Review
by Daphne Liddle
Winner
Take All – China’s
race for resources and what it means for us: By Dambisa Moyo Allen Lane; hardback £20 (£12 from Amazon) 272pp
including index and notes. ISBN 978-1-846-14503-2
Dambisa Moyo is
a young African economist, born and raised in Lusaka,
Zambia. She has studied
classical capitalist economics at Oxford
and Harvard and worked for the World Bank and Goldman Sachs. But she sees the
world of international capitalism very much through the eyes of an African and
understands the impact of capitalism on Africa and what
we call the Third World.
She has already written a few books, including
Dead Aid – a parody of Live Aid,
explaining how western aid to African countries is destructive to those
countries’ attempts to achieve economic independence and keeps them poor and
dependent.
Her book Winner
Takes All is aimed at western capitalists as a warning that our planet’s
resources are limited but the demands on them are steadily rising as living standards
in places like China and Brazil rise, and that China is the only world player
that is acting in a planned and organised way to secure for itself the supplies
it is going to need in the future.
But it is a very useful book for those
comrades who are struggling to work out whether modern China’s
relations with global capitalism are a good thing or a bad thing. Has China
sold out to the West? Or is China
freeing the Third World from the shackles of imperialism
and perpetual poverty and allowing it to progress and develop; for living
standards in the poorest places on earth to rise – and in the process to
develop a potentially powerful proletariat?
Moyo begins with a summary of the basic
resources that are going to be in serious short supply soon: land, water, oil,
food and minerals.
She also discusses the growing world
population, at seven billion now and set to rise another two billion within a
generation. World demographers expect that rise to level off later this century
as education living standards rise throughout the world and women chose to have
fewer babies. But in the meantime the increasing demand on resources comes not
only from the increasing numbers but from the rising living standards and
expectations of people in Africa, Asia
and Latin America who justifiably want the same living
standards that we have.
Then Moyo explains how China
behaves differently to other major economic powers; how is can plan
strategically because capitalism in China
is tightly controlled by the state. The Chinese state has a major stake in all
the major capitalist enterprises and its five-year plans coordinate the whole
country’s economic activities, giving it an ability to plan for the future that
western governments can only dream of.
Chinese
companies do not compete with each other but work together with the support of
the state. Western capitalists howl that this is unfair practice.
This is what has enabled China’s
rapid and sustained growth while the western economies have been rocked by
banking collapses and recession.
She writes: “China
is now the main trading partner of many of the most influential economies in
both the developed and developing world. In just a few short decades it has
become the most sought-after source of capital infusions. Indeed, rich
countries and poor alike do not wait for China
to come calling; they actively court and seek out Chinese investments.
“China now funds foreign governments
(providing loans and buying their bonds), underwrites schools and hospitals,
and pays for infrastructure projects such as roads and railways (particularly
across the poorest parts of the world) catering to the needs of the host
nations and making China an altogether more attractive investor than
international bodies such as the World Bank, which often tie loans to harsh
policy restrictions.”
Moyo points out that in international markets China
does not play by the capitalist rules. It pays above market prices for
resources that it knows will later be in short supply in order to establish
friendly relations with developing countries that are rich in resources but
poor in terms of living standards.
Western powers have accused China
of developing a new colonialism – ignoring their own record on this. But China’s
deals with Third World countries do not come with
strings. They allow these countries to develop economically and wherever they
invest living standards begin to rise; education and health improve giving
these countries more, not less, control over their own destiny.
Moyo also deals with accusations that China
is shipping in its own workforce to other countries. She says that allegations
that China is
using its own prison population as slave labour in Africa
have no evidence to back them up. Chinese companies do bring in skilled and
technical workers but in virtually every project more local labour is used than
imported Chinese labour – creating hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Her final chapters are a call to western
governments to come to their senses, get together and start planning for the
control and conservation of resources in the same way that China
is doing. If not, she foresees serious conflict in the future over resources.
She berates western capitalism for being unable to see or plan beyond the
short-term.
Throughout the book she writes very clearly
and explains economic terms like monopsony (the mirror image on monopoly, where
there are many suppliers but only one buyer) and uses plenty of well-sourced
statistics.
She assumes all governments, including those
in the West, are seeking to improve the general fortunes of their populations.
But she does not see that the very nature of capitalism – competitive and
driven by the need to maximise profit at every turn – makes the long-term
strategic planning that she calls for impossible.
Some readers will be relieved to learn that
there is at least one rising economic power that is taking seriously the future
of this planet and its resources and is, because of its political structure,
capable of doing something about it.
