I never signed up to The Disillusioned Kid's blog for Uzbekistan pledge, but I’ll give it a go anyway. So to Uzbekistan…via Angola.
China has granted Angola a $211-million loan to finance the first stage of the project, which will be carried out by the private Chinese company Roads and Bridges Corporation (CRBC) over the next two years.International financial institutions have called for more transparency in President Jose Eduardo dos Santos' management of his country's resources, in particular of oil revenues which currently account for 54% of Angola's gross domestic product.
China has placed no such conditions on Angola and has made large investments in the country, which is the second largest oil producer in sub-Saharan Africa, after Nigeria, with about one million barrels per day.
China has also promised to set up a Chinatown in Luanda. Just think of it – a whole business class injected into your economy, just because you happen to have something that China wants.
What China wants is two things: Oil and regional security. This latter may or may not mean regional hegemony. I suspect not, outside its near abroad. The only thing China demands of the people it helps is that they recognize the one China principle over Taiwan. That apart there are no strings attached to its support and no prospect of any strings being attached. There is no need, for instance, for China to smear a Craig Murray, because there would be no-one like Craig Murray adopted as China’s ambassador to Uzbekistan. There is likewise no need to accommodate pressure from human rights campaigners over the massacre at Andijan, because no such groups exist in China.
Back to what China wants. Uzbekistan has both oil and natural gas. Gold as well. And cotton of course – the ammunition for the bra wars has to come from somewhere. It also lies in what the Chinese do consider to be their sphere of influence. And it acts as a barrier preventing Islamists from making sustained contact with their co-religionists the Uighur of Xinjiang Province and the indigenous Hui. So, therefore, it has every reason to sign natural gas contracts worth $600 million, invite Islam Karimov on state visits, applaud the Andijan killings, and get it to join the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, the Sino-Russian version of NATO. For his part, Islam Karimov has no reason not to ditch allies in countries where troublesome individuals and groups can try to get their governments to put pressure on him in favour of allies where such individuals and groups can’t function. Karimov was given a great deal of leeway by the US, Britain and his other Western allies. But China offered a better deal, so he took it.
What to do? Boycotting Uzbek cotton seems to be a popular option, especially since much of it is apparently produced by slave labour. Yet the likely effect of a Western boycott would be to ensure that more of it is sold to China to make those wonderfully cheap clothes currently being stored in warehouses all over Europe, to much grinding of teeth by promoters of free trade. It may be that any state level boycott of Uzbek cotton could fall foul of WTO regulations. It would certainly be interesting to see the responses from that quarter to any attempt to enforce place of origin labeling requirements for cotton on clothing and other textile products.
Aside from being Uzbekistan’s new best friend, China is emerging as Iran’s main international backer, is heavily invested in the Sudan and is drawing closer to Zimbabwe. This is not to say that China deliberately seeks out bad actors. Its open handed diplomacy is the same to the good, the bad, and the ugly. And it’s certainly arguable that it gives better third world governments a real choice. They’re not under such pressure to accept brutal structural adjustment regimes under the Washington consensus orthodoxy, or to listen to pious little homilies about reform from our own dear Prime Minister.
China’s aim in all this is to secure allies and resources as it becomes an integral part of the world economic order. So the question of what you do about Uzbekistan is hard to distinguish from the question of what is to be done about China, and what is to be done about globalization generally. Until we’ve got that one figured, I suspect that Islam Karimov can go on boiling his subjects in peace.
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