Zimbabwe: Country's 'Look East' Policy - a Poisoned Chalice?


WITH an economy growing at an average annual rate of around 10% in recent years, China is undoubtedly a global economic tiger. China is experiencing an impressive economic boom virtually unparalleled in the past two or so decades. The increasing role that is being played by China in the global economy cannot, therefore, be ignored.

The main purpose of this article is to interrogate the economic relations between China and Zimbabwe firstly in a bilateral context and also in a generalised Sino-African context.

Going forward, the fourth Forum for China-Africa Co-operation (Focac) that was held at the Egyptian resort town of Sharm El' Sheik last month set the tone for China's desire to structure and outline its foreign and economic policy in Africa.

The need to foster and stimulate greater South-South co-operation through more integrated trade and investment synergies and linkages was emphasised. Because of the abundance of natural resources such as minerals and oil on the African continent, China is taking its economic relations with Africa very seriously.


Africa has not been spared from the effects of the global economic crisis. Although Zimbabwe's economy, for the past decade or so, has been largely de-linked from the global economy, it will be folly for anyone to think that Zimbabwe has nothing to lose from the global economic recession.

Weak and decimated as the Zimbabwean economy might be today, it is not a secret that Zimbabwe possesses tremendous economic potential.

In fact, Zimbabwe is a sleeping economic giant. As soon as we emerge from the politics of autocracy, repression and kleptocracy, Zimbabwe will be a resurgent economic giant in sub-Saharan Africa, second, perhaps, only to South Africa.




Zimbabwe has to learn to re-direct her development trajectory to make her economic revival more enduring and sustainable. Gone should be the days of sloganeering and hate-mongering.

This world is getting smaller and smaller and if Zimbabwe is not careful, she will very soon be squeezed out. China means business in Africa; the Chinese are not here to sloganeer and reminisce about the good old days of the liberation struggles that were waged on the African continent in the 1960s and 1970s.

China is in Africa to benefit from the vast natural resources that are necessary to fuel the Chinese economic boom.

Sino-African relations can be traced back to the 1960s during the Cold War when China provided military and ideological support to Africa's liberation struggles, particularly in southern Africa. In the 1980s, China adopted economic reforms that saw its economy increasingly becoming market-driven.

Of course, there were always the trappings of socialist rhetoric but my view is that modern day China is a capitalist nation; the main distinction from the West being that the vast majority of Chinese companies that play a major role in the global economy are state-owned corporations.

But these state-owned Chinese corporations are fiercely capitalistic in both their mode of production and marketing. They are first and foremost profit-driven.

The clarion call for Zimbabwe and, indeed, for the rest of the African continent, should be to seek to develop and sustain a win-win economic relationship with China. There are absolutely no meaningful benefits to be derived by Africa if small and weak African nations continue to enter fragmented and uncoordinated bilateral economic contracts with China.

Do I hear someone shouting that African countries, because they are sovereign nations, should do what they want with whomsoever they want on a bilateral basis?

I do not seek to bastardise the noble principle of state sovereignty. If anything, it is my argument that African countries can strengthen their sovereign status by engaging in well coordinated and regionally integrated economic ties not only with China, but with all the major economic powers of the world in the West and in the East.

Thus, although I have no qualms about the much talked about "Look East" policy, I have serious reservations about continuing to look east without also looking west, north and south. At any rate, if you continue going east, you will inevitably come to the west because the east and the west are now two sides of the same coin.

I attended the Chinese Development Assistance in Southern Africa Regional stakeholder workshop that was held in Maputo, Mozambique, on November 30.

This workshop was very ably put together by the African Forum and Network on Debt and Development in conjunction with the Southern African People's Solidarity Network. Notable amongst the presenters at this workshop was a celebrated citizen of Sadc and renowned academic, Dot Keet.

She presented an insightful paper titled "Perspectives for African Engagement with China". This was a thought-provoking paper that really interrogated the myth behind Sino-African relationships.

Keet was not flattering in her condemnation of the one-size-fits-all approach that is normally adopted by Western institutions such as the Bretton Woods institutions in their dealings with developing countries, particularly in Africa.



These African dictators will tell you that aid from China is always without any strings attached. They are, of course, not telling the truth. In this world that we live in as mere mortals, nothing is for free and no aid is without any strings attached.

China has a very strategic economic agenda in Africa. She needs to acquire resources needed for continued industrialisation and economic growth as well as to find access to new markets for cheap consumer products from China.


Is China really Africa's "all weather friend"? Certainly not! Is Zimbabwe's much talked about "Look East" policy the panacea to our socio-economic trepidation?

Obert Gutu is MDC-T senator for Chisipite.

