What is China doing in Africa
Africa is China’s China, and a lot of the policies that China has toward Africa seem geared to avoid the mistakes that the United States made toward China in the 1980’s and 1990’s.
So as China develops and the population ages, it doesn’t make any sense to keep a lot of the factories in China, so China is moving factories and know-how over to Africa just like the manufacturing moved from the US to China in the 1980’s and 1990’s. In the immediate term, the factories are moving to Southeast Asia, but places like Vietnam and Indonesia are leap frogging very quickly, and so pretty soon they won’t be suitable to put the factories that were in China a decade ago.
The mistakes that China wants to avoid are those that the US made a generation ago. Basically, the jobs went to China, and the people that lost the jobs were forgotten. What China’s economic strategy is is to focus on high tech, and then develop a middle class in Africa that can afford the high technology Chinese goods. The other thing that China is doing, is that rather than fighting globalization and keeping obsolete industries in China, China is embracing trade and globalization.
So as China develops and the population ages, it doesn’t make any sense to keep a lot of the factories in China, so China is moving factories and know-how over to Africa just like the manufacturing moved from the US to China in the 1980’s and 1990’s. In the immediate term, the factories are moving to Southeast Asia, but places like Vietnam and Indonesia are leap frogging very quickly, and so pretty soon they won’t be suitable to put the factories that were in China a decade ago.
The mistakes that China wants to avoid are those that the US made a generation ago. Basically, the jobs went to China, and the people that lost the jobs were forgotten. What China’s economic strategy is is to focus on high tech, and then develop a middle class in Africa that can afford the high technology Chinese goods. The other thing that China is doing, is that rather than fighting globalization and keeping obsolete industries in China, China is embracing trade and globalization.
