Zimbabwe's future: Made in China By Michael Wines The New York Times
MONDAY, JULY 25, 2005 JOHANNESBURG His new 25-bedroom palace is covered with midnight-blue Chinese roof tiles. His air force trains on Chinese jets. His subjects wear Chinese shoes, ride Chinese buses and, lately, zip around the country in Chinese propjets. He has even urged his countrymen to learn Mandarin and nurture a taste for Chinese cuisine.
That President Robert Mugabe rules Zimbabwe is irrelevant. Tightening his embrace of all things Chinese, the 81-year-old Mugabe, Zimbabwe's canny autocrat for 25 years, arrived in Beijing on Saturday for six days of talks with China's leaders, led by President Hu Jintao.
Shunned by Western leaders and investors for his government's human rights policies, Zimbabwe has begun a determined campaign to hitch its plummeting fortunes to China's rising star.
Mugabe calls the policy "Look East" and has relentlessly promoted it as another way to thumb Zimbabwe's nose at its old colonial ruler, Britain, and Britain's allies, like the United States. The sheer intensity of the pro-China drive has stirred resentment among average Zimbabweans and raised eyebrows among the elite, some of whom question whether Mugabe is simply replacing British political domination with a more up-to-date Asian economic rule.
But it is a hand-in-glove fit for the Chinese, who are steadily extending their political and economic influence across Africa, particularly in regions rich in oil and minerals.
The Chinese are widely reported to covet a stake in Zimbabwe's platinum mines, which have the world's second-largest reserves, and Mugabe's government has hinted at a desire to accommodate them. The mines' principal operator denies being pressured to deal with the Chinese, but negotiations are under way to sell a stake to unidentified Zimbabweans. The operator has postponed major spending on the mines, citing political uncertainty.
Meanwhile, China is investing billions of dollars to get access to resources for its fast-growing economy, in areas like Angolan oil and Zambian copper mines. And because they do not comment on their partners' human rights policies, the Chinese are becoming entrenched in some states, including Zimbabwe and Sudan, that bridle at Western criticism.
While the talk is of democracy sweeping the continent, some experts believe that China's rising influence in Africa may power its blend of free-market dictatorship, particularly among African leaders already reluctant to turn over power democratically.
"We might see the Chinese political system appealing to a lot of states whose elites and regimes are more in line with that sort of thinking," said Chris Maroleng, a Zimbabwe expert at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria. "It's really a conflict of two systems, one based on regime security and the other, almost Western, which talks of human security - good governance and human rights."
The Chinese have been friendly with Zimbabwe since 1980, when they and Mugabe, who led the newly independent state, shared much the same Marxist ideology.
But in the past two or three years, as Zimbabwe's economy has edged ever closer to collapse, the friendship has turned on investments and goods that Mugabe's government was increasingly unable to find elsewhere.
Some exchanges amount to good will: China, for example, donated the blue tiles adorning the $13 million palace Mugabe is building for himself in Borrowdale, a comparatively wealthy Harare suburb.
Others are more significant. Chinese companies have won contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars to provide hydroelectric generators for the national power authority, run by Mugabe's brother-in-law. China Aviation Industry, an aircraft maker, has sold or given three 60-seat propjets to the beleaguered Air Zimbabwe.
First Automobile Works of China has agreed to sell the Zimbabwean government 1,000 commuter buses to upgrade its municipal fleet.
China won a contract last year to farm 1,000 square kilometers, or 386 square miles, of land seized from white commercial farmers during the land-confiscation program begun by Mugabe in 2000. Zimbabwe's air force has bought $200 million in Chinese-made Karakorum 8 trainer jets.
Rumors abound that China has sold Zimbabwe's internal-security apparatus water cannons to subdue protesters and bugging equipment to monitor cellphone networks.
Zimbabwe says trade with China amounted to $100 million in the first three months of this year. Mugabe says China is close to becoming the country's leading foreign investor, a claim that seems likely given the headlong flight of Western capital.
Maroleng, of the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria, and others say that many deals are hidden in a welter of barter arrangements and front companies, reflecting Zimbabwe's inability to pay China with hard currency. China is widely reported, for example, to have taken a share of Zimbabwe's tobacco harvest in exchange for equipment.
What the ordinary Zimbabwean reaps from this relationship is unclear.
Zimbabweans complain that their new Chinese buses break down regularly and that the Chinese goods that flood stores and roadside stalls are shoddy. They have coined a term for the phenomenon: zhing-zhong.
"To call something zhing-zhong means that it is substandard," said Eldred Masunugure, the chairman of the political science department at the University of Zimbabwe in Harare. "The resentment of the Chinese is not only widespread, it's deeply rooted. It's affecting even other Chinese-looking people, like the Japanese."
Masunugure and others say that Harare's few Japanese residents complain of being taunted and called zhing-zhong. Harare newspapers report that high-yielding robberies of Harare's Chinese residents are rising.
A solution, however, is in the wings: In a meeting last month, China and Zimbabwe signed a letter of intent to cooperate in law enforcement and the judiciary. Atop the list is a plan for China to train Zimbabweans in managing prisons.
"They have a fairly advanced prison system," Zimbabwe's justice minister, Patrick Chinamasa, said. "We would also want to tap into that expertise."