A Chinese overseer looks on as a laborer in Guinea-Bissau works on the construction of housing donated by China for military officers. As China increases investment throughout Africa, it says it is looking for long-term "friendship" rather than immediate contracts. Accordingly, it has been lavishing gifts even on impoverished Guinea-Bissau, a country the size of Maryland with no oil, little industry, and few exports.
Photo: AP
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A Population for Export
This is the last week of the annual session of the National People's Conference, China's main legislature. The session currently going on in Beijing has been marked by the adoption of a manifestly expansionist course for China on the world stage.
At the end of last year, Chinese national television showed twelve straight days of a multipart documentary film entitled "The Ascent of the Great Powers," which features Chinese historians scrupulously parsing the reasons for the rise and fall of the world's great empires, from Alexander the Great and Rome to the Soviet Union and the United States. The film grew out of a lecture series by the same name that was given in 2003 in the Upper Party School of the Chinese Communist Party, which trains future leaders of the People's Republic of China. After the film was shown on Chinese television, many analysts speculated that the government in Beijing is beginning to groom the Chinese masses for the Celestial Kingdom's imminent transformation into a global superpower.
Judging from the atmosphere in Beijing at the National People's Conference (NPC), which began on March 5 and will conclude on March 16, the initial phase of preparations has been completed. Beijing is now ready to openly declare its imperial ambitions and has roughed out a plan for achieving the global dominion that it so desires.
The United States has been struck by the announcement that China's military budget for this year will grow by 17.8%. Washington is particularly uneasy about the fact that this is the largest increase in the Chinese military budget in five years. Beijing plans to spend almost 350 billion yuan (approximately $45 billion) on defense, which is 7.19% of the country's entire annual budget. In response, Pentagon chief Robert Gates said that "the US administration is very concerned by the militarization of China and the obscurity of its goals." In actual terms, of course, the Chinese military budget is pennies compared to the funds earmarked for defense in the US budget: this year, the Pentagon has requested $481.4 billion from Congress (15.71% of the American budget) on top of expenditures for the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. When it comes to defense spending, it appears that Washington still has nothing to worry about from the Chinese.
The NPC, however, will soon adopt a measure that has the potential to be a much more dangerous weapon than China's anti-satellite missiles. The law, which is entitled "On Assisted Employment," is aimed at strengthening China's global presence by supporting Chinese workers who wish to work abroad.
The Chinese diaspora has traditionally played a crucial role in advancing the interests of the Chinese authorities beyond the country's borders. This kind of cooperation between Beijing and Chinese immigrants abroad is exemplified by the success in the 1980s of Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms, which relied largely on experience, professional connections, and investment supplied by Chinese working in other countries. Since then, cooperation between officials in Beijing and the leaders of Chinese communities abroad has become a quiet but essential strategic branch of Chinese foreign policy.
Chinese immigrant communities, many with roots that go back a hundred years or more, can be found in many countries around the world. Earlier, these communities grew up more or less spontaneously and at random: someone succeeded in leaving China for a another country, and soon many relatives followed, providing the basis for a larger community. Many Chinese left their homeland because of China's exploding population and the impossibility of finding work in the countryside, while some were fleeing creditors or the law. The political cataclysms of war and revolution also made immigrants out of millions of Chinese.
More recently, the strained circumstances in China's labor market have encouraged many Chinese to seek work abroad. The ranks of the unemployed in China increasingly include not only recent migrants to the cities from the countryside but also highly-qualified specialists, particularly computer technicians, IT managers, and doctors. However, for the average citizen, the path to leaving China to work abroad is littered with bureaucratic obstacles. Until recently, to get around these obstacles people could hire private firms that promised, for a hefty fee, to find employers abroad and file all of the necessary paperwork. More often than not, however, these companies have turned out to be fronts for swindlers, and the Chinese media is full of stories of gullible people who were taken in by such scams.
Now the Chinese government is moving to get a grip on the country's brain drain. In order to leave the country to work abroad, all Chinese citizens will have to go through a special government agency that will find positions in foreign countries and process the necessary documents. The authorities in Beijing will thus gain both a monopoly in the Chinese labor export market and the means of fostering an expansion of China's influence in crucial regions of the world by deliberately flooding specific labor markets with Chinese workers.
China's future targets for the expansion of its overseas diasporas will undoubtedly be regions of key strategic importance to Beijing, especially Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Russian Far East. The main groups of Chinese workers that are likely to be sent abroad under the new regulations will be medical professionals and IT technicians, which China trains well but cannot fully employ, and these workers will face far less competition from the local population in these regions than in Europe or the United States.
Southeast Asia has been a target of Chinese expansionism since the thirteenth century, when China was conquered by the Mongols and thousands of Chinese fled south. Now ethnic Chinese occupy many leading positions in business throughout Southeast Asia, and the lion's share of the GDP of countries such as Singapore comes from companies run by Chinese entrepreneurs. The authorities in Beijing see Southeast Asia as the southernmost reaches of the Greater China that is centered on Taiwan and mainland China, and by reinforcing its dominance in Southeast Asia, the Chinese government intends to launch the transformation of the People's Republic of China into a superpower.
The future will also likely see a growing flood of Chinese immigrants to Africa. In recent years, Beijing has invested a great deal in getting its hands on the continent's vast mineral wealth. The Chinese state-run oil companies CNPC and Sinopec have signed contracts to develop oil fields in several oil-rich African countries, including Angola, Sudan, and Nigeria, and almost a third of the oil consumed by China, or approximately 800,000 barrels per day, comes from Africa. In addition to minerals and oil, the volume of trade between Africa and China exceeds $55 billion annually, and Chinese companies are signing agreements to build and maintain facilities and infrastructure all over the continent.
Relations on the level of government are just as sunny as in the commercial sector. For example, in November of last year Beijing hosted the massive China-Africa forum, which was attended by heads of state from 48 of Africa's 53 nations. In fact, Beijing knows that the main obstacle remaining to the decisive "Chinafication" of Africa is the relative paucity of Chinese communities on the continent. During his trip to Africa in February, Chinese President Hu Jintao promised to extend $3 billion in credits to African nations for the development of infrastructure and to send Chinese specialists to help realize these development projects. The labor migration law that will soon be adopted by the NPC will significantly help in this regard.
Another long-standing strategic target of Chinese foreign policy is Latin America, where, with the help of its immigrant community in the region, Beijing recently scored a major foreign policy victory by assuming proxy control of the Panama Canal. In 2000, a tender from the Panamanian government for management of the canal was won by the firm Hutchison Whampoa, which is owned by a 79-year-old Hong Kong businessman named Li Ka-shing, the richest man in East Asia and a fixture on the Forbes list of the world's ten richest people whose personal fortune is estimated at $18.8 billion. Mr. Li left mainland China for Hong Kong, then under British control, in the 1930s, and had little to do with the Chinese authorities until the beginning of the 1980s. Once the reformer Deng Xiaoping came to power, however, the billionaire businessman visited Beijing several times and established close contacts with top Chinese leaders. Mr. Li also exercises enormous influence in Chinese expatriate communities in the United States and Latin America, many of the leaders of which originally hail from Hong Kong. Having secured control over the Panama Canal, Li Ka-shing and prominent members of the local Chinese community lobbied for a project to modernize the canal to permit the passage of supertankers. The project was approved by the Panamanian National Assembly last July. Just two weeks later, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez signed an agreement with Beijing to increase deliveries of Venezuelan oil to China to one million barrels a day by 2012, which is incidentally when the reconstruction of the Panama Canal is scheduled to be completed. Once the canal has been widened, Mr. Chavez will be able to export his oil to China in half the time that deliveries currently take. In Latin America, however, as in Africa, there are many Chinese business projects but few actual Chinese – a situation that Beijing intends to remedy.
Russia has also not escaped notice in the upper reaches of the Chinese government. In the first place, the Russian Far East offers the most convenient valve for letting off some of the pressure of China's growing population. Secondly, the Russian Far East has long been a bone of contention between China and Russia, meaning that Russia can expect Beijing to attempt to encourage its wave of expansion via Chinese migrants to the north as well as to the south.
The road to Russia will not be easy. According to official statistics, there are currently around 200,000 migrants from China's border provinces employed on legal work visas in the Russian Far East. However, experts maintain that this number represents only 20% of the ethnic Chinese living in the region, and the Russian authorities are keen to crack down on illegal immigration from China. In order to strengthen the Chinese presence in Russia, Beijing will have to find a way to legalize the export of its labor force to the country, a problem that promises to keep Russian and Chinese officials busy for some time to come.
Meanwhile, however, the Chinese are moving forward with the plan to increase their global presence in a literal sense - by sheer force of numbers. With the decision to undertake the export of its own citizens to work outside its borders, China is on its way to building a formidable and influential network of military bases that spans the globe, using its own people as weapons.
Alexander Gabuyev
All the Article in Russian as of Mar. 12, 2007
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