 I'd like to welcome you to our third great decisions program. The COVID-19 crisis has put a massive strain on what was growing a positive economic and political relationship between China and the continent of Africa. As Chinese President Xi Jinping's centerpiece Belt and Road Initiative continues to expand Chinese power, the response to the spread of COVID-19, as well as the African government's growing debt to China has seen pushback. What are some of the growing economic and political issues between China and Africa? And that is going to be our subject tonight. Our distinguished presenter tonight is Martin Farrell. He is Professor Emeritus of Politics and Government at Ripon College and the Fond du Lac County Board Chairperson. He retired after 40 years at Ripon College. Currently, Mr. Farrell represents District 1 on the Fond du Lac Board of Supervisors and he was first elected to the board in 1994. He also received the Dick Ringler Distinguished Peace Educator Award for the year 2014-2015. It is for the state of Wisconsin. The award given each year by the Wisconsin Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies was presented to Mr. Farrell at the WIPCS Spring Student Faculty Conference held at Carthage College. Farrell was invited to give a keynote address, Democracy, Peace and Conflict, Person and Professional Reflections on 30 Years with the Wisconsin Institute, which reflected on Mr. Farrell's 30-year participation in the Institute and on the conference theme of democracy in the 21st century. Mr. Farrell's academic interests and expertise spans many regions of the world, including Europe, Asia, South and Central America. He has developed an international film course that has shown more than 700 films over the last 20 years. He was also a founding member of the Wisconsin Institute representing Ripon College on its board for many years. He was an active member in the WIPCS's Speakers Program and served as Executive Director of the Institute's Executive Board for four years. So this is Mr. Farrell and he will do our presentation tonight. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Thank you very much and I want to thank the Association of University Women, correct? That's the main sponsoring organization as well as the library. I know that when you restarted this series a few years ago, I was able to join in at that time and I always enjoy coming over here. I think last year we was either canceled or we had to do it remotely. I do a few more of these at other places as well, but we always enjoy coming to Sheboygan. You have a great community here. From Ripon, we actually come over here just for fun sometimes. We like your lakefront, what you've done there. It's very beautiful. You have a great museum. Now the new, is it a warehouse branch of the museum, kind of out in the country to the West, the four-story building. It was called the Preserve, that's brand new, wonderful, been there already. I won't mention the restaurants. It's about dinner time, I might be getting too hungry, but thank you very much. We do really enjoy Sheboygan and you have a great community here. Our topic today, though, is China in Africa. I've entitled it The Dragon Entering the Lions Den, but as an overview, the introduction mentioned Xi Jinping and since he has come in as leader of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012, he has made China much more assertive on the world stage, both in their East Asian region, but also globally. That does include Africa as well. Previous leadership, even since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, kind of tried to keep a lower profile and not arouse suspicions that China might be becoming too assertive and too aggressive in promoting its interests. But Xi Jinping has felt that with the amount of economic growth, and this is really the engine of all of it, China's tremendous economic growth unprecedented since 1978, their huge balance of payments surpluses. This economic growth and success in the trade arena is what enables China to build up its military, but also use its economic might to expand its political influence. So geo-economics is a term that is sometimes used for the strategy that China is pursuing. And we'll see that this does extend into Africa. They are not dominating Africa, the United States and the European Union countries still play a major role there. So it's not as if they're dominating, certainly not in every case, but they are winning a lot of diplomatic victories, especially in the United Nations. Now if you don't care about the United Nations, maybe that doesn't bother you, but when China gets unanimous support for its candidates for various positions in the organization, that indicates that their political outreach is being successful. And the economic aspects that have won them some favoritism or some favorable views are very important. Partially because of the projection of many of our maps, we don't realize how big geographically Africa actually is. And you can see here that not only China and the United States, but even India, many other countries will fit in there geographically. There are 54 nations. That's also a large number of nations, members of the United Nations on the African continent. Different population. This is getting a little bit hard to see, but this is as of 2019, Asia still has the largest proportion of world population, but Africa as a continent is second, Europe, North America and so forth. So Africa is very populous as well as geographically large. The largest nation, Nigeria, at 200 million. So that's very significant, places Nigeria pretty high in world population rankings. But if we look to the future, that's even more significant. So up here we have our population pyramids. This is East and Southeast Asia. If you're familiar with population pyramids, you know that this is the various age groups and you can see that Asia, East and Southeast Asia have aging populations. There's more of a bulge up here in the older age groups, whereas Africa has a much younger population, which means that if we look to the future, now Asia is actually dropping as a proportion of world population and Africa is gaining. And if we look at countries projecting from today, these are the top most populous countries. By the end of this century, it's projected India will be number one, China with its very much aging population will have dropped to number three, Nigeria at that point will have grown from 200 million to over 700 million based on these projections. Five out of the top ten will be Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Egypt and Tanzania. Five out of the top ten are projected to be African countries. So this is very important. Africa is the most diverse continent or region in terms of ethnicity, languages, religion and genetic diversity. The reason for that, we could again spend all evening on this, but as we'll see in a later slide, the vast bulk of the world's population today has descended from people who left Eastern Africa around 50 to 60,000 years ago. Virtually everybody outside of Sub-Saharan Africa is descended from that small group. But that means there's less diversity. Here these are the descendants of people who didn't leave, who stayed and they're more diverse. So that's proven by studying DNA, mitochondrial evidence and so forth. Looking just at the major religions we see in the north we have Sunni Islam, we have Eastern Orthodox and Ethiopia and Eritrea. Ethiopia was one of the first Christian nations on earth and it still has that strong but was then affiliated with the Eastern branch in Constantinople or Byzantium. Then we have Roman Catholicism and probably Christianity is dominant, but Western Christianity is dominant in those parts. We still have traditional beliefs or animism in certain other areas. Those are just the major religions. Now China, excuse me, Africa has been plagued by extreme poverty over many decades as we can see, but it is very well endowed with resources. So this is something that the Western colonial powers tried to take advantage of, but unfortunately with all the diamonds, oil, gold, everything that was exported or plundered out of Africa by European colonial powers left the people in poverty. So it still remains the most poverty stricken area of today's world. However, they are lately have been showing, and this is before COVID, but some pretty robust growth in much of Africa in the different regions. So three, four, it's not as spectacular as China's growth, although East Africa has been edging over 5% GDP growth per year. That's very strong, not the 10 to 12% that China enjoyed for several decades, but still. Again, very generally speaking, I think Africa struggled as a region after independence. They resented the colonial powers so much they rejected their, for the most part, capitalist free market systems. They experimented with various types of socialism or even Soviet models for their economy. And frankly, those did not work at all, whether it be under Julius Nyerere or whatever other leader who thought they had innovative approaches, it really did not work. And frankly, turning more to private enterprise as the Chinese communists actually have done, that is the engine of China's tremendous economic growth. And today, as we'll see later, African people still consider the U.S., but at this point, consider the U.S. economic model the best, but a close second is the Chinese model. So we're fortunate we still have some good image there with regard to our economic system, but China is catching up. In the article, if you read that in the Great Decisions booklet, they do put an emphasis on the COVID situation, and so I want to say a few things about that. Now, again, this is a bit earlier this year, early on, Africa had lower infection rates and death rates than most other regions, as you can tell by the lighter colors there. There are several reasons for that. One might be the youthful population that we looked at before. We know that older people are more susceptible to the disease and suffering seriously. A number of other factors have been mentioned, but one was that when the disease began to hit many of the African countries, again, frankly, did look to China for help, and China did provide them with equipment that they needed, but also with a model of locking down very quickly, and that did help at first. However, as time has progressed here, we see the deficiency, the big deficiency in the African response to COVID-19 is lack of vaccinations, and that's just a matter of money and technology and lacking the wherewithal. Again, Western countries can gain influence if they help with that, and I don't have the answer, but they need to increase their vaccination rate. This is as of October of just earlier this month, so this is up to date, but you can see they're lagging way behind, and so they have had additional cases. So again, early on they were not seeing many cases, but there was a first peak in the middle of 2020 last year, and then another peak in January of this year, and a third one in July of this year. So they've had three waves now of COVID infections, which is obviously a result of the lack of vaccinations, at least in part. Now, again, this is as of very recent October 15th, again, we're now seeing decline from this third wave, so that's good, but they have had three waves and really need more vaccinations to prevent further outbreaks. And obviously, this has a negative impact on economic growth. The poverty rates were declining here, and they're projected to continue to decline, but again, the projected growth for sub-Saharan Africa, a 2% or 3% loss of GDP in 2020, but it is projected they can recover in 2021, same for oil exporting countries of which several of the African countries are in that category as well. They also are a resource-intensive country, so this also would apply there. They're not tourism dependent, though. They're the ones hurting the worst. They rank relatively low in terms of tourism in the world. But above all, we could see really there has been a lot of progress, especially in the last 20 to 25 years in Africa. It's no longer the dark continent, except maybe the Saharan desert, but that's obviously to be expected. All right, just a little bit of background on Africa first. First again, we'll get into the China material very soon, but again, this is what anthropologists tell us that human beings originated in East Africa, Homo sapiens, sapiens, modern human beings, began moving out maybe 100,000 years ago, reached Australia as early as 50,000 years ago, then into Europe. They've recently found footprints of humans that they think are 23,000 years old in the Americas, so we may have to push that date back a bit. But modern humans did originate in Africa and moved out, as I mentioned. Africa also is the home of great civilizations. That's not as well known as it should be. Unfortunately we have, even among professional historians, sometimes some inaccurate stereotypes of lack of development, but the fact is Africa was home to a number of great civilizations with written languages, iron tools, large cities, minted coins, established empires, old colossal monuments. If you're interested in that, I checked in your library right here, has the DVDs of Professor Henry Louis Gates, six-part PBS series, Africa's Great Civilizations. I would recommend that if you're interested, and I believe it's available, you can even check it out tonight, if you're interested, Henry Louis Gates. But Egypt is obviously the best known of the great African civilizations, but there were a number of others as well, so these are indicators of where these outposts of African civilizations, some of their monuments, some symbols. This is one of the oldest Christian churches on earth, and it's not in the Middle East, it's not in Israel or Syria or other parts, it's in Ethiopia. That is the home of the Christian Ethiopian civilization right here. So that's important to keep in mind. Now as far as Chinese civilization, that is also a very well known civilization of ancient lineage with origins as early as 2000 BCE. We usually consider China as a unified nation as early as 221 BCE with the Qin Dynasty. But there's actually, I'm not going to dwell on this too much, but there's actually evidence of Chinese-African contact throughout China's recorded history. The first known interaction is all the way back in the Shang Dynasty, the 21st century, excuse me, around 1000, rather, around 1000 BCE. How do we know there was contact? Because they have found a female corpse in Egypt clad in a silk garment. And China was the only area producing silk at the time, 1000 BCE. So that's the earliest known contact between Africa and China that we are aware of. In the Han dynasty here, Zheng Qian was a roving ambassador for the Han Emperor, traveled as far as Alexandria, Egypt. And in his travels he opened up routes of trade and commerce that later became known as the silk road. And so that goes back as far as the Han dynasty. And similarly, Africans traveled from the Aksun civilization, which is also in Ethiopia, it's right next to the one I pointed out in the last slide. Aksun traveled to the Chinese capital around 100 AD during that Han dynasty. Tang dynasty, we had Chinese soldiers were captured and taken to parts of Africa, again the kingdom of Aksun and so forth. Really those kinds are fairly incidental, but they continued. Yuan dynasty was, of course, run by the Mongol hordes. So they had contacts all the way through the Eurasian continent and reaching into parts of Africa as well. So they definitely had, and that's when the first maps of Africa were drawn up during the, by Chinese, but were drawn up by, during the Yuan dynasty. So these are the oldest Chinese maps that included Africa. So there's sort of the African continent. And here's the African continent on this one, this would be Southeast Asia, this would be Japan, Korea, this would be Africa. So as early as 1390 they had maps. They weren't the greatest maps, but it was a start. Then we have the celebrated voyages of Zheng He and the Ming dynasty made seven famous voyages to western lands, huge fleets with over 300 ships. Some of them were as long as 400 feet, nine masted treasure ships, such as you see here, had as many as 28,000 soldiers accompanying him. His fifth, sixth, and seventh voyages included stops on the eastern coast of Africa. So that's represented here. And he took gifts for the local rulers there, gold, silver, tea, porcelain, and silk. In return he brought back exotic animals, including lions, leopards, camels, ostriches, rhino, zebras, and giraffes. And these were appreciated, but also beyond the animals, precious jewels, spices, medicines, cotton textiles, and knowledge of the people themselves. Because Zheng He and his fellow sailors did mingle with the local people. And so following one of these voyages, in 1419, several African ambassadors returned with him to the Chinese capital and stayed there for two years. However, that was the high point of Chinese-African contact for the next 500 years, because when the Ming emperor who was sponsoring these voyages died, the voyages were ended, the ships were scuttled, China attempted to cut itself off from the outside world. And that led to eventually the very serious decline of China. Again, the ocean-going ships were destroyed, but later that same century, 1492, Europe began its age of exploration, leading to the conquest of the Western Hemisphere and the colonization of most the rest of the world, including Africa, while China eventually fell into stagnation, decline, devastating losses in war after war, culminating in the brutal occupation of the 1930s and 40s, followed by the Civil War, won by the Red Army of Chinese Communist Party in 1949. But this is what the European powers did to Africa after China had stopped having contact or dealing with the outside world. So again, you can see all the different countries that, especially France and Britain, Germany had several infamous Belgian Congo here. So it was all carved up by the European power. During the Chinese Communist victory in 1949, China viewed itself as the leading anti-imperialist power, at least in their part of the world at the time. And as such, they opposed European colonialism anywhere in the world, or Western colonialism, including US colonialism, and supported the liberation movements, the national liberation movements of Africa, as they were getting going in the 1950s and 1960s. China quickly aligned itself with all those anti-colonial movements struggling for independence in Africa. You know, at the time, China really didn't have much in the way of resources. It was a very relatively poor country, and so it didn't have a lot to offer economically, but it did provide military training and arms for a number of the anti-colonial movements in Africa. In the 1960s, as China began to stray from the Soviet bloc after the death of Stalin, it then competed for influence in Africa, not only with the Soviet Union and the Western powers, but also with other non-aligned nations such as India and Yugoslavia. Now, the very first Chinese economic aid project in Africa was the so-called Tzara Railway started in the 1960s, completed in 1975, with full cooperation of China. The purpose of this was to allow Zambia, a landlocked country, to get its mineral resources to the Indian Ocean coast so that they could sell them and transport them, whereas here they could not go through Rhodesia, which was British-controlled or South Africa, which was under apartheid. So that was the very first of those projects. Now we have more recent, also, railway, but now we have a railway which actually traverses the African continent, but again, we're going to see much, much more as well. There's pictures of Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong with African leaders, Haile Selassie of Ethiopia and Kwame Nkrumah of Kenya. Again, we're not going to dwell on this. You should be aware of this, but here we see China's economy is stagnating through the 1950s and 60s. Deng Xiaoping comes into power again in 1978, institutes, farm privatization, starts setting up these special economic zones, opening China's economy up to market forces within the country and to trade and investment internationally. Now we see the economic takeoff that is so unprecedented. This ends in 2004, but I like that it shows you the takeoff period, but that then continued. Yes, there's been some slowing of growth recently, but still outstripping most of the rest of the world. That's what gives them the ability to expand their influence, and this is how they are trying to use it. 2013 established the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. It has $130 billion more assets than all six Western Development Banks combined. That includes the World Bank and all the others. International Monetary Fund, all of them. It's $130 billion larger. One road initiative, BRI or New Silk Road. We're going to take a closer look at that, but a commitment to invest $1.4 or $2 trillion over 10 years in all of these. The main emphasis is Eurasia. The main emphasis is to go from China through Central Asia, these underdeveloped countries, the Stan countries, including Afghanistan, but then on into Eastern Europe and then into the core of Europe, expanding all their infrastructure links there. But the initial amount being invested here is equal in inflation-adjusted dollars to 12 Marshall Plans. Some of you remember the Marshall Plan of the United States aid to Europe after World War II to get them on their feet, and that was a multi-billion dollar investment at this time. What China is initiating with their Belt and Road is 12 times that, even in inflation-adjusted dollars. We have just last year a new 15-nation regional comprehensive economic partnership. This is mainly East and Southeast Asia, but since 2000, China has signed bilateral trade agreements with 40 African nations, leading to an increase in their trade from 10 billion to 200 billion in those 16 years, a 20-fold increase. When we're talking about economic relations, we have to look at three different things. One is trade, so I buy products that you make, you buy products that I make, imports, exports, that's trade. The second thing is aid, so that's actually where I lend you money for you to do projects and you pay me back, or some of it could be grants as well. But that's development aid, that's money that I lend to you or in a few cases give to you to help you build your infrastructure or your development, economic development. The third component is investment, so that can be, again, a government entity, but usually a private entity. So that's direct foreign investment is when a foreign company builds a factory. When BMW built a factory in Spartanburg, South Carolina, that's direct foreign investment. That's a foreign company building a factory or some facility in another country. So these are the three different components. We have to keep them in mind, and I know we don't have a whole semester, unfortunately. By the way, in the introduction, it was very nicely mentioned that I retired after 40 years of teaching, but in fact, I'm back in the classroom this semester. So you can either feel good about that or sorry for the students however you feel, and I did just give them an assignment today, but we had a resignation just a couple weeks before the start of the semester, and they didn't have time to find a replacement, so they went looking in the boneyard and they did manage to drag something out of there, and that was me, so I'm back in there teaching introduction to politics again. So anyway, I hope I'm not too didactic, but it's important to keep those three different types, trade, aid, and investment, because they're all different. Now, China is expanding all of them in Africa, but they're not totally taking over. So again, if you look here, China has about 15% of Africa's imports and about 11% of its exports, but the EU countries are still very important. Again, they maintain ties with their former colonial countries, even though there may be resentment, but they're still, the former French colonies in Africa, they speak French, and the former British colonies speak English, and so there are links there, and so there's still a lot of trade with the former colonial countries and the United States, but we don't do a lot of trading with Africa, and that is maybe hurting us, but the China-Africa trade here, you can see it's really expanded, it did have a contraction in a couple of years, but it has expanded. European Union is still the biggest trading partner of Africa, but China is catching up, and the United States is over here, so that's kind of the trade part of it. New Silk Road, or BRI Belt Road Initiative, this is more of an aid initiative, not trade, but this is China, again, as I said, lending money to these countries to build infrastructure, so yes, the main thrust of it is through Central Asia into Eastern and even Western Europe, but also there's Southern through Southeast Asia, as I mentioned, some initiatives there, but it does reach to Africa, so building, that's a pipeline that they help build a railroad in Ethiopia that the Chinese contributed to. This is a planned railroad complex that has not been completed, but also look at the ports. China's first overseas military base is being established here in Djibouti, so that now, the United States has a couple hundred worldwide, but that is China's first military base outside of its own territory. Now, the reason that they are setting that up, they have said, is to help humanitarian peacekeeping missions that they participate in Africa, and I will show you something about that later too, and that is true, they are doing that. They are participating in the various peacekeeping missions, but other people are suspicious, so there's a concept of a string of pearls that China's establishing port facilities, naval facilities here in Djibouti along, all along the eastern coast, then here at Hatimbabtoto, Habantota in Sri Lanka, that's a famous port they help build, also here in Pakistan, Nawabshah, port facility, Guadar, one in Bangladesh here, and others, and so those who are suspicious of China's motives have evidence here that this could all be a string of naval bases at some point in the future, but for now, these are, again, not as big a part of the BRI as in the United States, but in the United States. The Eurasian components, but still significant. Now we turn to investment, the third component, again, again, briefly, you can see that the blue is China, and then some of the, mainly the eastern African countries, they are dominant in terms of their being investing countries, but over in western Africa it's still more the French, U.S. is tan colored, obviously we do a lot in Egypt, we were in Cairo, Egypt, I was in Cairo, Egypt with a group a while back and we went to a very fancy shopping mall in Cairo near the airport, it was one of these atrium type huge shopping mall, high end products and such, but what was the flagship store in the entire mall? Occupied the top floor and had the big sign that was visible through the entire atrium, you wouldn't know if you weren't there, but it was Ashley Furniture of Wisconsin. Okay, that's private investment, that's foreign investment of Ashley Furniture in Cairo, Egypt, so U.S. is still strong in Egypt and some of the other countries, China more, especially Ethiopia, that's the closest ally in all of Africa I think today would be Ethiopia. Again, foreign direct investment, the U.S. used to have more, but now China has more to Africa, but it's not hugely more, that's billions of dollars, but we're going down while they're more or less going up, so that's the correct reading of the trend. China meets every year with the China Africa Forum, now looking again at investment, again we don't have time to go into all the details, but finance, that's lending money for projects and it could be private lending as well as public lending, but then there's mergers and acquisitions, that's where Chinese, over 3,700 Chinese companies, some are state owned, most are not, but over 3,700 Chinese companies have invested in Africa, again either lending the money for projects or buying companies or green fields, that's building new, and very big in the energy sector, again the print is kind of fine here, but it's a wide range of different areas, but that's a big, that's the green fields is the most desirable, because that's building something new that wasn't there before. Criticism of China's increasing involvement in Africa, China's only interested in extracting Africa's resources, well it is true that most of the imports from Africa into China are resources, but actually all the aid and investment is helping with, yes some of it is helping with resources, with pipelines and oil fields and so forth, but a lot of it is actually in manufacturing, so they're helping to build factories in Africa, China wants to get rid of the low value added manufacturing, like making flip flops, stuff like that, they don't make money from that, and they frankly would like to move that production to Africa, where they have much less industry, but they have population for whom that would be a better job than what they have today, so I don't mean to put it down, but this is how China started, as you remember, low level, high labor intensive manufacturing, sowing, making blue jeans, things of that nature, they would much rather try to move increasingly within China to more high tech, making Apple iPhones, things of that nature, and get the more labor intensive, lower value added manufacturing elsewhere. There are no strings attached approach, encourages corruption, ignores democracy, it probably does ignore democracy, but I don't think they want to encourage corruption because then their money is wasted and they know that. High debt levels are predatory and unsustainable if projects do not pay off, that's a strong criticism that has been made, and Mike Pence made that in some recent speeches, but the Chinese say, look, we're taking the risk, and if the project fails, our loans don't get paid back, so we're willing to take the risk and we shouldn't be criticized for that. Also, do they harm the environment and not use enough local labor? Perhaps, again, there may well be some truth to these criticisms, but in terms of debt levels, it isn't overwhelming in Africa, so they're not really getting overwhelmed. They had much more debt back in the 90s and 2000s, and there were some debt relief programs bilateral and multilateral that helped get their debt down. It then has been creeping up again, but as you can see, only a couple of them are as high as 75% of GDP. We in the United States were, I think, at least at 100% of our government debt. It's around 20 trillion and that's about our GDP, that's 100%. It's at least close to that, so there's only a couple of African countries even more than 75, so at least up till now they're not overwhelmed with debt. Where else are they going to get capital but borrow it? They don't have the reserves that China has. They don't have $3 trillion in foreign currency reserves, so they do need to borrow it and China is willing to lend it to them. Again, this is just another measure of the debt burden which, again, isn't overwhelming. Finally we have just a couple. Despite the recent criticisms, public opinion in Africa is generally favorable to China. Again, it varies by country, like Sierra Leone is not as high as Guinea or Mali. The darker line is 2019 and 2020 and the lighter line is 2014 and 2015. You can see in some cases it has gone down. The favorability has gone down a bit, but in others it's stayed the same. But in any case that's what they say. It ranges from 80% either very positive or positive. The lowest is Tunisia for some reason, which I'm not aware of, but still even there they're in the 40s. 16 country average around 60% are willing to say that China has either a mainly positive or very positive influence. In this question, again, similar China overall, this is now 18 countries, 59% favorable. Now I'm comparing it with the United States only about the same, 58%. Highly negative 15, 13, the former colonial power of the country, 46% say they have a favorable. That's more likely to get stronger negative reaction, but it's still a minority that feel that way. Then this is how they feel about regional organizations and how they feel about Russia. Only 38% say that Russia has a positive influence. The negatives aren't much different from China and U.S. So those are some of the public opinion in Africa. Now what's the best model for future development? The red line is China and the blue or purple line is U.S. So the U.S. does have a more favorable view in terms of model for future development. So that should be encouraging, but again, not in every country. So Burkina Faso, Mali, it's China has higher rating, but those are the only two countries I think some are about even, but at least the U.S. still has somewhat of an edge in public opinion there. Now my last point, China is still being quite successful politically with their initiatives and they're gaining influence in Africa. They've made that their first foreign minister trip each year goes to Africa. The entire 54 nation voting block favored the Chinese candidates for these offices, including UN food and agriculture, which the U.S. put forward a competing candidate for that position in 2019. All 54 African nations voted for the Chinese candidate. That tells you something. They also helped elect Chinese as head of these other organizations. Not a single African member supported U.S. efforts to censure China for the mass internment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. So that again is a political victory for China. Doesn't mean I support it. I think they should be sanctioned, but personally, but we're not able to convince the African nations, even including the Muslim nations. And most of the North African nations are predominantly Sunni Muslim, yet even those nations could not be convinced to censure China on that issue. African nations are overwhelmingly opting for Chinese telecom equipment and infrastructure, including Huawei, which we've tried to blackball for 5G and smart city technology. And that's very influential. And if you're concerned about China, again why are we concerned about Huawei? Because they might be able to use the information that they obtain for intelligence purposes, that at least is the fear. But the African nations are not listening to that, and they are overwhelmingly going with the Chinese technology. Culturally, since 2000, over 60 Confucius institutes have been established in Africa. These are centers of Chinese culture. People can go there, learn Chinese language, learn about Chinese history, and so forth. And so those are points of influence within Africa, averaging more than one per country. Current president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, has said, this is in direct response to some of Mike Pence's rhetoric and also that of our former Secretary of State, Pompeo. Ramaphosa has said the real tangible and lasting benefits to our peoples refute the view that a new colonialism is taking hold in Africa. So that's from the leader of one of the major African countries today. Finally, militarily, again this is American forces, again it's mainly peacekeeping, anti-terrorism, trying to protect people and governments from these. These are the Chinese peacekeepers, so there's a lot fewer of them, but they do have a presence there. And these are the various different missions that they're involved in. But that's something else we should be aware of. So that kind of wraps up what I have here today. We're not through the COVID pandemic yet, unfortunately, and we're still seeing effects of that. But going forward, there's a lot to think about. China is increasing its influence in Africa, it has long roots, especially in the post-World War II era and the end of colonialism. But they are increasing their influence, and it's up to the United States to figure out how to respond to it. Thank you very much. Okay, well go ahead and take questions. I would like you to use the microphone, please. So raise your hand if you have a question, and you have to hold it really close to your mouth to talk. So any questions? Anybody have a question? I was wondering if you could, sorry, I was wondering if you could speak on the recent initiative by the U.S. and the G7 with the Build Back Better in maybe comparison to the Belt and Road? I apologize, I honestly couldn't hear. Can you repeat it? The recent initiatives with regard to what? The Build Back Better with the U.S. and the G7, sort of as maybe a parallel to the Belt and Road. What I am familiar with is debt forgiveness. Is that what the main thrust of that is? Build Back Better, that's the Joe Biden, the G7. I don't know if I've heard about it recently, sir. What I'm aware of is that there is in the G7 and also the G20 a debt service suspension initiative. I don't think that's probably the same thing, but that has been implemented. In other words, that's a little bit like in our own country when we have, I think it's recently been taken away, but we had the eviction moratorium for a while. If you're not paying your rent because you lost your job or there is no income coming in, you couldn't be evicted. Well, the G20 recently did that. That's the top 20 economies with foreign debt. They said to countries like the African countries, if you owe us money and you're supposed to be paying it back on a certain schedule, we're going to suspend that payback schedule, at least temporarily for the duration of the pandemic. That is an effort to relieve some of the pressure on the developing nations so that they don't fall into bankruptcy or default on loans because the economy had to be shut down due to COVID. That is an important initiative. But beyond that, I'm not aware, frankly. I guess I was just thinking maybe in comparison to how is China handling when some African countries maybe default on some of their loans, how are they generally being pretty forgiving or working with countries? What they will generally do, and this again, this is where some of the criticism has come in, what they will generally do is refinance. In other words, you had an originally a 20-year payback period, and now you can't make those payments. In some cases, they've extended the payback period to 99 years. Well, on the one hand, that's generous, but then some people say, well, now they have them on the hook for 99 years. Before long, the governments and the countries will be over their head and with a long-term commitment that they're not going to be able to make. But I'm not aware that they have, that was the case with some of the port facilities in the Indian Ocean countries. They had a couple like that, and that was the way they handled it. But with regard to Africa, I think that at the present time, they are suspending payments. I think I made a note on this. I may not be able to find it right now. China has actually gained points in Africa through the aid that they have given regarding COVID-19. And some of it is material, some of it is equipment, some of it is vaccines, although obviously not enough yet. But also, the model of how to handle it. Again, being a dictatorial one-party government, China could just shut down cities and nobody had anything to say about it. And some of the African countries, such as Rwanda, saw that and said, okay, this is the way to handle this, and that's what they did. And so, they thought that China's way of handling it was better. And so, overall, the overall impact has been such that the COVID pandemic has actually ... Please, all services will end, including checkout and other computer services. Please check out all materials prior to that time. So overall, China has gained favorability points with a number of countries in Africa. Tucker was a student of mine in a few courses a few years back, and so he knows how to throw me the tough ones. No, seriously, thank you, and it's good to see you again. Any other questions? Could you explain a little of what is going on in Ethiopia, which we read something that in a month or two later, maybe something else will come up, but really confused as to the problems they're having, and also what is happening to Eritrea. Right, well, that's all part of the same situation. And I'm not going to be able to give you a complete rundown of the details, but essentially, in a certain region which straddles, first of all, Eritrea used to be part of Ethiopia, but broke away several, you know, a few decades ago. But in the Tigray region, which spans both of those countries now, there are ethnic groups that are in conflict with the main ethnic groups in Ethiopia, and it's fundamentally an ethnic conflict of long standing there. I remember that this is flared up from time to time, unfortunately, pretty regularly, and I'm not going to be able to be more specific than that, but it's an ethnic based conflict between various groups that do not find it possible to get along. Anecdotally, I had a student from Ethiopia in one of my classes, you know, this is about before this most recent flare up started to happen, things were relatively calm at the time, but he came up to me after class, he said I'm totally upset, I'm just strut. There's ethnic conflict flaring up in my home area again, and my friend of mine was killed, and it's only going to go from bad to worse, and I fear for my family. And that was, again, that was at least I would want to say six years ago, when things were relatively calm, but that's when I had a hint that things were going to be, unfortunately, deteriorating once again. But that's, I'm not an expert in that specific area at all, so I really can't go beyond that. Okay. Any other questions? Since the United States and China are so cheesy together, and we have tons and tons and tons of money that we probably don't even have, do we play with money with China? Oh, that we ask for money, they help us out, and then do we help them out? No, I'm not asking for money, I'm asking for money. Not sure what you mean, help them out? Yeah, give them money. The way they do, they give everybody else. Do we do that? No. Well, no, we don't give them money for free. The main exchange of money between the United States and China is based on trade. So in other words, we buy stuff that they make, but also services, and vice versa, they buy services and goods that we make. Consistently, over several decades now, in general, we've had a trade deficit with China. So yes, they have gotten more dollars than we have gotten of their money you want. And the trade imbalance is fairly significant. But, and again, this is where some people, in terms of rhetoric, will say they're stealing from us, they're stealing us blind. And if that's how you feel, you're entitled to it, and I'm happy to listen. But from my viewpoint, that would be like, you know, I have a massive trade deficit with Webster's supermarket in Rippon. I give them untold thousands of dollars every year and I don't recall her ever buying a single damn thing for me. I have a huge trade deficit, but I'm not giving her money, I'm getting food for it. I'm getting products that I want to buy. And I buy it because it's something I need and want at a price I'm willing to pay. So she's not robbing me. And it's the same way with China. Again, I am not defending the bad things that they have done. But I've been there enough times that I know that these Chinese, I'm going to say women in many cases, when they started building factories, new modern factories for the first time in the 1990s, and they were living in dormitories 16 to a room with maybe a squat toilet down the hall and working at least 12 hours a day, six days a week, and maybe more for about a dollar or a dollar 50 a day. They were not stealing from us. They were not robbing us. They were trying to improve their living. And why were they working so hard and so long hours under such miserable conditions? Because it was a better life than what they had out on the farm in the rice slogging in the rice paddy, equally long amounts of time for nothing, for next to nothing. This was their key to a better life. That's why they were doing it. And they had that opportunity because the government set up these special enterprise zones where initially foreigners could build factories and take advantage, yes, of low-priced labor, but it was labor that they willingly gave because it was much better in terms of a job than what they had at home. And that was the beginning, and multiply that by tens of thousands of factories, and that is how China became a leading exporter. Now, the other point is what do they do with all those extra dollars? They're not Scrooge McDuck. They're not sitting there just playing with them and letting them run over. They've invested it back in the United States and buying our Treasury bonds, for example, helping keep our interest rates low. Again, that's not necessarily totally a good thing, but it's a fact that much of the Chinese trade surplus was reinvested in U.S. Treasury bonds. Why? Because it's the most secure investment in the world, and they wanted it to be safe. Now they're taking other parts of that money and lending it to African countries to build railroads and port facilities and things of that nature, so they're investing it. But most economists will tell you that bilateral trade deficits are more or less incidental and not that important in the total scope of things. If you don't want their products, don't buy them. Nobody's forcing you to. Nobody's holding a gun to your head. So that's my take on the trade issue, okay? But we aren't giving China any developmental aid. They don't need it. We did have Peace Corps there until recently, but I believe they have been withdrawn with the new bang of heads and tension that has arisen. And don't get me wrong, China is definitely the biggest geopolitical challenge that the United States is going to face over the next 50 years, and we need to be very aware of that. We need to be reacting to that, but we need to react to it in an intelligent way and a way that it doesn't alienate, for instance, whole continents like Africa or other potential allies. And again, we have to have friends. We can't rule the entire world from just our own little part of it here in the U.S. borders. We need to have friends and we need to have outreach, but I understand that China is definitely the number one geopolitical challenge, but we need to face it in a skillful way and an intelligent way and a resourceful way, not a blunderbuss type of approach. Did that, I'm sorry, did that help at least at all? Anybody is free to boycott Chinese products, but the reason they've been successful is they have been very good at manufacturing things at a relatively low price that people are willing to buy, and that's the main thing. Again, but we export, don't get me wrong, we still export a tremendous amount of material to China, including agricultural commodities and these tariff wars hurt U.S. farmers more than anybody else because our soybean, have any idea how much soybeans they use in China? Tofu, soy sauce, that's all soybean products. They imported a tremendous amount of our soybeans and our corn and our grains and that more or less all went away and now Brazil and Argentina are filling the gap. So it was a two way street, it just didn't come out exactly equal all the time. In fact it was a persistent deficit, but what's our trade relationship with Illinois? Do we have a positive or negative trade balance with Illinois? We don't know, because frankly we don't care. What difference does it make? As long as we keep beating their lousy football team, that's all we care about. No, it would even be hard to figure exactly and that's why the American founders wrote right into the Constitution that no state can put a tariff on goods coming in from another state, because they knew that's a good way to choke the economy off. Have one big market, Adam Smith, the bigger the market the better, right? Have one big market, trade Florida oranges for Wisconsin cheese and everybody will be better off. Okay, anything else? Sure, go ahead. Okay, this will have to be the last question. Okay. With all this talk about money, I know that the United States has an aid program for certainly Central America and parts of Africa. Does China do aid companies? Do they contribute just for food, for water assistance? It sounds like you're talking about humanitarian aid. Yes. I'm sure they do. I couldn't tell you right off exactly how much. That's a very good question. I'm sure they do. But a lot of what I was talking about would be called developmental aid. So what that, again, helping them build infrastructure, roads, railroads, ports, airports and China is helping them do that because when they have that then they can take over some of this lower level manufacturing that China would like to offshore. So there's different kinds of aid. I'm mainly focusing on developmental aid. That's what the Belt and Road Initiative is all about. Developmental aid. They see all those countries between Europe and China and they're not developed. They're underdeveloped like Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and even Pakistan and Afghanistan to an extent. Pakistan's more developed than some of the others. But a lot of them are not developed at all and China by helping them develop their infrastructure this will facilitate trade between Europe and China. But Africa is not as central to that but it is still important and again, oh my gosh. Oh no, now I wrecked everything. See, sorry. Economic development is not a zero sum game and this is something that people don't understand. What is a zero sum game? That's when there's, you know, if there's only a thousand dollars brought to a poker game by all the players, that's only a thousand dollars is going to leave. If I'm lucky it will all be in my pocket but everything I win somebody else has lost. There's only a fixed amount of stuff that can be distributed. That's not how economies work. What China is saying and I think this they have right that development is a win-win situation because if you now have facilities to make things and add more value, create more wealth, now you have purchasing power that you can use to buy stuff that I'm making. And I want, I don't want to be crude about this but they want Africans to make more money through the beginning stages of manufacturing and industrialization like those Chinese women from the rice paddies I was talking about 30 years ago, what they did. They want the Africans to do this now so they have enough money to buy their Chinese cell phones or the computers that they make. They understand that a world of wash and poverty is not helping them because if people have no money they can't buy what I'm making. If we can get them moving up then they'll be better off and I'll be better off. So it's a win-win situation but at the same time if that all works out it helps China's position in the world because it helps their prestige, it helps they then have influence in these countries, they'll be listened to, they get their votes at the UN so it does help their geopolitical position as well as their strictly political position. And I guess one final sentence, I know I'm notorious for that and then I use a lot of semi-colons but the final sentence is that I would say and it's not just me but others that I've read about this, China does have an economic interest in Africa but they have an even bigger political interest. Their main economic interest is Eurasia and Southeast Asia. They're just much bigger economies and much bigger opportunities but in terms of politics and political influence that's probably their number one priority and they're using their economic might in order to improve their political standing and that's their actual relationship that I think is going on. Okay well thank you so much. I've really enjoyed it and very nice to see you.