This endorsement comes after one by Justin Lin, the World Bank’s senior vice president and chief economist, in the prestigious annual UNU-WIDER lecture to the United Nations University in May last year. Lin, who previously was a professor at Peking University, a member of the National People’s Congress and holder of other offices in China, includid setting up special economic zones among his six recommendations for “developing countries” that he called a “road map” to economic growth. (In the same speech, he likened China to a “leading dragon,” rather than a mere “leading goose” as in the expression “flying geese,” that will be the source of structural transformation in these countries.)

In the past, the United Nations Industrial Development Programme (UNIDO) has endorsed special economic zones in Laos and Cambodia and in Nepal (the latter was specifically related to a Chinese project and later retracted by higher-ups in the organisation). But UNDP has tended to be more “pro-poor” and less sanguine about the growth model these zones represent.

The debate inspired Paulette Nonfodji, a masters student at the University of Amsterdam who studies Chinese agricultural investments in Benin, to write the following poem:

THE TORMENTS OF A MINER

It’s been said that they come from the Levant and the Occident to flock to the Centre

With their bags full of money to invest in the mines of the Centre;

For even more money for themselves;

And a job for me with a boss all for me.

It’s been said that this one is a better boss for me

It’s been said that, that one is a worst boss for me.

But I say what matters?

I still have to wake up every single day

With the fear in the pit of my stomach,

Very well repressed in the depths of the unconscious,

To trudge in the bowels of the mines;

Hoping, yes hoping to make it back

To the happiness of somebody’s father or mother

To the delight of a friend

Or to the disappointment of an enemy.

Yes, hoping to make it back with a pittance of their bags full of money

So that they can make even more money out of their so called investments.

But I say what matters?

It is been said that the casualties in some mines are better than in some others.

But I say what matters?

Every single miner’s life lost in the bowels of mines is shaping a story.

Yes, a story of a lost father or a lost mother

A story of a lost well-beloved or a lost enemy.

So I say to all this what matters?

I, miner still have to carry my yoke every single damn day

Wondering what Tomorrow might bring,

Hoping for a better Day.

Dreaming of a brighter future that escapes me perpetually

So after all tell me:

What matters whether they come from the Levant or the Occident?

 Paulette Nonfodji

According to a source quoted by a Kenyan news portal, Jackal News, “CNC TV became the most watched TV station in the Asia continent mostly [for] the Africa stories.” A source that spouts such nonsense is hardly worth much (it is in fact impossible to ascertain from CNC’s website when they have launched their services and where they are available), but Jackal News confidently asserts that “CNC TV is planning to start poaching employees from both local and international stations.”

A South African news site, meanwhile, reported that CCTV “has launched the biggest raid on personnel across Kenyan TV newsrooms … as the station prepares for its launch in December. “Top editors of what will be the Kenyan office and continental satellite studio for the Chinese have already been trained in Beijing and are preparing for what is being described as a ‘transformation of international TV experience.’”

Al-Jazeera is also launching a Swahili service and “poaching” journalists from Kenyan stations.

Semi-official Chinese commentators have long been saying that Western influence on media in Africa (and more recently Burma) is a key obstacle to a better image of China. The expansion of Chinese media overseas has been set by the government as a goal to serve the growth of China’s “soft power.” Li Qiangmin, the current Chinese envoy to the Southeast African Common Market and a senior diplomat, recently said in an interview that Africa’s “misunderstanding” of China is largely because of the “demonisation” in Western media and the absence of Chinese media from the continent. Since the failure of the Southern Media Group, which has a liberal reputation and has recently been attacked by nationalists in China, to buy Newsweek in 2010, however, this expansion has mostly been proceeding in Chinese-language media.

According to a Tanzanian news site, the Chinese government has also “expressed interest to establish an FM radio that will use Chinese and Kiswahili languages as a symbol of friendship with Tanzania.” Li Wei, the Vice-Minister of the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), who made this announcement, said that “the first step we took is to translate a Chinese play into Kiswahili which is called Doudou.”

The article profiles 49-year-old Tong Guoqiang 仝国强 from Baiying 白营Township, Tangyang 汤阳 County, who started a vegetable farm in Sudan in 2003. He was later joined by 14 fellow villagers. The article also claims that there already are 500 thousand entrepreneurs from Zhejiang Province engaging in various agricultural, forestry, and fishery activities around the world. For instance, Party Secretary Zhang Jin 张金 of Huafeng 华丰 (meaning “Chinese Prosperity”) Village, Xieqiao 斜桥 (meaning “Tilted Bridge” but homophonous with “evil overseas Chinese”) Township, Haining 海宁 Prefecture has bought 200 thousand mu (133 square km) of land in Rio Grande do Sul state in Brazil, on which he is raising 3,700 heads of cattle.

Meanwhile, Shandong Province has approved a joint venture between Gaomi Cotton Technology 高密市锦棉业科技有限公司, a prefectural-level state enterprise, and a Zimbabwean company to invest $100 million in a joint-venture cotton plantation and factory.

So now, the government is inviting members of the “popular” (non-state) media to study tours of China, as it has done in African countries. It also has set up satellite broadcasts of China Central Television to Burma, which were — like any other satellite channels — previously banned by the Burmese junta. So the government seems to be banking on the chance that more openness may bring more, not less, attraction to China.

One of them planted 5,000 mu in 2002 but, in 2006, UWSA commanders forced him at gunpoint to sign what he describes an extortionate lease contract. He fled to China and was later persuaded to sign the land over to Wa. Another planter, who first invested in Burma in 1998, had two plantations taken over in similar ways by Wa soldiers.

Meanwhile, as part of the media coverage that has followed Burma’s suspension of the Myitsone Dam project, a power industry website published an article about how electricity companies in Dehong Prefecture have been providing power across the border, starting as early as 1985 — that is, when the Burmese Communist Party still controlled the region. An employee would go across the border once a month to take electricity readings. He got himself into dangerous situations but assured the reporter that the company provided the same service to cross-border customers as to domestic ones.

This is a reminder of the complicated power relations in the region. The local ceasefire armies, particularly UWSA, are not simple victims or co-perpetrators of Chinese exploitation: they can also be adversaries. Chinese investors, for their part, can be victims or service providers trying to “act normal”.

The man, it turns out, is a serious mountaineer and one of the few people who have been to both the South and the North Pole. He is almost 2m tall. His 16th-floor office has four cats, a rabbit, two monkeys and two parrots: “not the traditional office of a Chinese businessman.”

Maybe it’s just the Nordic connection, but the picture reminded me of Henning Mankell’s description of the Peking office of the evil tycoon who is the protagonist of his novel The Man from Beijing. That tycoon, connected to the highest officials in the Party, plans a mass resettlement of Chinese farmers in Africa even as he arranges for a series of revenge murders in Sweden. The Guardian called the novel “admirable in its concern about corruption, colonialism and ­cruelty.” The two businessmen are very similar: starting from officialdom, they become cosmopolitan globetrotters — Huang actually says he decided to quit government service after reading Chekhov’s Death of an Official! – but it is just this seeming cosmopolitanism that makes them such good subjects of conspiracy theories.

The Iceland venture was facilitated by the wife of an Icelandic friend Huang had met at Peking University. She later became mayor of Reykjavik and a government minister. (This detail reminded me of Dan Holloway’s short story in which a Spanish official decides the only way to save his hometown is to invite Chinese investors to build a car factory that will destroy the local landscape. The head of the Chinese delegation is a businesswoman who was Ignacio’s lover during his studies in China.)

According to the article, in 2005, Huang tried to invest in tourism development at Issyk-Kol Lake in Kyrgyzstan but withdrew after media spread the story that the project was a cover for China’s nuclear submarine programme and Kyrgyz officials began asking him for their cut. (I visited Issyk-Kol around the same time and wished there were somewhere to stay apart from Soviet-ere sanatoria.) “I got scared — you can’t go so far as to bribe people.” Then Huang tried to invest in a resort in Hokkaido but found that Japanese workers didn’t want to work for a Chinese boss or a woman.

See, he says all the right things for liberal Western readers. Suspicious, huh?

To the three c’s of corruption, colonialism and cruelty, let’s add two more: cosmopolitanism and conspiracy. All combinations allowed.

Most of them are simply taken from Africa news aggregrators like Allafrica.com, but occasionally there are links to left-wing or antiglobalist sites like Pambazuka or Counterpunch, and more rarely, to mainstream Western news sites. As one would expect, those praising China predominate, but while the choice is certainly not balanced, critical articles are not completely absent.

Rather than in the reporting on China, I see a much more clear and disturbing bias in the newsletter’s choice of representing Western — specifically American — views to underpin the message of a U.S.-led global conspiracy to dominate the world, and within it, Africa. Articles from the English-language website of Pravda — the newspaper of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, formerly the Soviet Union’s People’s Daily but by now a marginal publication — or the Centre for Research on Globalization, a Canada-based New World Order conspiracy theory site that most academics in the West would probably regard as wacky, are offered up without any comments, creating the appearance that they represent mainstream views in Russia and North America.

In the 25 October issue (No. 65), Li — whose signature lecture in Englh is on how China’s foreign policy is driven by Confucian values — quotes Paul Craig Roberts’ article on Counterpunch in his weekly letter to readers as accusing the U.S. government of assassinating Gadhafi. According to Li, it is not by chance that he was killed a day after Hilary Clinton expressed the U.S. government’s hope to see him captured or dead soon.

Who knows, maybe Roberts — and Li, who doesn’t accuse but insinuates — are right. The problem here, though, is that Roberts is identified simply as a former U.S. assistant secretary of state, creating the impression that the U.S. has all but officially confessed to engineering the murder. Now, Roberts had that position for two years in the Reagan administration. Today, however, he is known as a radical critic who, according to Wikipedia, has called the U.S. a puppet state of Israel and said “There is probably more democracy in China than there is in the west. Revolution is the only answer…”

This is a refrain that resonates with the Chinese government and many Chinese people, including those building dams and investing in factories. So it does with many Americans: in the same issue of the newspaper, economist Tyler Cowen advocates a “pro-discipline and pro-wealth cultural revolution,” bringing to mind Aihwa Ong’s observation years ago that “Asians” (i.e., increasingly, Chinese) had become the ideal enterprising American subjects.

Europeans are clearly the laggards here: Jin Liqun, the head of China’s overseas investment agency, recently admonished Europe’s “worn-out welfare societies” to change labour laws that “induce sloth, indolence rather than hard working.” As a friend from Benin commented, “For the very first time since I don’t know when a non-Westerner is dictating a code of conduct to Westerners! Are Chinese going to devise conditionalities for loans to the West similar to the ones of Structural Adjustment Programme to the Third World?”

Maybe. For now, Hungary, whose government has recently come out with the vision of a “work-based society,” announced the opening of two more Confucius Institutes. Do so many Hungarians really want to learn Chinese? Probably not, but the mayor of Szeged, where one of the new institutes is planned, says Chinese investors have “more trust in cities that have them.” (The mayor, by the way, is from the opposition Socialist Party.)