Russia used “little green men” in Ukraine. China used predatory loans in Uganda. But the effect was the same in both countries: Extraterritorial control!
First a little context:
You should all have a friend like my old college roommate … One of the many reasons why is that he texted me on Saturday to invite me to gloat over what internationally acclaimed pundit/pollster Frank Luntz had just tweeted as “Breaking News.” This, because he knew the news at issue was something I had been writing, in fact warning, about for years.
Given Luntz’s profession, it’s hardly surprising that he linked his followers to a story (tweeted right) under this enticing line:
The perils of having China own your debt:
Upon further reading, you would’ve gotten the impression that, after Uganda failed to repay its loan, China not only seized Entebbe International Airport but Chinese workers began operating it to boot.
Not to mention that, compounding Uganda’s humiliation, this seizure reportedly came after Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni sent a delegation all the way to Beijing to beg Chinese President Xi Jinping “to renegotiate the toxic clauses,” which led to this default. And, that Xi rejected their pleas.
What is surprising, however, is that Luntz would share such a report without any context or follow up. After all, here is how the Voice of America reported on this story yesterday:
Ugandan officials are rejecting reports that China could take control of the country’s only international airport because of a failure to honor a loan agreement. China’s embassy in Uganda also dismissed the report. But analysts note the loan deal could become a problem if Uganda ever has trouble paying it back.
Local media reports had indicated that Uganda risked losing its only international airport to China over a $200 million loan to expand the facility. According to documents shared with local media, China rejected Uganda’s request to re-negotiate some clauses in the 2015 loan deal. …
In a 2018 report, Uganda’s auditor general raised concern that Uganda had agreed to several stringent conditions in the loans and these had not only increased the cost of borrowing but also exposed Uganda’s sovereignty to risk.
Of course, it’s in their mutual interest at this point for Uganda and China to deny these reports. Their problem is that China’s credibility on the world stage is such that, by dismissing it, most people will automatically have just cause to believe it is true. And I do.
But Xi being Xi, he seized yesterday’s opening of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation to make a grandiose announcement about vaccine donations and direct investments (i.e., more predatory loans) to change the subject:
China will deliver another 1 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines to Africa and encourage Chinese companies to invest no less than $10 billion in the continent over the next three years, President Xi Jinping said on Monday.
The country has already supplied nearly 200 million doses to Africa, where vaccination rates have fallen behind amid growing concern over the spread of the new Omicron variant of the coronavirus, which was first identified in southern Africa.
(Reuters, November 29, 2021)
Except that the authoritarian and tone-deaf way China reacted when the international community protested its attempt to disappear Peng Shuai is far more telling. Because, with hosting the Winter Olympics just weeks away, you’d think China would have bent over backwards to pacify prevailing misgivings about its human rights abuses.
Instead, it treated its most famous athlete like a disgruntled handmaiden to a member of President Xi’s inner circle. Moreover, it made clear that, as such, even if he raped and abused her (as she alleged so sensationally), her only recourse is detention for re-education, presumably to learn how to keep such matters to herself.
The point is that, China clearly has no compunction about treating its own citizens like latterday serfs. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that it has no compunction about treating Uganda like a latterday feudal state.
Apropos of my roommate’s text, he was referring to the many commentaries I’ve written over the years – warning about China getting countries hooked on debt the way cartels get people hooked on drugs. Titles to a few of them alone speak volumes, namely
- “China Buying Political Dominion Over the Caribbean (Latin America and Africa)!” February 22, 2005;
- “World Beware: China Calling In (Loan-Sharking) Debts,” February 2, 2010;
- “China Putting Squeeze on The Bahamas. Your Country Could Be Next,” October 22, 2010;
- “South Africa Joins Ranks of Countries ‘Selling Its Sovereignty to China’,” October 3, 2014; and
- “China Using Loans to ‘Colonize’ Developing World,” August 20, 2018.
Perhaps most instructive about this “peril” is this excerpt from “Countries Queuing Up to Become as Indebted to China as US,” September 15, 2011:
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The Chinese could be forgiven for thinking that even President Obama would heed their extraterritorial directive against meeting with Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama. And they were undoubtedly emboldened last year when Obama appeared to do just that. Specifically, he snubbed the Dalai Lama on the eve of his (Obama’s) first state visit to China.
But the day of reckoning on this directive for Obama, as well as the Chinese, is drawing nigh. For, when the White House announced yesterday that Obama intends to welcome the Dalai Lama later this month, the Chinese reacted variously like an angry parent disciplining a willful child and a loan shark dealing with a delinquent debtor.
I applaud Obama for calling China’s bluff. Not least because any real attempt to squeeze the US financially would amount to an unprecedented case of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. After all, the US market is even more indispensable to China’s economic growth than China’s credit is to the US’s . …
This episode of naked bullying should serve as a warning to all countries around the world that are not just lapping up China’s largesse, but heralding it as a more worthy superpower than the United States. Because, if China can spit such imperious and vindictive fire at the rich and mighty United States over a relatively insignificant matter like meeting the Dalai Lama, just imagine what it would do to a poor and weak country in a conflict over a truly significant matter. …
In point of fact here, in part, is how I admonished countries in the Caribbean and Latin America in this respect six years ago:
What happens if China decides that it is in its strategic national interest to convert the container ports, factories and chemical plants it has funded throughout the Caribbean into dual military and commercial use? Would these governments comply? Would they have any real choice? And when they do comply, would the U.S. then blockade the entire region – as it blockaded Cuba during the missile crisis?
Now, consider China making such strategic moves in Latin America or Africa where its purportedly benign Yuan diplomacy dwarfs its Caribbean operations. This new Cold War could then turn very hot indeed.
(“China Buying Up Political Dominion in the Caribbean,” The iPINIONS Journal, February 22, 2005)
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Sure enough, as that scenario I posited way back in 2005 envisioned, what is a country’s sovereignty worth if China controls its only international airport? That appears to be Uganda’s predicament today. But China seized Sri Lanka and Djibouti’s deepwater seaports just years ago with equally compromising consequences for their sovereignty, respectively.
Unfortunately, despite my repeated warnings, countries throughout the developing world have been blithely subjecting themselves to China’s increasingly aggressive attempts to get them hooked on its Faustian largesse. I even pointed to the cautionary tale of China’s culture-vulture approach to mining for minerals and drilling for oil in what remains of Ecuador’s Yasuni National Park to no avail. This, after it replaced the US oil company Chevron/Texaco as that country’s most-favored foreign pillager.
This is why, as much as I appreciated my roommate’s invitation to gloat, I could only muster this foreboding reply:
It’s only a matter of time before Africans go genocidal on the Chinese for playing them for such feudal fools. I mean, at least the Europeans had the decency to take a few of them to enslave in foreign lands. The Chinese seem hell-bent on enslaving all of them right there in their homelands.
And if you think that’s too farfetched, here’s a preview of the coming backlash:
Chinese goods are being smashed, burned and looted in the Solomon Islands as Australia sends troops to quell the rising tide of anger in the Pacific island nation divided over its relationship with the superpower. …
Tan Jingquan, secretary of the Solomon Islands Chinese Association, said more than 100 shops owned by Chinese citizens were devastated, and all of them were ‘concerned and frightened right now’.
Tensions have been rising … since the national government abruptly changed diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan to China in 2019.
(The Global Times “Knews”, November 27, 2021)
Of course, the Solomon Islands is only joining a long list of countries to sever diplomatic relations with Taiwan in exchange for China doing everything from building roads and athletic stadiums to bribing government officials.
In any event, 77-year old Museveni is the last of Africa’s Big Dadas – who gained pan-African prominence by defying British attempts to compromise Ugandan independence with neo-colonial obligations and protocols. So it must strike him as too humiliating for words for the Chinese to make a mockery of Ugandan independence by seizing no less a crown jewel and symbol of national sovereignty than his country’s world famous airport.
If he allows this to stand, Museveni might as well invite China to rename Entebbe, Xi International Airport. Because I have news for any country similarly indebted, if China controls your airport or seaport or, God forbid, both, your country might as well be Hong Kong …
This is why, to protect and preserve Uganda’s sovereignty, Museveni must nationalize Entebbe Airport and all other Chinese assets, and then kick them out. As justification, he should declare China’s loan not only an untenable debt trap but an assault on and insult to Ugandan independence.
Before doing so, however, he should coordinate (or conspire) with the leaders of Zambia, Angola and other countries in Africa and the Caribbean – who have suffered or are facing similar losses due to China’s predatory loan practices. Because it would be best to act in solidarity, and challenge China to respond to them as a group.
What is China going to do? Invade them all…? Think about it folks, Donald Trump is famous for being a debtor too big to default. This not only enabled him to dictate easy repayment terms for existing loans, but to induce banks to grant him new loans at even greater risk. I submit that debtor nations can turn the tables on China in similar fashion. And that would serve it right …
Having said all that, I’d be remiss not to note that the ugly Chinese are fast replacing the ugly American in countries across the globe – not just as mercantilists who are pillaging local resources to ship back home but also as tourists who expect locals to be more Chinese than native. Say what you will about Americans as citizen ambassadors of a superpower hegemon, at least they were fun and friendly…
Related commentaries:
China using loans… Peng Shuai… Hong Kong… Museveni, Big Dada…