton (Guangzhou) instead of the other way around. Canton is still the normal name for the place in normal English, although most officials now use Guangzhou.
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What was the food like Abagond?
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China looks very different from 25 years ago, and not necessarily in a good way.
For one, the sky is almost always grey, even on a cloudless sunny day.
something that no one no longer dares does in the central urban areas.
I see more bicycles in downtown DC now.
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Re: Afrofem’s question here:
Civil Society is the way that citizens interact and participate in society and exert their influence outside of government and business. This includes family and clan, but also religion, arts, media, benevolent associations, community organizations, trade and labour unions, private academia, NGOs, charities, etc. Many of these organizations and institutions of civil society provide services that government and business do not, or may even provide them more effectively. Some of them may be a partnership between government, business and civil society (eg, NGOs that receive government or corporate grants).
The USA has a very deep and rich civil society (albeit, government and business have often sought to limit or control it).
In the PRC, much of civil society has been destroyed or rendered dysfunctional. Many of its institutions are simply illegal. We not only look at the arts, religion, media, academia and NGOs, but the family itself, following the cultural revolution and one-child policy, is a mere shadow of its former self. Any other kind of expression of civil society must conform to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) guidelines and regulations. So, any religious practice in the PRC must abide by the CCP rules and oversight. Only the CCP can appoint approved bishops to the State Catholic Church – the Vatican cannot appoint them. The CCP sets all the rules on how Muslims must practice their religion. If you do not practice religion in a state-sanctioned church or temple, then you must go underground, and there are severe penalties if you are caught.
The media cannot quote foreign media about what is going on in the Mainland, or even HK and Macau – only state sanctioned media can be referenced. Foreign media operating in the PRC must store their data there and allow the government to access it at any time. NGOs must register with the police and allow full access to their information to the government. There is no functioning trade or labour union. Any labour union that exists is really just an arm of the CCP, to make sure that labour and business follow CCP rules (and has nothing to do with ensuring labour interests are fairly represented to business owners).
Any religious, arts, media, labour organization, NGO, etc. that the government do not approve of can be shut down immediately and the organizers can be abducted and held (in secret locations) for subversion of state power.
In my several dozen trips to the mainland PRC, the biggest thing I notice is a lack of civil society. This means that their moral compass is quite screwed up. Everything to me seems to be about money and state power.
This erosion of civil society can now be felt in Hong Kong.
The next thing I notice is the impact on the environment and nature.
Last year, a casual hike through the Shenandoah National park in Virginia brought us face to face with not only chipmunks, opossum, skunk, raccoon and deer, but also black bears. In the Everglades, within a single hour, I had contact with manatees, crocodiles and alligators, blue heron and bottle-nosed dolphin. You see wildlife even in the cities – peregrine falcons will swoop down and catch wild squirrels. I went to Solomons, MD in August and saw a coyote in the parking lot and on the way back to DC, when I stopped to “relieve myself” by the road, a doe and a fawn were watching me the whole time.
I took the train from DC to Charleston, SC and back last month, and the entire trip is thick with trees.
If you took the train, say, from Guangzhou to Shanghai, you are unlikely to see any natural forest. It has all been removed for fields, factories and housing and commercial buildings (and much of that housing is empty). I went to a forest nature reserve surrounding a freshwater lake this past March in the northern part of Yangzhou prefecture (central Jiangsu province), but it was anything but natural. The trees were all planted in rows and were all the same species. They grew fungus on the tree bark for commercial purposes. Loudspeakers were installed along the paths to repeat the rules of the park. Sure, a few birds made nests in the trees, but it was anything but natural. You will not find any squirrels or anything wild in or near the cities, and most natural landscape features have been so much exploited by commercial tourist development that they are now quite hideous.
(What I do find hideous in the USA are large expansive parking lots. I read that there are 8 parking spaces for every car in the USA – it has created a very ugly landscape and is very inefficient.)
I help run a marine conservation NGO in HK, so I do pay attention to the relentless destruction of the marine environment. Not only has the coastal region been decimated by overfishing and pollution and just general debris, but they have also destroyed the reefs in the South China Sea. They affirm their “right” to fish in waters belonging to other sovereign nations, as far away as Africa and South America.
It affects Hong Kong too. For example, the Chinese white dolphin has gone nearly extinct in the Pearl River Delta, but that does not figure into the radar screen of a government only intent on building more and more infrastructure that is not desired by the majority of residents.
I cannot help but think that the Panda reserve in Sichuan province is not there really to protect the Giant Panda nor to expand or protect their habitat, but as an instrument to further their panda diplomacy.
Rubbish not left piling up on the streets, is usually either burned or dumped into the sea.
Blue skies are a very rare thing in the PRC. On a cloudless, sunny day, the sky is still usually a shade of grey and the sun is barely visible through the thick haze. The US embassy in Beijing used to post the air quality at the embassy every day and on their website. The government wanted desperately to shut that down. Ordinary citizens are not allowed to post that kind of information.
OK, Trump has sought to dismantle the EPA, walked away from the Paris Climate accord, etc. but the government has not undergone the same relentless campaign to destroy the environment for as many decades as the PRC, and civil society in the USA is still vibrant enough to reflect the will of the people to a large extent.
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@ Jefe
“Everything to me seems to be about money”
I’m not questioning the validity of the above statement, but the U.S. is so obssessed with money that it’s difficult for me to conceptualize how it’s any different from China in that respect.
Can you provide some examples (like your very helpful ones concerning the environment) that could illustrate the differences you see in regards to the attitudes towards money in the U.S. and China?
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@ jefe
That was quite a description of differences between the PRC and the USA.
I have often read government and quasi-government types wish aloud for the ability to “get things done as quickly and efficiently as less democratic states”.
The nightmare environmental scenario you described is one logical conclusion to a process that I feel is ongoing in the USA.
This past summer in Seattle, wildfires from British Columbia, Oregon and Washington forests produced such a thick haze of smoke that the sun was just an orange orb in a gray sky. The haze hung over the city like a shroud for weeks at a time. At least once this summer, I went out to my car in the morning and found it covered in a fine coat of ash.
A lot of local people complained about the lack of views or the absence of Seattle’s characteristic cool breezes (even on the hottest days). All I could think about was the long-term or permanent loss of valuable forest habitat for countless animals and people. Not to mention soil erosion and possible desertification.
China’s destruction of its environment for profit ( the magnificent Three Gorges come to mind) is mirrored in the US, albeit at a slower pace.
What is that old saying, “when everything has a price, nothing is valued.”?
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@Solitaire,
What is different about the USA (compared to the PRC) is the size and expanse of its civil society, which offers alternatives to money and the consolidation of party power as a motivation for engagement with society.
A simple thing as the right to protest, the right to organize labour, the ability to worship, freedom of speech, the right to vote for local representatives who might not belong to the party in power, etc. Even the freedom to have as many kids as you want. People in the USA value other things in addition to money.
And there is a process in the USA to work out a way when these values come into conflict. It is far from perfect, but it does allow for things like the abortion debate and the legality of same sex marriage.
Do you think there could be an organization in China called “Tibetan Lives Matter”? Why do people have to leave the PRC to discuss the massive organ harvesting program there? WeChat and Weibo and Baidu are not blocked in the USA, but Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Google, Viber and just recently Whatsapp are blocked in the PRC. So is the New York Times. So are foreign hosted blogging sites such as WordPress. At least in the USA, I feel that I can learn about various points of view (although that is controlled too, as evidenced by YouTube’s demonetization policy and the banning of books by school boards). But at least we can even talk about that, and pay for information that is not easily available for free.
So, in the USA, it is about money, but not just about money.
Civil society is still not yet destroyed in HK, but it is eroding. THAT has made it less interesting to live here.
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Thanks, Jefe. I think I understand better now what you meant.
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Just came across this article about the bubble tea boom in China. “What’s Behind China’s Unquenchable Thirst for Bubble Tea?” explores the sweet and the ugly side of bubble tea.
Bubble tea, described as:
http://www.caixinglobal.com/2017-09-29/101152328.html
Bubble tea seems to attract long lines of customers and venture capitalists.
Bubble tea is also a major attraction in Asian American communities throughout the USA.
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Bubble Tea originated in Taiwan, and spread to Hong Kong and southeast Asia before it became semi-popular in Mainland China (and USA/Canada/Australia). I still don’t see it THAT often in mainland PRC outside of the areas that have many people living there or visiting from HK, Taiwan, SE Asia or overseas (eg, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Beijing, etc.).
The first few times I visited Taiwan in the 1980s, there was no bubble tea. It’s only been around for about 30 years, and did not arrive to the mainland until much later. Abagond might not have seen it in the mainland when he first saw China.
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https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/03/asia/uk-hong-kong-china-boris-johnson-bno-intl-hnk/index.html
I don’t know what to think of this development regarding Hong Kong and its population.
I’m old enough to have witness – reading the press at that time – how Great Britain put a kind of curtail to any massive immigration and extension of British citizenship to people of the recently left colony of Hong Kong in 1997 who happened to want to leave the colony to Great Britain at that time. I got then the impression that that was directed especially to non-White residents of Hong Kong.
I understood that attitude at that time as trying to limit a phenomenon that occurred in other previous European-run colonies where after their independence not only the European residents in the colony but also a sizable part of non-Europeans including local natives went or tried to go to the respective European power center (called, “metropolis”).
This phenomenon was, by the way, the genesis, of the later known as “brain drain” process. For some of the inhabitants of the colonies, the European center was very attractive to merit an attempt to go there and, if possible, to acquire the citizenship. In the case of Hong Kong, Great Britain wanted to limit this. Some other Western countries were more willing to receive them, as was the case of Canada.
I’m just remembering all this by memory.
What I find curios and somehow ironic is how, now, Great Britain wants to reverse that policy, opening its arms to Hong Kongers who want to leave the place.
Some interpretations…
1) Old tricks of a colonial power trying to manipulate their former colonies
2) A colonial power honestly feeling the need to protect the human rights of their former subjects after noticing abuses emerging after “the independence” of the territory
3) Hong Kongers never became truly “independent” psychologically, always wanting to preserve a “special relationship and status” vis a vis the former colonial power. By the way: did you know that when the Apartheid regime handover its power to the new Black led government in South Africa in the middle 90’s, a small party was formed in Cape Town which wanted to breakaway from the new democratic republic and form what they called at that time, “Republic of the Atlantic”, or something similar? Decolonization is, indeed, a painful and contradictory process and not all colonial subjects want it…
4) Communism showing its ugly face and Hong Kongers wanting to flee from it.
5) etc.
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@munubantu
Great that you are paying attention to this, and your desire to know more.
You said that you recall the following:
There was indeed a great concern in Britain about allowing potentially millions of Hong Kong Chinese (and other groups) flood into the UK. How would they absorb such an influx?
But prior to the 1984 Sino-British joint declaration, the majority of those born in Hong Kong were indeed eligible to migrate to the UK and settle. That was changed.
The greatest part of the pushback was not from the UK side, but from the PRC. In order to keep HK running as intact and functioning and valuable to the PRC, PRC did not want a brain drain with a large support population fleeing. Besides, as the CCP regarded HK as Chinese territory all along, and that Britain’s ruling of it was illegitimate, It was essential to the CCP that these people of Chinese descent be of Chinese nationality.
The UK did feel some obligation to HK born citizens, and a compromise was set up enabling some 50,000 elite HK families to be granted UK nationality including the right to settle in Britain at any time. The rest were entitled to apply for British National Overseas (BNO) status, which confers only visa-free access to those born in British colonial HK. Anyone born after 1997 would never be eligible for this.
Most of the granting of UK nationality to those 50,000 families was meant to prevent a brain drain (a sort of insurance in case things went sour), not cause one.
However, the PRC conferred Chinese nationality only to those of Chinese descent. You might know that Hong Kong had tens of thousands of people born in HK but not of Chinese descent. The majority were of South Asian (eg, Indian, Pakistani, Nepalese, etc.) descent, but there were others too. They were granted a BNO passport, but not a HK SAR (Hong Kong Special Administrative Region) passport as that requires “Chinese” nationality. Some of them managed to get a passport from where their parent or grandparent was born, but many could not. This essentially rendered them stateless. Imagine being born and raised in HK to parents who were born and raised in HK, and holding British Nationality, later converted to BNO, only to suddenly become stateless, as BNO did not confer residency in Britain, or the right to work or study. their children born after 1997 would be completely stateless. as they could never apply for BNO nor HK SAR passport. This oversight was not revealed during the Sino-British negotiations, but only revealed at the 1997 handover.
I had a colleague of Indian descent who was born and raised in HK and her father was born in HK too. She had never been to India, but after 1997, her mother, who had been born in India, then had to apply for her daughter to get an Indian passport. Had my colleague had a child in HK, that child would have no nationality.
This is more racism from the PRC side than the UK side.
Some time after the handover, the UK did allow HK residents who were refused Chinese nationality and rendered stateless to apply for a category of UK nationality.This was opened up to both white and non-white HK born stateless persons, so I cannot say it was specifically racist. But, that might require residency requirements in Britain, not something everyone could easily do. So, it was just an option then.
The HK immigration dept. routinely refused applications for Chinese nationality to these people for at least 10 years. But about 10 years later (around 2007) the HK govt approved its first granting of Chinese nationality to a HK born person of Pakistani descent. Since then, there have been small numbers of people not of Chinese granted Chinese nationality and a HKSAR passport.
At this point in time, I think the CCP is much less concerned about the UK opening a path to citizenship to HK residents born in the territory before 1997. They have already been allowing well over a million mainlanders migrate to HK. If these BNO holders leave, they can let even more mainlanders in. (ie, in effect, they can cleanse the population of these “colonially brainwashed people”). There is probably a way for the UK to allow pre-1997 HK born residents to immigrate to the UK under certain categories without violating the Sino-British joint declaration, with an ultimate path to citizenship. After all, tens of thousands have continued to immigrate to Britain since 1997, so the requirements could be simply loosened.
In short, there was some racial pushback from the UK pre-1997, but most of the pushback came from the PRC side.
UK, as a signatory to the Sino-British Joint Declaration, has been reluctant to declare officially the repeated breaches from the PRC side. They still are very reluctant to say those words. If they declared it invalid, and launched a claim to the UN that the PRC violated the treaty and declare it invalid, the CCP would most likely threaten war, something the UK does not want. Yet, UK is under international pressure to do something. Relaxing requirements of BNO holders to migrate to Britain would help address that. Is it enough?
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“1) Old tricks of a colonial power trying to manipulate their former colonies”
Correct.
“2) A colonial power honestly feeling the need to protect the human rights of their former subjects after noticing abuses emerging after “the independence” of the territory”
Snowball’s chance in hell. They wouldn’t even give the people the right to vote in 1949.
“3) Hong Kongers never became truly “independent” psychologically, always wanting to preserve a “special relationship and status” vis a vis the former colonial power. By the way: did you know that when the Apartheid regime handover its power to the new Black led government in South Africa in the middle 90’s, a small party was formed in Cape Town which wanted to breakaway from the new democratic republic and form what they called at that time, “Republic of the Atlantic”, or something similar? Decolonization is, indeed, a painful and contradictory process and not all colonial subjects want it…”
Par for the course when change is the order of the day. New Orleans and other southern states were the refuges of people, White, Black and Mixed fleeing the changes caused by Blacks freeing themselves from slavery.
“4) Communism showing its ugly face and Hong Kongers wanting to flee from it.”
Absolutely hideous. Under ‘Communism’, HK-SAR went from a GDP per capita of $27,330 (PPP) to $64,928 (PPP, 2019 est.).
Macao fared even worse, GDP per capita was $16,460.20 (PPP 1998), $115,913 (PPP, 2018). It is expected to be the highest in the world in 2020! My heart aches for all the starving Chinese ‘ruined’ by the CCP. (WARNING, SARCASM ALERT) 😦
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https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/21/asia/hong-kong-racism-intl-hnk-dst/index.html
Interesting take on the situation of racial minorities in Hong Kong.
I would like to invite the commentators
grojo, and
jefe
to comment on this.
This article partially answers my question on how is racism in Hong Kong.
I remember jefe apparently downplaying it in another thread in a context where racism in the rest of China versus racism in Hong Kong were being discussed.
I would like to go back to those issues and with the material of the article above, to deepen the discussion.
P.S.:
1) It is not clear if jefe can participate in this discussion given the recent changes in the political and administrative landscape of that Chinese territory. Sadly.
2) It seems that the situation of the “darkies” in Singapore is better than in Hong Kong!
3) Apologists of Western countries practices regarding racial minorities oft argue that regardless of their shortcomings, those countries do treat those minorities better than other corners of the world. The issues raised by the article above give us food for thought.
4) I would like to see if that situation is becoming better or worse with more direct influence from the central government in Beijing over Hong Kong.
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“Interesting take on the situation of racial minorities in Hong Kong.
I would like to invite the commentators
grojo, and
jefe
to comment on this”
Thanks for the invite.
1) jefe is either, ““filed away for future reference” by the CPC” or preparing his lecture tour on how ‘oppressive’ HK-SAR has become.
2) Based on what?
3) You ignore a crucial fact the article makes, the relative power and wealth of the victims of discrimination.
4) Direct influence by Beijing is geared to keeping things as they are. The Chinese get rough treatment from Africans, Indians, and other ‘darkies’. Indonesians massacred half a million Chinese during the Suharto led coup in 1965. Racism cuts both ways.
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@ gro jo
1) Anyway, I expect him to come back expressing his ideas.
2) Actually, I have no firm basis to state that, I must recognize. Only thinking out loud!
I was trying to compare these two societies, small in area, densely populated, with majority Chinese (ethnic Chinese) populations and important minorities coming from other Asian countries, and highly developed too (recently!)
But Singapore has larger minorities and made more attempts in homogenizing them with the majority. See for example, http://factsanddetails.com/southeast-asia/Singapore/sub5_7b/entry-3733.html
Despite jefe’s testimony https://abagond.wordpress.com/2020/03/10/the-coronavirus/comment-page-1/#comment-440823 of some mistreatment or neglect of “guest workers”, in Singapore, I remain convinced that it seems not as bad as in Hong Kong (based mainly on what the above article says, but not only).
3) Social status is the main cause of the discrimination. This is what you are saying?
Isn’t this what the deniers of racism in the USA say?
Pay attention to what you say!
4) There have been mistreatment of ethnic Chinese in parts of Asia, this is true. But in Africa?! I’ve not heard of something of that sort! Can you please show me a link of that?
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” There have been mistreatment of ethnic Chinese in parts of Asia, this is true. But in Africa?! I’ve not heard of something of that sort! Can you please show me a link of that?”
Ok, here you go! (https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/05/china/china-zambia-murder-intl-hnk/index.html)
“Social status is the main cause of the discrimination. This is what you are saying?” Yes. Lots of Africans lived in Asia, even became rulers over the local populations. Some Africans became miserable lower class citizens. Jinjira State and Malik Ambar testify to that fact. Prof. Adekundle Adeyeye, (https://www.dur.ac.uk/experience/colleges/newheadsofcollege/adekunleadeyeye/) of National University of Singapore, and Durham University in the UK shows that racism isn’t everything, class goes along way in determining the status of an individual.
“Isn’t this what the deniers of racism in the USA say?” I don’t care.
Pay attention to what you say! ?????
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@ gro jo
This incident in Zambia can be properly considered racism of Blacks against Chinese. I concede this.
I read about that incident at that time but didn’t follow the details. At first I thought of it as a case of robbery with killings mixed up, but other details now show that racial animosity was embedded in the whole episode. It’s sad.
This event shows also how failings in the leadership can easily translate in communal warfare, tribal, racial or international.
I found particularly reprehensible the attitudes of the Lusaka’s Mayor.
He attacked the Chinese bosses for malpractices in the way they treated their employees. This, like in the case how Mugabe dealt with White farmers in 90’s, smells me always as rotten, in the way it was done. Not that those Chinese bosses weren’t doing something wrong, but the question is: is this the way to address those problems?
This is not a country ruled by the Chinese! This is a country ruled by Blacks Africans. If somebody is stepping outside the laws of the country, please use those laws to call them to reason, to bring them to court and if necessary to imprison them. The bravado, the macho attitudes, showing the population that you care, that you are powerful, etc, are not necessary. Let the law guide you and be consistent.
By the way, how could the Mayor claim that the Chinese were practicing slavery? And where was the Zambian ruling class – where he belongs, by the way – in the meantime, allowing all that? Were not this ruling class creating conditions favorable to those abuses?
I’ve read some African authors claiming that Zambia is the one country in Africa that could be called with property, a Chinese colony. I’m not studied their situation with detail to evaluate if that qualification is really correct, but when I look at the situation in my own country I can see that we have relationships with China (the People’s Republic) but our state always tries to diversify their international relationships, in order to be not too dependent of anybody else. This is a core point in our diplomacy.
A few important landmarks in our economic relations with outside powers illustrate this drive to diversification.
– first large scale aluminium smelter in Mozambique; established in partnership with the Republic of South Africa (South Africa, for short) and Great Britain;
– exploration of the medium size gas deposits in the southern province of Inhambane in partnership with South Africa; first deals were with a USA company but later the Mozambican state shifted away and choose to deal with the South African state’s company SASOL;
– construction of a medium size gas power plant to help stabilize the electric power supply to the southern provinces of the country, in partnership with Japan;
– exploration of coal reserves in the Tete province in partnership with a Brazilian company;
– exploration of large gas deposits in our northern province of Cabo Delgado in partnership first with Italian and later American companies;
– construction of one of the largest bridges in Africa in partnership with a Chinese building company and financial support from the Chinese state (the People’s Republic); two other large bridges were also constructed recently but in partnership with Portuguese companies;
– etc.
So, in Mozambique, who call the shots are the Mozambicans. They establish relationships with foreign entities in order to help them develop their country but without too much dependence vis a vis any of those foreign entities.
This is called sovereignty. It´s not perfect, but I think it’s better than the kind of subservience that the Zambian ruling class seems to have chosen vis a vis the Chinese.
The rest follows from this basic mistake. The abuses from the Chinese bosses. The racial animosity against them by the population of Zambia. And the attacks.
P.S.
I apologize if my understand of the situation in Zambia is incorrect. In fact I was using them as a case study of how to not format your foreign policy if you are a developing country. Do not choose a new colonial power to be over you, but instead make central to your efforts, to diversify those relations and make clear to them all that you are the real owner of your destiny.
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munubantu, your comment indicates that you agree with me that a good deal of racial animosity is fueled by economic and class antagonism. In South Africa, Zulus carry out pogroms against Nigerians, Zimbabweans, Ethiopians and other blacks, but not against whites, what does that tell you about ‘racial’ strife and social status?
“I found particularly reprehensible the attitudes of the Lusaka’s Mayor.
He attacked the Chinese bosses for malpractices in the way they treated their employees. This, like in the case how Mugabe dealt with White farmers in 90’s, smells me always as rotten, in the way it was done. Not that those Chinese bosses weren’t doing something wrong, but the question is: is this the way to address those problems?”
Racism and demagogy walk hand in hand. In Mugabe’s case, he felt betrayed when White farmers turned against him after he protected them during the period known as the Gukurahundi. The White farmers and their political representatives used the repressive measures Mugabe used to protect them to try to overthrow him and keep their ownership of the land. Unlike you, I don’t blame him for letting loose the War veterans on the White farmers. They sowed the wind, they reaped the whirlwind.
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One year ago I was thinking about the future of Hong Kong and its population, in the context of a “closer” and more assertive attitude of the central authorities in Beijing. One of the interesting variables was also the attitude of British authorities, who have shown an openness to receive Hong Kongers wanting to resettle to Great Britain. See, https://abagond.wordpress.com/2017/09/22/seeing-china/#comment-444558
Now we can already see the migration process taking place, one year later.
https://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2021/05/31/hong-kong-bno-passport-uk-national-security-law-lu-stout-pkg-intl-hnk-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/around-the-world/
I wonder what factors were considered by people who decided to leave their home place to Great Britain. Are they aware that in a decade or two, some of them can possibly be not as well integrated in the new society as they are dreaming now?
Anyway I wish them well.
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