Those well positioned to make such assessments, irrespective of their nationalities, don’t see China’s political-economic model as being exportable – mostly because it very clearly isn’t.
For at least two thousand years, China’s culture has developed along a distinct path of favouring communal interests instead of emphasising individual rights.
China is seen by many political scientists as the first modern state as it overcame the innate tendency for kinship based political hierarchies in favour of emphasising merit – at least a millennium prior to Europe beginning a similar shift.
From SA’s perspective there is also the quite substantial consideration that ethnic diversity did not feature in China’s development.
SA does not have the option of subjugating individual rights to communal interests as 1) this is contrary to the nation’s constitution and 2) SA’s politics must contend with the economic and social challenges of a population which is highly diverse ethnically and in terms of economic clustering.
Even today, over 90% of China is ethnically Han Chinese. About 80% of SA’s population is black and two-thirds of this major population subset is poor while there is almost no poverty amid the other 20%.
Phrased another way, China’s politics don’t seek to cater to political identity issues whereas this is central to SA’s politics. Western political structures battle with such challenges but at least they are designed to do that.
The western political philosophy project developed along a path very different from China’s.
Individual rights provide foundational groundings for western ideas around politics and then various structures are typically assembled within a national constitution to protect such rights.
Few modern societies would have peacefully succumbed to China’s so-called “one child” policy as it so aggressively constrained reproductive rights.
That this central dictate was accepted by most Chinese reflects many centuries of individual interests being subordinated to leaders dictating what was in the interests of the broader public.
Whether such a policy actually advanced the collective interests of the Chinese people is not the point here. Rather the point is that acceptance of such an intrusion on individual liberties was made possible by a culture that emerged over an extremely lengthy time frame.
A further core challenge to aligning with China is that its extraordinarily successful growth model of the path forty years has run its course.
China’s amazing success followed from its becoming such a formidable exporter of manufactured goods while investing aggressively in fixed assets.
This model has now become a victim of its own success.
Yet China’s domestic consumption spend is still not adequate to fuel sufficient growth to lift its still considerable volume of poor into the middle class.
China’s success to date has focused on outcompeting the world to sell to deep consumer markets – mostly in the West.
As this path has run its course, China’s updated model has become more competitive still but also more predatory.
There has been a growing global awareness in recent months regarding how inherently predatory much of China’s lending practices have been.
SA is particularly vulnerable because:
- SA’s ruling party sees China as a struggle-era alignment partner
- SA is becoming increasingly desperate to access capital
- SA’s ruling party sees its membership in BRICS as positioning the nation as a co-pioneer in offer a post-imperial world order.
Yet it is not possible that China’s leadership can respect SA’s leadership due to SA’s policy failures reflecting their having been polar opposites to what has driven China’s success over the past forty years.
Just as China and Russia supported anti-constitutional developments in Venezuela’s and Zimbabwe’s, they will continue to seek clandestine influence in SA which will erode constitutional protections and economic prospects.