[Introduction] Since its inception in 2008, “Wenhua Zongheng” magazine has gone through fifteen years. In order to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the founding of the publication, and to sort out the changes in China and the world over the past 15 years, so as to open up a broader academic vision and a more forward-looking awareness of issues for future scientific research on philosophy and social sciences, Wenhua Zongheng specially planned “Imagining the Next Fifteen Years” series of special lectures, inviting well-known scholars and social development participants in different fields and different generations to speak personally and share their knowledge, and look forward to a new era with all readers.
On September 17, 2023, the second round of the lecture opened simultaneously online and offline. Hosted by Zhou An’an, special editor of “Wenhua Zongheng”, Cao Fengze, an overseas engineer of China Electric Power Construction Corporation, gave a wonderful speech titled “Going to Africa: The ‘Developmental’ Choice of A Young Chinese Engineer” and interacted with readers on relevant issues.
Cao Fengze shared his journey of self-exploration since studying and working, and shared his hands-on experience participating in Africa building. After graduating from Tsinghua University, facing the growing confusion brought about by the competition of “being an expert problem-doer from a small town”, he was determined to keep a distance from the singular evaluation system of meritocracy. “Going to Africa” meant staying away from the anxiety-inducing big environment and starting to learn the operating principles at the bottom of the society. By outlining a complex and specific Africa, he believed that young people should make dialectical evaluations when faced with choices, confront the unknowns of fate with courage and determination, and refuse to be self-satisfied with imagination.
In Cao Fengze’s view, China’s partnership programs along the “One Belt, One Road” initiative route aim to break the Malthusian trap through infrastructure construction and help Africa develop. By partnering with emerging economies with practical development plans and inclusive and effective employment policies, relatively scientific industrial policies are implemented along the Belt and Road route, and China’s practice is fundamentally different from the “debt trap” stigma promoted by the West. Based on field experience, he divided African countries into two categories: developmental and non-developmental states. Countries represented by Tanzania and Zambia have concentrated national resources to promote the construction of public facilities. However, South Africa, which is trapped in “distributive justice”, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is in political turmoil, have difficulty creating a favorable development environment. Cao Fengze believes that compared with China’s strong economic presence along the “One Belt, One Road” initiative route, our country’s internal and external cultural development is much weaker. This requires researchers and Belt and Road builders to strengthen their dialogue grounded in mutual understanding.
This article is an original edited manuscript from Wenhua Zongheng’s “Imagining the Next Fifteen Years” special lecture series. It was re-edited based on the speaker’s lecture notes and released after confirmation by the speaker. The original title of the lecture was “Going to Africa: The ‘Developmental’ Choice of A Young Chinese Engineer”. It represents only the author’s own views and is for readers’ reference only.
1
I am a small leader at a Chinese construction company stationed at an overseas hydro project. My degree is in civil engineering and both my attainment in the humanities field and my clout are strictly zero. I have to admit though, being on this podium, I now have a very strong desire to express myself, and I am eager to share what I have experienced and felt in this era with everyone here. These things may not have a high standing, nor deep theoretical value. When it comes to the content of subjective judgments, they may not be sufficiently rational or neutral. But I hereby guarantee the authenticity of what I tell you, including the truth of objective events and the truth of my own emotions in the narrative. In other words, everything I say below is what I firmly believe at this moment.
According to our East Asian rules, I need to start from my college entrance exam to enhance the persuasiveness of my following content. I was born in Heilongjiang Province in 1994. I took the college entrance exam in 2012 and won seventh place in science in Heilongjiang Province. At that time, there were 200,000 candidates for science majors in Heilongjiang Province, so my score was the top 0.3 10,000th in the province. Then I entered the Department of Civil Engineering of Tsinghua University as an undergraduate student. To be honest, I didn’t choose my major based on meticulous calculation about my future and destiny. I don’t know if everyone has experienced the same feeling - when you work very hard for something for a long time, regardless of whether you accomplish it or not in the end, you do not ultimately feel very happy or the need to cherish. On the contrary, you suddenly feel a strong urge for self-destruction. You can’t exactly tell who you are retaliating against, or perhaps just retaliating against your working so hard over the previous years like a sucker.
Of course, this mentality of giving up on life did not really make me give up on my studies. After I entered college, my grades were still very good. How good they were, was that I won the Future Scholars Scholarship in 2015. Friends who have studied at Tsinghua University may know the Future Scholars Scholarship, which is the scholarship awarded to the first place in the overall evaluation of a department’s doctoral recommendation. Then I went directly to the Ph.D program at Tsinghua University, and while I was at it also got a double major in economics. In other words, if we only measure from the domain of doing problems, the probability that a normal person will meet someone who is better than me in doing problems in his lifetime is basically zero.
Of course, when I talk about this now, there is actually no element of bragging or pride at all. My heart is completely still, and I even feel more or less somewhat ashamed. On the one hand, because this happened so many years ago, this kind of achievement on doing problems is kind of like a kid playing house, and it is very childish for an adult to brag about it. On the other hand, after so many years of psychological transformation, I now hold a completely negative attitude towards East Asia’s cradle-to-grave, ranking-based achievement system. That is to say, it is not just towards doing problems, but also all these acquired constructs such as getting promotions or making fortunes, anything that involves rankings and comparisons, which fool East Asians into working diligently like an old workhorse from birth to death, I now hold a completely negative attitude. I don’t think there is any honor in these things and they don’t deserve any respect.
All in all, after I played and cleared the game of doing problems, it was almost inevitable for me to think about what the next phase of my life would be like. So, everyone must have seen what kind of life a standard middle class in Beijing lives. To put it simply, you spend your life savings on buying an apartment, and then live in the same city every day, every year, for the rest of your life. So in the end, you become very familiar with the city. You know very well which restaurant has delicious food, where the new bar is, and where the new amusement park is. Your vision basically hovers around the city where you have settled. Then it is the tiger parenting; your father went to Tsinghua University, why can’t you get in, why can’t you even pass the 985 exam, why can’t you win if I can. And then you will fall into deep self-doubt and rage about the incompetence. Entertainment is basically driving your wife and kids to camp at a city park that is overcrowded with people and pretending to be in the wilderness. During the process, the kids cry and adults scream, and your wife keeps complaining about things like her clothes getting stained on the road. And then you still have to spend half an hour looking for a parking space.
So after I saw the life of the middle class in Beijing with my naked eyes, I almost inevitably deduced the following reasoning: if this is the life that my efforts over the past twenty years have led to, then why don’t I just die now? In comparison, it seems I would be happier if I die now.
This was probably around 2018 or 2019. In fact, when my mind reached this step, it basically meant that I had roughly reached a reconciliation with the first 25 years of my hard work on doing problems. First of all, I was now no longer afraid of death, because it was obvious that death would be much happier than the life of a middle class in Beijing; secondly, I was no longer afraid of my following life, because I was completely clear on the life that I hated, and any other kind of life was something I could try.
In fact, in my context, the concept of Africa itself was abstract. When I first talked about the concept of Africa, it did not refer specifically to Africa in the geographical sense. It was more of a complete denial and escape from the singular evaluation system and singular view of success in East Asia. I believe more in geographical determinism. Materials determine consciousness. A person’s environment will inevitably affect a person’s way of thinking and his state of mind.
Of course, I do not deny that there are some people who are very strong psychologically and can be the great hermit who achieves seclusion in the city, maintains their color even if the great Tai mountain collapses, and can be immune to external influences and take care of themselves regardless of what kind of anxiety-inducing, comparison-oriented environment they are in. But you have to admit that they are an extremely small number. The truth is, none of us are saints. We are all inevitably affected by the environment. If you stay in this environment for a long time, even if you don’t want to, you will become anxious. In the end, I am very certain that I will become a person who even I myself will hate. Even though I myself detest this kind of life, when I see others doing well, my genes of being a problem-doer that has been successful for more than 20 years will definitely once again be awakened, and I will involuntarily feel anxious. It means that I will eventually be driven by my genes to keep chasing things that I clearly hate.
So in fact, the most realistic solution is to run away, that is, to leave this big environment and not have any contact with this anxiety-inducing environment. For example, if you are no longer part of their system for selecting civil servants, you won’t care which classmate has become a senior official and you find that so and so is obviously better than you. Then, if you are no longer in their financial or IT systems, you won’t care if so and so has an annual salary of several million and has entered the upper class. Once you’ve manually eliminated all the popular choices, what’s left is very clear - self-exile. Admittedly among the many reasons why I chose to go to Africa, this self-exile factor took up a fairly large part.
Many times I think that self-exile is probably a necessity for people, especially intellectuals, which means that you must self-exile, and if you don’t, you won’t be able to live, at least the soul cannot survive. Driven by this mentality, after I graduated in June 2021 and received my doctorate, I came to work in Africa without any looking back. At that time, I didn’t know what kind of life I wanted or what kind of future I wanted, but I knew very clearly what kind of life I didn’t want and what kind of future I didn’t want.
2
After I officially started working, my first project in which I had a practical role was a hydropower station in Tanzania. Let me briefly describe it first. Hydropower projects are a little different from ordinary construction projects. The main difference is that hydropower projects are often massive. An ordinary construction project may cost tens of millions or hundreds of millions, even if it is a relatively large project, but the investment for a hydropower station can easily reach tens of billions, and the scale is several times or even dozens of times larger than ordinary projects.
Like our project, there were hundreds of Chinese employees and 5,000 local workers. Correspondingly, there were many management levels. The administrative system for the whole project was basically that of a large state-owned enterprise, which was quite complicated. When I went there, I was the chief engineer of the dam part of the project, which was equivalent to the deputy chief engineer of the project. Generally speaking, if an ordinary college graduate in our company had been working in on-site management or technology, it would take at least ten years to reach this level, and they must be relatively capable and outstanding. So at that time, I was pretty thankful to our company for the position itself. The income was really good, too, and I was pretty satisfied.
But if you put aside the job title and salary, the job itself was really devastating. I came to the Construction Bureau as a doctorate from Tsinghua University, which was indeed very rare for the Construction Bureau. The big leaders in the Bureau would of course express to you their high expectations and high regard. Then they would also say that the main reason for you to go to the ground level was to study. After you were familiar with the ground level stuff, you would definitely take on a more important role. The company definitely did not spend so much money to recruit you just to make you an excellent employee; it must be to make you an outstanding leader and bring long-term development to the company. Anyway that’s basically how it went.
But when you actually arrived at the project, you had to realize that all ground level departments, no matter the industry, were always battered, always upside down, and always short on people. At the ground level, it didn’t matter who you were, whether you were a specially introduced talent or that the leader paid special attention to you, any extra manpower was a godsend. Because there was just way too much work and way too few people, no matter who came at this time, they would actually just be working like everyone else. As long as you came, you could shoulder the burden together with everyone.
Another thing that could make the smile fade from your face was the living environment. One of the characteristics of hydropower projects is that they are generally very remote. Our project was particularly remote. It was located in a nature reserve in Tanzania and was isolated from the world in the truest sense. There was a 350-kilometer pure dirt road to Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania. It took 6 hours to drive when it was not raining, and 10 hours for a start if it rained a little. And most amazingly there was not a single town in between. There are two most famous nature reserves in Tanzania. The one in the north is the very familiar Serengeti, and the one in the south is called Selous where I was. The construction area of our hydropower station was a small human reserve in the middle of this large nature reserve, where there were many wild animals. The most common ones were these: baboons, giraffes, crocodiles, hippos, antelopes, warthogs, zebras, wildebeests, bison; not many lions, but there were.
So you can imagine what this kind of isolated life was like. In fact, everyone’s daily life included only work. Apart from work, it was just to eat and sleep and nothing else. As long as you came to the project, you usually wouldn’t go out for a year. This was even more true in the past few years during the pandemic. Many people went abroad to work in 2018 and originally planned to return to China for vacation in 2020. When the pandemic began, they no longer had the opportunity to return to China, and so they had been working abroad for five years. During this period, there was basically no opportunity to go into the city, most likely one would just stay at the construction site. You can imagine what kind of a state this was, that is, to stay at a construction site for five years at a time, with no entertainment and no change of environment, just keep on working, day in and day out.
If we just talk about how difficult it was at the project, then the outlook is narrow, isn’t it? Indeed, and not only is the outlook narrow, it is also unfair to only talk about how difficult it was at the project. The fact is that many people actually wanted to keep working at projects like this. We will talk about them separately here, first we talk about the Chinese, and later we will talk about the locals. For Chinese employees, many of them if they were in China, they would just be ordinary migrant workers. Their daily wages on construction sites in China might be very high, ranging from four to five hundred or even six hundred, but there were actually not many days that they could get money to take home after a year. There were in fact very few people who could get 100,000 yuan a year. But if he was here, first of all he was the foreman and he did not need to do things himself. Generally, we had a Chinese foreman working with 30 to 60 local workers on a worksite, and he could just give orders, so it was not as tiring as in China, and he could get a feel of being the leader.
The second thing is that he worked here every day, which meant that he was paid every day; including salary and bonus, he could make 200,000 yuan a year, or even more; plus room and board at the project were free. If he stayed on the project for five years, that meant that he could save more than one million in cash. Think about it then, for an average Chinese citizen, this more than one million could directly turn his life around. But if he wanted to go back to China for vacation, and someone else took his place during his vacation, he would probably not be allowed to come back, and he would lose this opportunity to keep making money abroad. If he went to look for work at a construction site in China, his income would be much lower than abroad.
Other than that, what was the so-called hardship on the construction site?
First of all, as an outdoor place, it was of course fundamentally different from indoor work. You can find a construction site to experience it. In the construction site environment, even if you were not doing any work, just standing at the construction site for a day would absolutely be heavy physical labor. Firstly, it was being exposed to the wind, rain, and sun, which was unavoidable.
Secondly, you needed to be alert to all kinds of dangers at all times, and your mind was always in a relatively tense state. Also, the construction site environment had unlimited sources of danger. Unlike indoor operations, no matter how many sources of danger there were, they were limited and could be enumerated exhaustively. There was no way to exhaustively list the sources of danger on the construction site, you could only try to be cautious yourself. There were also all kinds of noises and dust. In addition, the work space was different from the kind in a factory which was designed to make you as comfortable and efficient as possible. It was a very anti-ergonomics space. This made the construction site an environment where you would feel exhausted as long as you spent a day there and climbed in those strange and dangerous places. Add on some technical work and arguing with the project owners back and forth every day, for many people, they actually had to run off within a few days.
Other than this, everyone can also imagine the quality of the food from the same big pot. It was not that the ingredients were not good. Given the intensity of labor at the construction site, the ingredients were guaranteed to be of high quality and quantity, and there had to be enough meat for you, otherwise people would not be able to work. But the taste was not guaranteed. Especially during the pandemic, China did not allow us to use local chefs at us overseas projects at that time. We could only have Chinese chefs cook for the Chinese people. A few Chinese chefs had to cook for hundreds of people. If it were you, you would obviously be devastated, too. You can imagine the taste of the meals in the end.
As for the accommodation, there were bungalows, concrete floors, tin roofs, all kinds of bugs and rats you had never seen before, power outages more than ten times a day, and water outages more than ten times a day. Just imagine what kind of environment this was. When it rained during the rainy season, the sound of the raindrops hitting the tin roof was deafening, making sleeping impossible. Later, I got completely used to that sound, and I would open my eyes very calmly and look at the roof, waiting for the rain to completely pass. Of course, I was fairly lucky. One night, there was strong wind and rain, and the tin roof of one of my guys was straight up blown off. The guy was sleeping when he suddenly heard a loud noise, woke up and saw dark clouds in the sky, and then pouring rain washed over him. He couldn’t tell between dream and reality at that moment. At least my roof never did fly.
But then again, this almost outrageously difficult life was still only seen from my perspective. I was born as an only child in a decent middle-class family. My parents were both college students at major universities in the 1980s. I grew up in a rather pampered environment. Not only had I never seen such a difficult environment, arguably even my parents had never seen it since they graduated from college and were assigned to work in the Daqing Oilfield in the late 1980s. This formed a stark and absurd contrast. After I showed my parents my work and living environment, they thought it was outrageous. They couldn’t even give me the spiel like “how hard your parents worked back then” to encourage me. Because they had weekends off 35 years ago, they had better food and better housing than I did, so the scene at that time was pretty hilarious.
But all this hardship was from my perspective. What if you look at it from the perspective of the Chinese foremen? First of all, the rooms they lived in in Africa were either single rooms or double rooms. At the very most, there were no more than 4 people living in a room, which was a large room. Besides, there was air conditioning and you could take a shower, not to mention that it was a brick house. Where did they live in China? It was a board house, 16 to a room. Things like air conditioning and bathing all depended on the conscience of the construction site; you had it when you had it, and didn’t when you didn’t. It was even more so with food. Although the taste was not good, the ingredients themselves were definitely sufficient. Each meal had two meats and two vegetables, and you could take as much as you wanted. Which construction site in China would provide such treatment in food? So if you were me, do you think you could still complain in such an environment? This kind of feeling was very complicated.
Next let’s talk about the locals. Let me first talk about something that was different from the stereotype that everyone had always believed, that is, at least in the emerging and fast-developing economies of Eastern and Southern Africa, local black workers were not lazy. They were actually very hard-working and followed the rules when it came to their work. As long as you taught them, they were able to complete the process exactly as you said and rarely cut corners to save effort. This was even better than the typical situation in China. Chinese workers in contrast often would try to be clever and violate certain operating procedures. Black workers were more likely to abide by the rules in their work.
The scenes we had seen of African workers sitting down to rest or working inefficiently were in most cases due to managers’ poor production organization or workers’ lack of skills or experience. They were not due to subjective laziness. As for workers’ demands for regular weekly and monthly breaks, I thought these were completely reasonable and legitimate demands, and productivity could be fully made up through reasonable work scheduling and other methods.
On the issue of diligence, I can’t say that my personal experience can represent black Africans as a whole. In fact, there are a lot of variances between different countries even if they are all in Africa. We will discuss this in detail later.
The situation in Africa is like any country in the early stages of industrialization. It has a high fertility rate, which means that it has a very large youth population. Meanwhile, because industrialization and modernization is an exponential growth process, the number of workers it can absorb in the early stages of industrialization is very small. This leads to the phenomenon that the vast majority of the young labor force cannot be formally employed. In economic terms, this country is far from reaching the Lewis turning point. You can hire the labor force you need almost unlimitedly with basic wages. Therefore correspondingly, most of the local people who are employed cherish the jobs they have. As long as their dignity is not severely violated, they will not do anything excessive. Of course, what I mentioned above mainly refers to these new economies in Southeast and South Africa. This is not the case in some countries, where the locals are very hostile. We will talk about this later.
3
Actually, the real situation and status of Chinese people in Africa may be different from what everyone has always imagined. One of the most typical ones is that people are still used to calling the work we do when we go overseas as “construction aid.” Most of the projects are normal commercial contracts. You give me money, I do the work for you, and then I will make a reasonable profit. Of course aid exists, usually of a humanitarian nature such as schools and hospitals.
To put it another way, we are on the market-economy earth after all. We must obey the logic of this market economy when doing things. A unilateral aid relationship can never last long, only a two-way mutually beneficial relationship can last long, this is guaranteed. Correspondingly, the vast majority of Chinese people who come to work in Africa are not idealists. Needless to say, there are the kinds like small business owners who seek wealth and fortune despite the risks, who of course have come here to do business and definitely not charity; others, regardless of whether it is at a state-owned or a private enterprise, everyone works a job with the aim of supporting a family.
Of course, this also brings about a problem, that is, almost all of these Chinese people are what we call “workers”. Whether they are engineers or laborers, what everyone has in common is that they are good at working, one person can do the jobs of two or three people, but they are not at all good at talking. Essentially they are no good at external publicity and no good at internal publicity. This makes China now have a very strong economic presence and a large number of people along the “Belt and Road” initiative route, especially in African countries, but when you go back to China and ask, everyone is completely blind to the state of Chinese presence in Africa. There is absolutely no research related to it in the academic world, to the point where if you ask me how many Chinese are in Africa now, no one can give you an exact number.
The Chinese are at a huge disadvantage on this point. They don’t pay much attention even at home, do you think that foreign countries will have good impressions of the Chinese? That is of course impossible. It is very lucky already if people don’t have many negative opinions about the Chinese, what positive opinions can you hope for? The cultural hegemony of the West did not fall from the sky. It requires intensive investment and intensive brainwashing over many years. It is not that you just work hard and then people will be moved by you over time.
It is precisely due to this guiding principle of no guiding principles, it is not 90%, but 100% of Chinese people who come are here to make money to put food on the table and support their families, enduring the hardship. Therefore, the overall caliber of Chinese people in Africa is actually not that high. There are many old foremen who are not even literate and come here just to work, so it is conceivable that conflicts will arise between them and local workers. I’m afraid that it is strange if there is no conflict, right? We were a formal large-scale state-owned enterprise. You have to know that more than 80% of China’s projects in Africa are from the private sector. It is not just a problem of illiterate foremen, but also a boss worth hundreds of millions may not himself be literate. You can imagine how many conflicts unconscientious behaviors from these people will cause.
Let me add another example, which is the legal residence issue that Chinese people generally face. It’s not that you think that the project you are working on is a big national project for them, perhaps you rub shoulders with the country’s ministers and directors everyday, how big of a deal is a simple visa? No, this does not necessarily mean that the Immigration Bureau is willing to issue you a work permit and visa. Your status is still illegal.
Like my current project, a water supply project in a certain country. The contract value of this project is several billion, which is of the same order of magnitude as the country’s GDP. Logically speaking, it must be a major project that the whole country pays attention to, what does it matter with a simple visa. Sorry, what does your Development Bureau project have to do with my Immigration Bureau. In the end, everyone was working there despite their illegal status, and there was no entry stamp on their passport. This was not so bad even. Almost every one of my colleagues in Mozambique had been detained by the Immigration Bureau. The key is that what do you think he did wrong? He did nothing wrong. He was dispatched by the company to work abroad to support his family and put food on the table, he did a completely legal job, and then he was arrested and put in jail for several days.
So the reason why it is not possible to simply rely on ideals, and you must have money, is because pure idealists cannot take these. Idealists may be able to endure the hardship, but they certainly cannot tolerate the insult. You go to Africa for your ideals, and you receive such an insult. Then where are your ideals? So at this time you have to have money. Only money can help people get through it, isn’t it?
Why am I talking about these things? Because I don’t want to tell you about a hyped up, false Africa. There is only one kind of heroism in the world, that is, you still love it after recognizing the truth of life. The same goes for the opposite. In fact, there is only one kind of laughable tragedy in the world, that is, you have unrealistically beautiful expectations for life, imagining a kingdom of heaven on earth, and then you find that it is not as good as you thought, and you immediately treat life as a useless and ugly thing. You jump between absolute beauty and absolute ugliness like a diode. Unfortunately, both of them are false. Only when you truly and completely understand the whole picture of something, including the good and the bad, will you be qualified to decide whether you like it or not. You all still remember that I mentioned a concept called self-exile of intellectuals before. Yes, this time it has become an actual exile. You realize that this is not a child’s play, it’s not your time to sing a high note, they are serious about it, and the smile on your face gradually disappears. This is when we call it exile. Before that, it was all just travels.
It is only then that the meaning of exile really becomes apparent.
4
Of course, the connotation of the so-called ideal certainly cannot be so superficial. When you talk about respect, which may indeed be of a higher level than eating, drinking, whoring, and gambling, but it is still a low-level need. If you are very discouraged because you don’t get the respect you want, then this is actually not an ideal. This still belongs to the realm of Hong Kong police and gangster movies, which is still about getting ahead.
In fact, I think, just from the African part of the “One Belt, One Road” initiative, what is a very important, or hidden, main theme among the things we are doing now? It is actually to break the Malthusian trap.
I am telling you about the Malthusian Trap at this time in 2023. Many people may not like to hear it. You see, the mainstream countries in the world are facing the problem of aging populations. Everyone is worried that the population is getting smaller and smaller. How can anyone think that there are too many children? The Malthusian approach has long since become obsolete. You see, you are a very typical person who only treats people in developed countries as people, and half of the world’s population has been expelled by you from the earth. The Malthusian approach is indeed outdated when applied to Germany and France, but it is not outdated when applied to Africa.
Now most African countries are facing this problem. It’s not that their economies don’t grow. Their economies can grow, but their economic growth cannot keep up with the growth of their population. In other words, their material accumulation is being filled by the growth of their population. In the end, not only do people not benefit from economic growth, but the environment also becomes more crowded and worse.
What is this, my friends, tell me what is this? This is textbook Malthus! This is the most standard Malthusian model. The total fertility rates of the few major African countries are all above 5, and in very select cases can reach 7. What is the meaning of the total fertility rate reaching 7? The fertility rate data is not uniform. It does not mean that you two have 7 children, they have 7 children, or all couples have 7 children. Instead, there are many couples without children. There are many couples with only one or two, or two or three children. Many people never even enter the environment of childbirth, and end up fighting or wandering and having nothing. So where does this 7 come from? It’s because there are even more couples with more than ten children. What is the state of a large number of women in Africa? From the time they become fertile, they keep getting pregnant, getting pregnant immediately after giving birth, and giving birth and getting pregnant again. Until she dies or loses her fertility, there are no breaks in her life. This way, the total fertility rate can reach 7. This is a textbook humanitarian disaster.
From a mathematical point of view, if you are in a country and you find that on average couples on the street in this country have two or three children, then it goes without saying that the total fertility rate in this country is definitely less than 2, and the population is definitely shrinking. If you want the country’s total fertility rate to reach 2, you will definitely see many couples with three or four children on the street, or older brothers and sisters leading younger brothers and sisters. For the total fertility rate to be 7, there are countless women who give birth from the first day to their last day.
The Malthusian influence will spill over, because people have legs. If in the next 40 years, with the current rate of progression, the population of sub-Saharan Africa quadruples from 1.5 billion to 6 billion, then I dare say that no so-called developed country in the world can stay immune, hiding in a corner and being its own world unto itself. Everyone will inevitably be profoundly affected by this drastic change in population. That will be a profound change in the most fundamental operating principles of the entire society.
But we have also noticed that, especially in the past ten years, with the improvement of overall peace in Africa and the general economic development of various countries, the total fertility rates of the few major African countries have gradually declined, which is a very good signal. For example, Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, has seen its total fertility rate drop from 7.3 to 5.2 in the past decade, and Tanzania’s has dropped to 4.5. In general, the total fertility rates of major African countries are now in the range of 5 to 6, which is much better than ten years ago when everyone was in the range of 7 to 9. Now the population basically doubles in twenty years.
The connection between population and economic development is actually very clear. As long as the economy grows, the level of education, especially that of women, increases, the employment ratio of women increases, and women gain the bargaining power and ability to refuse to have children, your fertility rate will definitely drop sharply.
Procreation is an unconscious act, especially for those who have given birth to a particularly large number of children, they often do not realize what procreation means. Once you realize that procreation is a thing, your fertility rate is unlikely to be high. No matter from the perspective of statistical data or from the statistics around me, it is impossible for couples who have short videos to binge to have a high fertility rate. The lower the fertility rate, the faster the economy develops, forming a virtuous cycle. The key to the problem is whether your economic development can outpace your population growth. If you win, you enter a virtuous cycle and everyone is happy. If you lose, you will enter the Malthusian trap as I just said.
So what are we doing now? I think the underlying logic here, to put it bluntly, is to allow the economic development of African countries to outpace their population growth, and our entry accelerates this process for them. In this process, the state, or large state-owned enterprises, do the fundamental work, such as electrical power investment. As we all know, electric energy is the cornerstone of all modern life. You must have electricity first, and then you can talk about other things such as manufacturing, communications, service industries, etc.. Large enterprises must enter first to build the infrastructure, and then private enterprises, small businesses, and illegal vendors can get to work and vitalize the economy. Otherwise, these people will end up with no room to survive.
5
The truth is, regarding the issue of infrastructure investment, I am not a radical. My own economic views are relatively conservative and I have opposed high leverage. This sounds a bit disjointed, right? Because as someone who works in the infrastructure industry, it stands to reason that the greater the leverage, the more projects I will have and the more money I will make. But actually, the reasoning does not go like this, because we must consider repayment. High leverage means high risk. After I finish my work, it is a question whether the owner can pay us the money. The reality is that it is uncertain, and it is almost certainly impossible to have it in full. This topic will become an overly technical business contract issue later on, so I won’t go into too much detail.
I only want to say one thing, that is, the idea that China is engaged in neo-colonialism with its debt trap is very laughable, because no creditor does not hope that the debtor will repay the debt honestly on time. So in fact, from my observation, the industrial policies of this round of governments in African countries, at least in the Eastern and Southern Africa regions, are relatively scientific.
I have always in comparison admired the countries in Eastern and Southern Africa, including Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, and of course Ethiopia before the civil war, however, it is difficult to tell the situation now given the civil war in Ethiopia. This kind of admiration mainly comes from the technical level, because after all, I am an engineer, and my standing isn’t high enough. What I consider more is, first, who can do the project well, and second, who can develop the industry well in the long run from a purely economic perspective. Some issues may involve higher-level political considerations, which I don’t understand and cannot possibly understand. But at least from my perspective, the countries in Eastern and Southern Africa are comparatively solid.
From the perspective of doing projects, they are solid mainly in the following aspects:
1. More realistic when formulating development plans, cook as much rice as you have, so to speak. For example, in engineering development, they generally do not blindly launch massive projects with excessively high standards. They complete a project first and then make it perfect, and they focus on the inclusiveness of the project first. For example, you build low-standard dirt roads across the country, or simple paved roads. This money, if you build a highway, may just be enough to build a ring road around the capital. In that case, they will first choose to build some lower-standard dirt roads. I first solve the problem of whether it exists or not, then I gradually develop, and solve the problem of good or bad when I have the money. In some countries, they are more stubborn. I want the high standards of the West, and will have none of it if anything is amiss. The end result is that you can’t even start construction without prolonged delays, and if there is any flaw, you stop. Ten years go by, other people have developed well, but they haven’t finished building a road.
2. Realistic in formulating employment policies. The countries of Eastern and Southern Africa share a common thinking, which I sum up as a low-wage, high-employment model. Their minimum wage standards are set relatively low, which is of course still relatively high in relation to their overall economic level. For example, in the construction industry in Tanzania it is about 1,300 RMB, and in Zambia it should be around 800 RMB now. Compared to the vast majority of their unemployed people, who can’t get much money at all throughout the year, it is already very good. But at the same time, they have very high requirements on the number of employees. We call it the degree of localization. The general idea is that for every additional Chinese person you use for this project, you have to recruit 20 more local people.
This has several obvious benefits. First, the fruits of development can benefit as many locals as possible, and there will naturally be less opposition with more people receiving wages. The second is to increase the project speed and make up for the low construction efficiency by increasing the amount of labor. Third, it can accumulate a relatively large number of skilled workers. Don’t underestimate this. The work on construction sites is actually very technical. China is quite special, because you feel that all migrant workers in China have some skills, as if they don’t need to learn these things, but that’s not the case. When African workers first come, many of them don’t recognize steel bars, don’t know how to plug in plugs, much less mixing concrete with the appropriate proportions, etc.. They all need to be taught from scratch. The highest-paid workers on hydro projects are bulldozer drivers, whose earnings are usually three to four times that of ordinary workers. It is much more difficult to drive a bulldozer than an excavator.
And some countries are not like this. They will raise the wages of many personnel very high. They will raise the prices to thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars per month for even slightly technical jobs. You hear this price and think it is very ridiculous, I can’t reach your price if I hire Chinese or even Europeans, can I? Of course if you don’t hire them, they will cause you damage. But at the same time, they have no requirements on the number of local people you hire. You must know that the vast majority of people in this country are struggling on the line of survival, and then you require that a small number of people earn dozens or hundreds of times the income of ordinary people. I don’t want to get too deep into what’s going on in their heads, and there is no need. I just want to say that the failure of this kind of country is obviously inevitable. You have to consider very carefully if you are partnering with this kind of country and entering this kind of market.
As far as the African countries I have experienced, I think they can be mainly divided into two categories, one is developmental states and the other non-developmental states. The two typical developmental states I have seen are Tanzania and Zambia. Kenya, too, and Kenya is even more developed than Tanzania and Zambia, but I have never been there. Swaziland counts as one. Typical countries that are not developmental are the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Africa. These two countries are somewhat different, which we will discuss later in detail.
The most typical characteristic of a developmental state is the big push, which is to concentrate national resources as much as possible to promote the development of public facilities, for example, providing electricity, basic infrastructure such as road transportation, railway transportation, ports, agricultural irrigation, water supply, education, and basic medical care. These things are the basis of all industry and modern life, their required investment is tremendous and the return cycle is long, which basically can only be done by the government. But once it gets started, you don’t need to worry too much about a lot of things. Capital will voluntarily come to invest in building factories. As for the process of obtaining funds, whether you are selling mines or labor, you have to find a way to solve it.
The hydropower station where I worked in Tanzania is very typical. The Tanzanian government is very powerful. They raised the domestic consumption tax very high, and also used some income from natural gas sales and tourism. Then they started to build this hydropower station purely through the government’s own funds without loans. The power generation capacity of this hydropower station is one-tenth that of the Three Gorges, but it is still considered a large hydropower station. It will double the power generation capacity of the entire Tanzania after its completion. You should know that the power generation of the Three Gorges currently only accounts for 1.5% of China’s total power generation. You can do the math and get a feel of the order of magnitude. This is the gap between industrial countries and non-industrial countries.
Although the early stages of industrialization are hard, there is also an advantage. Precisely because there is not much development in your country, everyone can work on easy projects first and then the difficult ones, so no matter what you want to do, it is easy-to-chew meat, and for now you don’t need to chew on the hard bones. The so-called delicious meat means that your project is often in a very good financial situation, the costs very low, and the returns very high. For this project, no matter how inefficient you are or how much waste you create, as long as you finish it, the returns will be very, very good. Like our project, by rough estimates, the investment will be paid off in ten years under the most unfavorable conditions, and after that it will be a fully automatic money printing machine. Hydropower stations cost almost nothing to operate and have a lifespan of more than 100 years.
But China has now entered the stage of chewing the bones. The projects we work on these days may not be so easy to turn a profit. No matter how meticulous we are, we may not necessarily be able to make a profit. This is the result of different development stages. Of course, this is another topic.
6
Having talked about developmental states, let us now talk about non-developmental states. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is an African country that fits everyone’s stereotype. The country is extremely chaotic. The government’s control is limited to a few major cities. Most places are in a state of barbaric anarchy, calling them warlord regimes is being generous. At the same time, this country is extremely rich in mineral resources. That level of richness is hard to describe in words. If Congo had an average government and these minerals could be sold at a normal price and benefit the people of Congo, then Congo should already be a developed country. Of course, it is not so in reality. The wealth from these mineral resources is divided between adventurers from various countries and local snakes in Congo, and the people of Congo get nothing. This country has a lot of money and the supply of goods cannot keep up. The result is that prices are ridiculously high. With incomes at African levels and prices at American levels, you can imagine what kind of life the people of Congo live.
Let me give you a simple example: the houses of common folks in Congo back then shocked me to the core. It’s not even made of common slum materials like thatch, adobe or tin sheets, but made of a few wooden sticks and plastic sheets taken off of sacks. It seems that Congo is not only poor, but also that the people of Congo have given up on themselves in this social environment to a certain extent. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is not a developmental state because it fundamentally does not have the right to choose its own path of development.
The other one is South Africa. We know that South Africa is not actually a typical developing country. It is very powerful. It fell back from a developed country to a developing country. It has some special characteristics among the many countries in Africa. We know that South Africa’s past economic achievements were to a large extent created by the previous white colonists, and during the development of old South Africa, they adopted very cruel racial oppression and apartheid policies against the native black people in South Africa. Therefore, in the 1990s, after the Mandela Revolution in South Africa, the new regime dealt the original white colonists some retribution and inherited the economic legacy of old South Africa.
In fact, South Africa has a certain hegemony over the industrial economy of the entire Africa, because strictly speaking it is the only industrial country in the entire sub-Saharan Africa. All of South Africa’s sectors, from agriculture to industry to services, are overwhelmingly powerful in the whole sub-Saharan Africa and enjoy near-monopoly dominance. Africa’s local industries have almost no power to fight back against South Africa, and due to geographical and political distances, it is also not easy for products from East Asia, Europe, and the United States to compete with South Africa’s on the African continent.
In Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, any slightly decent product you can buy as an ordinary consumer will most likely be a South African brand. This is still true today. In sub-Saharan Africa, the price of consumer goods for working-class to middle-class people in a country, in addition to its own country’s consumption tax, is almost entirely determined by the country’s geographical distance to South Africa and the difficulty of transportation. The closer it is to South Africa and the easier it is to transport, the lower the price level in the country. High-end such as Europe and the United States, and affordable such as China, these powerful economies’ impact on African prices is like a drop in a bucket.
However, after Mandela’s revolution, South Africa’s development has been held back and regressed, and they have not made good use of the legacies. Let me list some data. In 1990, Yugoslavia’s per capita GDP was 3,800 USD, which was basically the same as South Africa. Thirty years later, along with the massive changes in Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia disintegrated into six large and eight small pieces. Serbia, the worst among them, had been beaten and sanctioned for ten years and had been systematically persecuted and threatened by the EU and NATO. As of 2021, its per capita GDP was 9,200 USD, while Slovenia’s, the most developed among these Yugoslavia fragments, was 23,500 USD.
In contrast, South Africa, for which it had been smooth sailing for thirty years, had a per capita GDP of 7,055 USD in 2021, which was about 60% of China’s and 75% of Serbia’s. In 2021, South Africa’s power generation capacity was 215,000 GWh, which was only about 40% higher than in 1990. It had decreased by 7.4% compared to 2019, falling to the lowest point since 2006, and is still decreasing rapidly. There are currently 15 thermal power stations in operation across South Africa, 13 of which were built before 1990. Their average service life is over 43 years. At the same time, public safety in South Africa is almost the worst among the countries in East and South Africa where I have stayed. I was almost afraid to get out of the car. This was hard to imagine in Dar es Salaam. I often just took a motorcycle to go out in Dar es Salaam.
Of course, I am not speaking for the white-centric view, the old stereotype that black people could not govern a country. Because everyone has also seen that I highly admire Tanzania and Zambia. These are genuine black countries and they can govern the country well. So why is it that South Africa, a country with a much better foundation, is not governed well? I think something has gone astray with the overall governance principles of South Africa. The aim of the whole country is not development, but distribution.
Mandela’s revolution was essentially a revolution in which black people in South Africa seized power. Therefore, the core of the policy of the whole new South Africa is how to distribute resources so that black people in South Africa can benefit. It can even be said that the source of legitimacy for the contemporary new South Africa’s government is to tilt the benefits towards the black people in South Africa, otherwise it would have no legitimacy at all. Actually, it is difficult to say that this thinking is wrong, and it was indeed effective in the seizure of power and during the initial stage when the regime was being established; but in the long term, the core of a ruling party’s work must return to development, and being dogmatic will certainly not work.
The protection of domestic enterprises and workers should be based on the actual caliber of enterprises and workers and carried out as much as possible on the side of distribution, which is also the thinking of the emerging economies in Eastern and Southern Africa. South Africa’s approach is to simply and crudely protect domestic enterprises and workers on the side of production. Then there is a problem: the core of the production side is always production. If the capabilities of your enterprises and workers are simply not enough to organize effective and high quality high throughput production, but you still ignore the facts and force them to directly participate in or even guide the production, then your cake base is already burnt before it is baked into a cake, and how can you talk about dividing the cake?
Different from the feeling that “there are indeed many problems, but things can always get done” in the emerging countries of Eastern and Southern Africa, in the South African market, the biggest feeling is that “nothing can be done.” We mentioned before the “local employment” requirements of African countries. The South African market has even more stringent requirements: in addition to ordinary workers, they require that foremen and senior managers must include considerable proportions of local employees, among which the proportion of foremen is required to be as high as 99%; in addition to personnel, local subcontractors must also reach a certain ratio, otherwise the work cannot be started. The asking prices for these local mid-level and senior-level employees are extremely high, with monthly salaries easily reaching 60,000 to 70,000 RMB, much higher than that of Chinese executives of the same level. In contrast, the standard monthly salary of ordinary local workers is less than 2,000 RMB, which is less than one tenth that of Chinese workers’. The estimates quoted by the subcontractors are also abnormally high, some even reaching three or four times the reasonable market prices.
Actually, multinational contractors often are not sensitive to the price of labor. Because for large-scale infrastructure projects, labor costs are not a big factor, and the salaries of a few or a dozen managers are nothing. What really matters is the construction duration and the utilization rate of those mechanical equipment and materials. Moreover, the salaries of local personnel will be taken into consideration when quoting a contract. If the labor is expensive, the quote will be raised accordingly. As long as the employees are competent at their jobs and can genuinely improve the work efficiency, the contractor is willing or even happy to pay more.
What’s really crippling is that these so-called “foremen” and “executives” are extremely incapable and almost entirely incompetent at their jobs. They have made up their minds from the very beginning to be here to mooch. The reason why the price is high is because the market is bad and there are very few job opportunities for local senior employees. They come with the mentality of “no work for three years, work once and it’s good for three years”. Many of the local subcontractors are paper companies with no construction capabilities at all. They give abnormal quotes in order to get you to reject the quote, then they take advantage of their local status to make a fortune by providing the shell and withdraw directly, so-called bagging the white wolf empty-handed.
With things going on like this for a long time, the vicious cycle in the South African market becomes apparent. The harsh market environment has caused companies to exit continuously, reducing job opportunities for local companies and employees, then they further kill the chicken for the eggs, worsening the market environment, and further reducing investment projects. It’s no wonder South Africa’s power generation has fallen to its lowest point in 15 years.
7
The reason why I’ve spent so much time talking to everyone about the differences between these countries in Africa is not necessarily to make everyone know more about the various details of Africa, but to convey the idea that I have always wanted to say, which is to seek truth from facts, always look at problems dialectically and from both sides, not think too well or too poorly about one thing, but see its true and complete form.
I mentioned before that these Chinese people in Africa are all workers. They can do it, but they are very poor at speaking. Many of them are not even literate. This is very disadvantageous. We have done so many things, but no one knows, no one studies, and no one cares.
However, if this question is asked the other way around, isn’t it the same? Our workers can’t speak a word, but isn’t it the case that our talkers do not know how to do any work? When have our academic circles ever taken the initiative to care about how amazing our workers are and how many miraculous achievements they have made? What do they know about what kind of life they live on the front line, what the painful things are for them, and which things that you think are painful, but in fact they do not feel painful and are on the contrary quite happy about? They do not know at all.
Our intellectual class, they imagine an Africa, imagine the image of a working class, and then imagine their lives and the difficulties they face. Your background and characters are all imaginary, to what extent do you think your imagined reality of their situation will be distorted?
So many times when I spoke with some so-called intellectuals who had received higher education, after only a couple sentences, I felt like they were talking apples and I was talking oranges, no way to communicate at all. Later, like my coworkers, I began to be reluctant to communicate with these intellectuals. Because all I could feel was hopeless stupidity. But it is not helpful to keep avoiding it, therefore I am now very thankful to Wenhua Zongheng for providing me this platform, allowing me to share with you some common knowledge that seems so blatantly obvious to the real builders of the “Belt and Road”, so that the two different circles in this country can intersect.
Our time today is limited, and I have too much to say to you. I can only talk a little bit about everything, just barely touching on them all. More importantly, many things are difficult to express in words. Tsinghua University has an internship policy for doctoral students, which lets students work at the ground-level of government or public sector institutions for one and a half months. I participated in this program in 2018 and went to the Xiakaifuxia Hydropower Station built by Power China for a month and a half, and finally joined my current company at the 11th Hydropower Bureau. I must say that this policy is excellent and can be considered a breath of fresh air in the current environment of separation between industry, learning, and research.
But I think it is far from enough, because the feelings for temporary work and actual work are completely different. You need to experience the feeling that you are really thrown here and that no one cares about you, and the smile gradually disappears from your face. You call to Heaven and it is not responding and you call to Earth and it is not working. Only then can your heart really become still and can you really treat as brothers those migrant workers who you have originally by default ignored, and those small leaders who have got to where they are by toiling at the bottom for more than ten years. Because in truth only they are your brothers, and they are the only ones you can rely on when the storm comes.
It’s easy to go to Africa. White people have many left-wing projects to help kids from middle-class families build their resumes. You can go if you have money. Something like being a teacher for black kids for a couple days, digging a well, or giving candies to black kids, then take a few group photos with them laughing. Hold up a banner and go out on the street to chant a few words like “an elephant cannot be without teeth”, is this what you call environmental protection? My hydropower station saves tens of thousands of tons of standard coal every day, that is called environmental protection. If you want to go to such an Africa, you can go now. Mega cities like Beijing and Shanghai have long been in line with the West, where there are many such projects.
If you want to really learn something and have real thinking, there is no shortcut. You just have to get down and start to learn from the operating principles of the bottom of this society, whether it is Africa in my geographical sense or Africa in the philosophical sense.
I have actually always believed in this reasoning, that is, God often rewards those who do not make too many calculations about their lives. It’s not that you don’t think, you must think, but you don’t need to calculate so precisely. Why do I say this? Because human society is a second-order chaotic system. It is unpredictable. Not only is it unpredictable, it will also change drastically in correspondence to the disturbance from subjective human will. All your precise calculations must end up in vain. You thought you had entered a popular and good industry, but within five years it was saturated and there were massive layoffs. You thought you got an iron rice bowl, but within a few years it turned out to be a loss. These are all normal things that have happened countless times in history. Many people make calculations upon calculations, but they are too clever, and in the end misled by their cleverness. If you ask me, you might as well not calculate. Instead of thinking about how to live a good life all day long, you might as well think about how to live this life well.
A warrior, before he fights a duel, he will also pray to God, asking God to give him courage and determination, but he never prays for victory itself. In my opinion, praying for victory itself is a cowardly act, because it means that you lack enough curiosity to face your own unknown. But don’t you think that the unknown itself is fascinating? You don’t know where your future will go, and you don’t know what role you will play in facing these unknowns. Isn’t this the meaning of life in itself? As a young person, I think it is self-evident that before you can take responsibility for the meaning of your life, you must first take responsibility for the fascinations in your life. Living a meaningless life is not that scary, but living a life without fascinations would be really terrifying.
Finally, I would like to share with you a passage that I particularly like. You may have heard this passage from “Time Enough to Love” by Robert Heinlein: A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
I wish all young friends that God will grant you courage and determination, so that you can watch where the wheel of fate will take you calmly like a bystander.
This article comes from the WeChat public account: Wenhua Zongheng (ID: whzh_21bcr), author: Cao Fengze (Overseas Engineer of China Electric Power Construction Corporation), organized by: Chen Rui, the original title of the speech is “Going to Africa: The “Developmental” Choice of A Young Chinese Engineer”