Sino-Zim ties sound, but need strengthening

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    Discovered: 2010-03-12 01:18:03 | Garikai Chengu Author: Garikai Chengu | Chronicle Source: Chronicle

By Garikai Chengu



AS the global economic balance of power shifts from West to East, it is becoming increasingly evident that we are living through the end of 500 years of Western ascendancy.
Consequently, Zimbabwe must exercise long-term strategic vision, by perfecting the art of benefiting from China.
Most analysts agree that China will break away from the US and have the world’s largest and most influential economy by 2025.
However, as it stands, America needs China to buy her treasury bills; and China needs America to buy her exports. They are like two drunken giants leaning on each other. Yet a sobering reckoning of some sort seems inevitable; and it is difficult to see how both can be winners.
The eureka moment of the past decade that indicated that only one giant will remain standing, was the crippling global recession and consequent realisation that China holds vast global reserves, while the US lives increasingly unsustainably on credit.
US reliance on Chinese capital to stabilise its accounts signifies that the decline and fall of America’s undeclared empire might therefore be due not to despicable terrorists at the gates or to the rogue regimes that sponsor them, but to a fiscal crisis at home.
For 500 years prior to this crisis, what had given the West the edge over the East were five key features: the capitalist enterprise, the scientific method, global imperialism, the consumer society and the “Protestant” ethic of work and capital accumulation as ends in themselves.
China has clearly replicated one and two. However, it may be in the process of adopting others with some alterations (consumption and the work ethic). Only number three — imperialism — shows little sign of emerging in the People’s Republic of China.
The New World Order will not commence after China’s economy overtakes that of the US in 2025, it has been started already. The US was the old order’s main architect, and China is the rising power of the new.
Thus, the decision by President Mugabe to “Look East” was strategic and prescient; however, the country must now perfect the art of benefiting from China’s colossal rise.
In order to do so Zimbabwe must recognise and expand mutually beneficial areas of political, economic and social cooperation between the two nations.
From the outset it is important to note that looking East does not mean completely turning one’s back to the West. A great deal of emphasis has been placed on the need to re-engage the Bretton Woods institutions and detente with the West, and rightly so; however, this rapprochement must occur in simultaneity with a strengthening of economic relations with China, which has fast become of great geo-strategic importance to Zimbabwe on several fronts.
First, President Mugabe’s administration has had links with the Chinese Government ever since China provided Zimbabwe’s guerrillas with training, logistical and material support to wage the liberation struggle.
Chinese authorities’ associations with the Second Chimurenga, and subsequent cordial political relations, have resulted in the crucial formation of an ideological alliance with a permanent member of the UN Security Council. This alliance has been unwavering throughout the Third Chimurenga, where China’s support was instrumental in derailing attempts by Western nations to use the UN Security Council to put sanctions on the People of Zimbabwe, pursuant to illegal regime change.
Illegal economic sanctions have brought Zimbabwe and China c... ...

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