Below are links to two articles I wrote for Dragonomics about key themes in How Africa Works. If you want a bit more detail about what is in the book before shelling out your hard-earned, you will find it in these pieces.
Key themes in How Africa Works
February 16, 2026How Africa Works, Global Developments review
February 16, 2026Joe Studwell Turns To Africa
Feb 10, 2026
How Africa Works: Success and Failure on the World’s Last Developmental Frontier, by Joe Studwell. Atlantic Monthly Press. 2026.
When Joe Studwell’s How Asia Works came out in 2013, it was a book deeply out of consensus. In an age of randomized control trials and micro-interventions, it resurrected macro policies—land redistribution, industrial policy—that had virtually disappeared from mainstream development economics. Moreover, it returned East Asia, the only developing region in the world to successfully make the postwar climb out of poverty, back to the center of debate.
Thirteen years on, Studwell probably deserves some kind of triumphal march. Industrial policy is back in a big way. Through How Asia Works’s influence on Noah Smith and a host of bloggers, a generation of young tech-adjacent males were primed to rant about semiconductor subsidies at parties.
I am no exception. Reading How Asia Works was a formative intellectual experience for me—a jolt out of the mathematical slumber of PhD coursework. I have a complex relationship with the text (more on this in a moment), but I still recommend it effusively to anyone who wants to learn about East Asia.
Now, thirteen years later, Joe Studwell is back. How Africa Works aims to do for Africa what he achieved for Asia—becoming the natural first stop for readers who want to learn about the economics of the continent.
A Dismal Inheritance
The first part of How Africa Works addresses the perennial question: why is Africa poor?
Historically, low population density, induced by pests like the tse-tse fly, discouraged the formation of large urban centers. The slave trade—first Arab, then Western—further depopulated the continent, breaking down social bonds. When Europeans arrived in force in the 19th century, they did colonialism on the cheap, with few policemen and even fewer schools. (I wrote in depth about this a few months ago.) Unlike (say) the Japanese in Korea or Taiwan, the colonial state rarely penetrated much farther than the capital or key ports, leaving governance in the vast hinterland to invented or upjumped chiefs.
Decolonization left a dismal inheritance. In spite of superficial similarities in GDP with East or South Asia, Africa had far more problems on its plate. Levels of education were far too low to sustain an effective civil service, let alone communities of engineers or innovators. Incoherent states encased in inappropriate borders meant Africa’s founding fathers had to stitch nations together from unrelated ethnic groups.
Studwell’s diagnosis of Africa’s problems is steadfastly conventional, leaning heavily on the academic consensus established by Jeffrey Herbst, Robert Bates, Nicolas van de Walle, Leonard Wantchekon, among others. This is no dig; Studwell is an elegant synthesizer. I have some quibbles around the margins—the underrating of precolonial Africa reflects some lingering Western state-centric bias—but as a diagnosis for Africa’s poverty this is a far richer, textured, and more accurate account than the memelike “extractive institutions”.
Four Success Stories
Having set the scene, Studwell turns to four successful case studies: Botswana, Mauritius, Ethiopia, and Rwanda. This itself is a refreshing approach to economic analysis of Africa, which so often wants to dwell on failure. Unlike Taiwan or South Korea, none of these countries is an unqualified developmental miracle, but their relative success provides clues to how an African economic transformation might take place.
Botswana
Botswana is Studwell’s poster child for a successful democratic developmental coalition. (For this reason, it featured heavily in Acemoglu and Robinson’s Why Nations Fail as an example of “inclusive institutions”.)
Under the sound leadership of Seretse Khama, local chiefs were carefully co-opted at independence and the Botswana Democratic Party built up into a genuine national force. Khama also created a capable civil service, initially staffed by remaining Europeans, but gradually Africanized with sterling Batswana talent. This meant that when diamonds were discovered just around independence, the windfall was carefully managed, avoiding the worst effects of Dutch Disease. These mining revenues helped raise Botswana to upper middle-income status, making it the fourth-richest country in continental Africa.
Botswana’s chief failing, in Studwell’s view, was adhering too much to responsible policy orthodoxy—i.e., not enough industrial policy. There was no vision for large-scale industrialization, no coherent plan to create large numbers of factory jobs. Moreover, the political dominance of large cattle owners (Botswana was a society of pastoralists rather than farmers) meant that redistribution was never in the cards. The result is a relatively rich society, but one that is highly unequal.
Mauritius
Mauritius, which is often not thought of as an African country, is perhaps the most unusual choice. An uninhabited island before Dutch colonization in the 17th century, its ethnic makeup of Indians and Creoles resembles the Caribbean more than continental Africa. Moreover, Mauritius became independent in 1968 at an income level that most contemporary Africans would envy (see chart above).
Nonetheless, Mauritius’s developmental record is impressive. Originally a sugar colony, a tax on sugar receipts was used to funnel landowners’ capital from agriculture to manufacturing. In the subsequent manufacturing drive, powered by the exports of apparel and textiles, GDP rose 6% a year. With egalitarian, broad-based growth, poverty was virtually eradicated.
However, Mauritius was unable to make the leap from garments to higher-value manufacturing, and the sector’s share of GDP has since halved from over 20 percent to just 11 percent by 2020. Alongside Seychelles, it is one of only two African countries ranked “very high” on the UN’s Human Development Index.
Rwanda
Ethiopia and Rwanda, as recent developmental darlings and conscious emulators of the East Asian example, are perhaps the least surprising inclusions in Studwell’s list.
Under President Paul Kagame, Rwanda has explicitly modeled itself after Singapore (including Lee Kuan Yew’s authoritarian tendencies). At first blush, this struck me as absurd: Singapore is an island state on the crossroads of the world’s richest sea lanes; Rwanda is a landlocked country in poor central Africa.
Studwell’s account convinced me there is an economic logic to this strategy. The high cost of road transport means that importing goods into Central Africa is prohibitively expensive. Rwanda does not necessarily need to compete with the world; by delivering on infrastructure projects and maintaining rare political stability, it can attract investment as a kind of entrepot to Africa’s Great Lakes. Under this formula (with perhaps some slight fudging of the numbers), Rwanda has maintained impressive 7% growth for the past decade.
The big question surrounding Rwanda is if the growth coalition can hold together. Nowhere else in Africa is the tragic legacy of ethnic division more apparent; the present Kagame regime took power by overthrowing the perpetrators of the infamous 1994 genocide. Rwanda’s military involvement in the Eastern Congo, which represents both a source of raw materials and a lucrative market of 30 million, adds a further dark cast to its developmental success.
Ethiopia
It is Ethiopia that comes the closest to achieving all parts of Studwell’s formula. As a country of 135 million people, it has the scale to set a major example to the world and to take a serious bite out of Africa’s poverty all on its own.
Meles Zenawi, prime minister from 1995 to 2012, was an avid student of East Asia. (His thesis outline is available online; for any economist with a wavering faith in the power of ideas, read the bibliography.) Under his leadership, the Ethiopian state invested heavily in agricultural extension and irrigation, improving the yields of smallholder farmers. It began (with Chinese support) building industrial parks to support an export manufacturing base. Most ambitious of all, it began work on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, one of the largest hydropower projects in the world, to find a permanent solution to Ethiopia’s energy woes.
No student of How Asia Works could have done better. Had How Africa Works been published before November 2020, it’s easy to see how a celebration of Ethiopia might have occupied most of the book. But the outbreak of civil war derailed Ethiopia’s progress, demonstrating the continuing risk of ethnic conflict to the prospects of economic growth.
Mashamba Na Viwanda
Unlike East Asia, Africa has no unqualified economic miracles to point to. The result is a book that is more diffuse in its rhetorical impact than How Asia Works, but also one that is perhaps more realistic about the constraints. Some of the swaggering confidence that marked the Asian Triple Growth Formula is gone.
Nonetheless, Studwell insists that universal prescriptions still exist:
… despite the radically different context, I have found that the policies that were most effective in East Asia in producing economic transformation are the same ones that have worked in the handful of cases of early success in Africa. In this respect, there is no African exceptionalism.
As a recap, these policies were smallholder agriculture with state support, industrial policy to support export-led manufacturing, and tight government control of finance to support all these aims. To these three, Studwell adds the extra ingredient of a “developmental political coalition”—taken largely for granted in the relatively homogenous, authoritarian states of East Asia, but far from table stakes in ethnically fractious, democratic Africa.
I’m no expert on any of the four countries Studwell discussed. But let me comment on two of Studwell’s key pillars from an economic lens: agriculture and manufacturing.
Agriculture
Like in How Asia Works, Studwell advocates for smallholder farming in Africa, citing the familiar evidence that small farms grow more crops per acre than big ones. (In jargon, this is the “inverse farm size – yield relationship”.) In theory, then, redistributing land from big landowners to smallholders should improve aggregate productivity.
Smallholder farming may be desirable for political, distributional, or social reasons. In most societies, owning your own plot of land naturally has enormous psychological value. In Kenya, for instance, having a rural shamba is a source of social status and, in urban downturns, acts as a form of social insurance. Regimes that ignore this basic fact invite unrest: the anti-communist regimes of East Asia likely had to do some form of land redistribution or risk being thrown into the sea.
But on the narrow point of efficiency I am more agnostic. I mentioned earlier my complex relationship with How Asia Works; my academic work finds that the major land distributions in Taiwan and Mainland China had smaller yield effects than previously thought. Having pondered this question for years, it now seems to me simplistic to expect there to be a universal Platonic relationship where the smaller the farm, the higher the yields. Far more likely that this relationship depends on the crop, the soil, and the available infrastructure. Wheat yields in Europe, for instance, seem to be the highest on large farms, while rice yields in Asia can grow on tiny plots with the near-endless application of labor.
But on Studwell’s broader theme, of a renewed developmental focus on agriculture, I am in complete agreement. African smallholders, ignored by their states and deprived of support, are struggling. According to the best available data, stretching from 2008 to 2019, both smallholder yields and total factor productivity have been declining by around 3 to 4% a year.1 It’s difficult to envision lifting 460 million Africans out of extreme poverty without improving the meager returns from their primary occupation.
Manufacturing
The other noteworthy component of the Studwellian recipe is a heavy emphasis on growing manufacturing, fostered by state industrial policy.
What’s so special about manufacturing? Studwell leans heavily on an influential 2013 paper by Dani Rodrik, who argues that manufacturing possesses the unique property of “unconditional convergence”. Unlike other sectors, manufacturing in developing countries appears to catch up quickly to the global frontier of productivity. Intuitively, because most manufactured goods are tradable, manufacturing firms are more exposed to the pressure of international competition, forcing them to innovate; moreover, manufacturing processes (compared to, say, crop growing practices) are readily transferrable across borders.
I was long a True Believer in this thesis, but have recently had my faith shaken. New empirical work, forthcoming in the American Economic Review: Insights, suggests that unconditional convergence in manufacturing may partly have been an illusion of the data. (In that paper, somewhat cheekily, it turns out that agriculture and services display convergence, but manufacturing does not.)
Of course, no one’s worldview is really determined by a paper based on a few cross-country regressions. (Even one by Dani Rodrik.) What convinces most is how central manufacturing was to the East Asian miracle, still the only region of the world to ride the escalator up from poverty to riches.
This relates to a deeper problem with the prospects for African industrialization: namely, that industrialization never happens in a vacuum. A successful domestic manufacturing base is a product not only of your own industrial policy, but global market conditions and the strength of your competitors.
One obvious risk is automation, which threatens the manufacturing sector’s absorption of labor, and may help keep Chinese factories globally competitive despite rising wages. Studwell quickly brushes off these concerns (“[the] labour cost in a country like Madagascar is US$65 a month… the cost of an advanced industrial robot in the apparel sector is over US$100,000”). In my view they deserve deeper inspection.
Moreover, even if Studwell’s right, Africa has strong competitors in the race to claim China’s manufacturing share: South and Southeast Asia, with their large urban populations and increasingly capable states. Studwell notes optimistically that Africa has finally caught up to the educational attainment of East Asia in 1960; he fails to note that South and Southeast Asia have long exceeded that level.
A Bias For Hope
Longtime readers of Studwell’s writing—from 2003’s The China Dream to 2013’s How Asia Works to the present volume—will know that he has a strong contrarian streak. The China Dream was notably downbeat about China’s development prospects just as the largest export boom in history was getting started (p. xii: “the economic foundations of contemporary China have been laid on sand and [are] constructed from the kind of hubris that drove the Soviet Union in the 1950s”). How Asia Works was stridently dirigiste, right at the high-water mark of the Neoliberal Age.
By contrast, Studwell sounds unusually optimistic about Africa, where, post-aid cuts, the pendulum of international opinion has swung decisively towards gloom. State-led improvements in health and (to a lesser extent) education, supported in part by international aid, have eroded some of Africa’s historical disadvantages. Most of all, the demographic boon of the world’s youngest population will give growth efforts a brief but powerful tailwind.
As an analysis of what makes countries grow, the Studwellian formula is of course incomplete—but, with 54 countries and 1.6 billion people, how could it not be? What makes Studwell nonetheless compelling to read is his steadfast underlying belief that poverty is a product of policy decisions. Analytically, this is of course not quite right: as the first part discussed, strong historical and geographic factors condition what’s possible. But, for a practitioner, such belief—what Albert Hirschman once called a bias for hope—is surely a necessary condition for action.
Development is ultimately an act of imagination, of envisioning what’s not yet there. Sound policy requires that these visions be supported by durable political coalitions and within states’ capabilities. (A latent motif of the book is eager states overreaching with megaprojects, in a vain attempt to leapfrog their peers.) But even the mixed success of import substitution industrialization or the follies of incomplete irrigation megaworks seem preferable to the status quo of seeking rents while sitting on one’s hands.
On one final point I am in wholehearted agreement.
At various points Studwell discusses “demonstration effects”: the positive influence one country can have on peer states. Demonstration effects are essentially impossible to falsify in the modern language of econometrics, but are unmistakeable in the real world. (If you disagree, take a look again at Meles Zenawi’s library.) The world really only has two industrial clusters: one began in 18th century Britain, and grew to encompass most of Europe and its colonial offshoots; the other started in Meiji Japan and spread to the rest of East Asia. In both cases, culturally similar neighbors saw what was possible and copied the recipe.
In one sense, this is a note for pessimism. If history is any guide, the great global factory complex will first stretch down from China through to mainland Southeast Asia and Indonesia, and westward through Bangladesh and India, long before it ever reaches Africa. But in another, it sounds a note of hope. If even one African country manages to sustain the kind of broad-based growth that Studwell describes, it could do for its neighbors what Meiji Japan accomplished for the rest of Asia. It may only take one resounding success to shatter the illusion—fed by sixty years of disappointment, egged on by lingering prejudice—that Africans are incapable of achieving economic prosperity.
Studwell presents a careful and sensitive discussion about the tradeoffs between formal land rights (which would make possible land reform) and the present communal landholding that dominates the continent. Considering the elite capture of legal systems, which will likely only favor rich landholders, he ultimately decides that communal landholding is likely better than the alternatives. Smallholder agriculture will have to wait.
How Africa Works, Economist review
February 16, 2026
Africa needs to follow Asia’s path to grow
So argues an important new book, “How Africa Works”
Feb 12th 2026|3 min read
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How Africa Works. By Joe Studwell. Atlantic Monthly Press; 416 pages; $32. Profile Books; £25
Africa is adding 300m people per decade: by 2050 it will be home to 2.5bn, a quarter of humanity. As the rest of the world ages, the continent’s youthfulness stands out. It will play a bigger role in the global labour market and as a source of consumers, culture and ideas. Thought-provoking new books about Africa are therefore sorely needed. In “How Africa Works” Joe Studwell, a visiting fellow at the Overseas Development Institute, a think-tank, has written one of the most interesting analyses of the past few years. It will prove valuable reading for anyone curious to understand “the last great frontier of global development”.
Africa is home to most of the world’s poverty. Why? Mr Studwell argues that it is partly a result of “low-budget colonialism”. European powers extracted commodities, then left behind a pitifully tiny number of educated elites. Their arbitrary borders created kaleidoscopes of ethnically fragmented states.
So far, so familiar. But the author quickly moves on to make a more original argument. He singles out “chronically low population density” as an important cause of Africa’s underdevelopment. Asia was labour-rich and land-poor by the time of its economic rise. But because of scourges such as disease, crop-trampling elephants, slavery and bad soil, Africa has been much slower. As recently as 1975 the population density across Africa was equivalent to that of Europe in the 1500s. By 2030 Africa will have the population density Asia had in 1960. “Africa is only now becoming sufficiently densely populated to achieve strong economic growth,” potentially following in Asia’s footsteps, he argues.
It is a bold claim. In general GDP per person and density are not especially correlated. Some of the densest African countries, such as Burundi and Malawi, are the poorest. Other development experts have put more emphasis on literacy and fertility rates. But Mr Studwell’s case—that it takes a critical mass of people before markets can start to hum—has an intuitive logic.
Already four of the continent’s 54 states have shown impressive growth in recent years. The stories of Botswana and Rwanda will be familiar to Africa-watchers. But those about Mauritius and Ethiopia are newer and welcome. Across the quartet—in an echo of Stefan Dercon’s “Gambling on Development” (2022)—Mr Studwell notes the presence of a “developmental coalition” transcending ethnic lines.
Part of the reason Mr Studwell’s book was so keenly anticipated is that he came to the subject quite fresh, as an outsider. He wrote “How Asia Works” in 2013, ascribing that continent’s escape from poverty to more productive family farms, export-oriented manufacturing and state intervention in finance. Later Bill Gates asked him what he thought about Africa. That conversation and a visit to east Africa seem to have inspired him to turn to the continent; he has since travelled extensively there and surveyed the academic literature. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he concludes that Asia’s development recipe would be ideal for Africa, too. Two of his star subjects, Ethiopia and Mauritius, have already done more than most African countries to follow in that vein.
Some scholars will question how important—and how possible—it is for Africa to pursue this classic story of structural transformation. On the face of it, the Asian mould feels foreign: South Sudan will not become South Korea. Africans may also feel that their politicians do not get enough blame for the corruption and complacency that have stymied growth so far.
But in 2026 African GDP growth is (unusually) set to outpace that of the Asia-Pacific region, as the Chinese economy slows and commodity prices have surged. Investors are becoming more bullish about Africa as a destination for capital, not charity. And Africa’s careless political elites, terrified of their jobless youth, are starting to see economic growth as crucial to their own preservation. There is no stronger development incentive than survival. ?
This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Continental fates”
From the February 14th 2026 edition
How Africa Works, first of the podcasts
February 10, 2026
There are lots of podcasts done and coming following the publication of How Africa Works and I will endeavour to provide links to more. To kick off, here is half an hour with an old friend — former IMF staffer, investment bank economist and independent emerging markets analyst Jon Anderson.
This link should take you there. There are a few graphs that will help you understand what this book is banging on about.
How Africa Works is out in the UK, FT review
February 10, 2026
My new book, How Africa Works, is out in the UK and will be out in the US on February 17 (and dates around this in other parts of the world). The first review that I have seen was published in the Financial Times. Here it is:
‘A dazzling reassessment of the continent’s historic handicaps, and its potential for economic development. … One of the most original and important books on Africa in years.’
How Africa Works by Joe Studwell — how to change the economic trajectory A dazzling reassessment of the continent’s historic handicaps, and its potential for economic development
In 2013, writer and academic Joe Studwell produced a brilliant, intellectually daring account of the factors underlying Asia’s economic miracle. Called How Asia Works, the book flew in the face of the pro-market prescriptions of the Washington consensus, concluding that Asia’s most successful economies had thrived through unorthodox policies: a combination of agricultural reform based on intensively farmed small plots, financial repression and industrial policy turbocharged by a ruthless drive to export.
Impressed, government officials in Ethiopia and Rwanda, both serious about development, suggested that Studwell write about their continent. “In Ethiopia, in particular, I was struck by my hosts’ depth of knowledge and their appetite for more,” Studwell writes, before concluding in typically terse style: “The invitations were flattering but pointless.” He knew nothing about Africa.
Studwell subsequently set about putting that right. He devoted seven years to intense reading and field research, collecting empirical evidence rather than received wisdom. The result is one of the most original and important books on Africa in years. Especially in the dazzling first section, almost every page bristles with ideas and challenges to lazy (often prejudiced) thinking.
How Africa Works is arranged in three parts. The first, contrary to the title, is an analysis of why Africa doesn’t work. More accurately, it catalogues the factors, sometimes surprising, that help explain why most of the 54 states into which Africa was corralled by colonialism have failed to emulate Asia’s economic take-off.
The second section is a study of four states — Botswana, Mauritius, Ethiopia and Rwanda — that have managed to generate long periods of sustained growth. The third is an assessment of what it would take for other African economies to emulate that record, with particular emphasis on the agricultural and manufacturing revolutions that were essential to Asian growth. Throughout, Studwell steers carefully between the Scylla of fatalism and the Charybdis of frothy optimism.
Africa’s two big development handicaps, he argues, are a sparse population and what he calls “low budget” colonialism. The first factor, in particular, challenges conventional thinking, but Studwell makes his case powerfully. At the start of the 20th century, Africa’s population density — at under five people per square kilometre — was similar to England’s in 1066
Before the 20th century, because of factors including a high disease burden, slavery and the preponderance of crop-destroying elephants, Africa was thinly populated. Between 1700 and 1850, the population barely budged and, even by 1950, there were fewer Africans than there had been Asians in 1500. At the start of the 20th century, Africa’s population density — at under five people per square kilometre — was similar to England’s in 1066.
Studwell argues that this retarded development. In pre-colonial times, it slowed state formation. Unlike in crowded Europe, where nations were formed through war, in Africa, when one set of people didn’t like their leaders, they simply picked up and started someplace else. At the onset of colonialism, there were 10,000 African polities, some of them proto-states but many “loose groupings” of between 5,000 and 10,000 people “constituted as micro-monarchies”.
Since independence, a sparse population has made it harder to deliver services, such as electricity and education, to rural populations. From Studwell’s perspective, the explosive population growth of recent decades, viewed with alarm by many Africa-watchers, is nothing more than “an extremely belated process of demographic normalisation”. Since 1960, around the time many African nations gained independence, the continent’s population has more than quintupled to 1.5bn and is forecast to add a further billion people in the next 25 years.
The previously sparse population, overlaid by “low budget colonialism” — shallow, brief and extractive — made Africa less ready for take-off than many Asian states. Tanzania, by no means an outlier, gained independence with two engineers, 12 doctors, 120 ethnic groups and 85 per cent illiteracy.
African leaders made a collective decision not to contest colonial borders. Since 1960, Studwell counts five interstate wars and 38 civil wars. “Most of Africa was frozen as an atomised, pre-modern ‘ethnic’ jigsaw,” he writes. “The violent process by which state formation took place in Europe was interrupted.”
Studwell is too astute to blame everything on colonialism, or even on pre-colonial factors. The book’s second section examines how four countries set about overcoming their inheritance, albeit imperfectly. The chapters on Mauritius and Ethiopia are particularly enlightening.
Mauritius, dismissed as “an overcrowded barracoon” (slave enclosure) by the writer VS Naipaul, is now on the cusp of becoming a high-income country. The key, argues Studwell, was to forge a political coalition across ethnic lines, one whose overriding goal was development. In lieu of the radical land reform that took place in Asia’s most successful economies, Franco-Mauritian sugar barons were forced to finance development through taxes. These were recycled into special economic zones and a textile industry that became the basis for a push into higher-end manufacturing, finance and luxury tourism.
Mauritius has not done everything right. Studwell blames it for not pushing manufacturing beyond jewellery, watches and small-scale electronics. But the key to its significant success, he writes, has been a lack of ideology. Whether former Marxists or rampant capitalists, leaders emulated China’s cautious attitude described as “crossing the river by feeling the stones”. They experimented and then did more of what worked.
Ethiopia has been even more important as a potential development template. With 137mn people, it is the continent’s most populous nation after Nigeria. Once a byword for famine and misrule, under Meles Zenawi, who came to power after the overthrow in 1991 of a disastrous Soviet-backed regime, Ethiopia modelled itself on South Korea and Taiwan.
For Meles, everything was about instilling a sense of national mission. He liked the story of Taiwanese customs officers who extracted bribes on imported consumer items but never on the capital equipment needed for national improvement. Ethiopia prioritised agriculture — a Studwell essential — building rural roads and providing farmers with advice and fertiliser. Agricultural output quadrupled. Farmers’ savings were trapped by capital controls (Studwell’s financial repression), lifting investment to 41 per cent of GDP, on a par with Asia.
Meles, who died in 2012, thought growth would trump ethnic conflict. After 1991, the economy expanded by 6-10 per cent annually, but conflict came anyway amid resentment over the political control exerted by officials from the northern Tigray region from where Meles came. Studwell calls the resulting 2020-22 war in Tigray, in which 600,000 people died, “the biggest development tragedy in a generation”. Still, growth continued and Studwell too hopes that economic gains can eventually smother ethnic divisions.
The final section strikes a note of measured optimism. Some countries will fail, Studwell writes. But others have hit a stage at which development becomes possible. In 2030, Africa will finally reach the population density of Asia in 1960, its point of take-off. African urbanisation rates are the fastest in history. Ninety African cities have populations above 1mn against two in 1960. Scarcer land and more urban demand has forced an improvement in yields and created a landless peasantry fit for the factory. Relative wages have fallen, while education levels have soared.
With the right policies, Studwell argues, the conditions are in place for Asian-style manufacturing-led development. He dismisses those who say technology means Africa has missed the boat. A textile machine costs $100,000 upfront, he says. A Madagascan worker costs $65, paid monthly.
Studwell’s conclusion is that, while most African countries are not going to become development states, many can move the policy needle. If by 2060 they reach the African Development Bank’s target of $4,500 GDP per capita — a stretch for some admittedly — the continent would have an economy not much smaller than today’s China. Africa he concludes is not “a miracle waiting to happen”, nor is it “a monolithic failure”. The truth lies somewhere in between.
How Africa Works: Success and Failure on the World’s Last Developmental Frontier by Joe Studwell Profile £25/Grove $32, 448 pages
David Pilling is the FT’s Africa editor
Notes from Africa 4: Mauritius
June 16, 2022A series of notes from the world’s developmental frontier…
Mauritius is an island roughly 60 kilometres long and averaging just over 30 kilometres wide, located 850 kilometres east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. It is also the most complete and equitable economic development success story in Africa.
Mauritius was uninhabited prior to the arrival of Europeans. Its original connection to the African continent was the importation by the French in the 18th century of slaves from Madagascar and Mozambique to work sugar plantations that dominated the colonial economy. In 1810, the British took Mauritius to prevent it being used as a base for attacks on British shipping. French sugar growers were left to carry on, except that from 1835 slavery was prohibited; over the next 70 years, 450,000 Indian labourers were imported to replace the African slaves, on harsh contracts termed indentures. By the time of independence in 1968, this meant that half the population was Hindu Indian, one sixth was Muslim Indian, 30 percent was Creole (as the descendants of the slave population are known), and small fractions were French and Chinese.
Political tensions were high around independence. Franco-Mauritian sugar barons believed they would be subjected to Hindu political hegemony after the British left and their capital was moved off the island; the Creole population also feared Hindu political dominance. It was in these circumstances that Mauritius’ first premier, Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, set out to forge a developmental coalition.
Senior political figures representing Franco-Mauritian and Creole interests were invited to join the post-independence cabinet. Ramgoolam, an avowed socialist, embraced several institutions that linked government to the private sector dominated by the Franco-Mauritian elite. The most important was the Joint Economic Council (JEC), a forum in which key political and business leaders met on a regular basis, usually at the prime minister’s office. The tone was set for a developmental state in which government and private sector were partners, albeit with the government as the dominant partner.
A compromise with sugar
The biggest issue between Ramgoolam’s Labour Party and the Franco-Mauritian elite was how the post-independence government would deal with the sugar estates that dominated Mauritius’ economy, exported their profits and did little to address the island’s chronic unemployment. In the 1950s, many in the Labour Party favoured nationalisation of the farms of the so-called ‘sugar barons’. However, in the context of the coalition Ramgoolam found a more subtle but developmentally effective approach. His government created a Mauritius Sugar Syndicate as the sole sugar exporter, repatriating all proceeds which were not permitted to be invested offshore. And a tax on gross sugar receipts was introduced, initially at 5 percent.
Concurrently, incentives were established to encourage the sugar barons to invest in labour-intensive manufacturing. An Export Processing Zone (EPZ) – one without geographic limits – was created. Any approved factory enjoyed duty-free import of equipment and components and extremely generous income tax concessions for 20 years. The right to unionise was denied, unlike in all other parts of the economy, and the minimum wage was set lower than outside the EPZ. The prospect of tax-free earnings from manufacturing was combined with steady increases in the tax on sugar receipts, which rose from the initial 5 percent to a peak of 23.6 percent in the 1980s.
The fiscal environment meant there was no sense in new investment in sugar (except for smallholders who were exempt from the tax). Sugar barons had already dabbled in local non-sugar businesses prior to independence under a tariff protection scheme designed to reduce imports and foster local industry. They therefore confronted the export-oriented manufacturing promoted by the EPZ with a modicum of experience outside the sugar business. The key to the EPZ was Mauritius’ quota-free and duty-free access to European Economic Community (EEC) markets, which the island was granted from June 1973 under the EEC’s Yaoundé (later Lomé) convention for former African colonies.
The Mauritian government’s promotion activities drew a small number of mostly Hong Kong and French garment firms to invest in early EPZ factories. The sugar barons offered themselves as local partners with cash to invest. After the first year of the zone, six factories were operating, with 640 workers. By the end of 1976, there were 85 EPZ factories with 16,404 workers, representing the beginnings of a revolution in employment fortunes in Mauritius, which experienced unemployment rates in excess of 20 percent. Knitwear was the dominant product.
The dawn of full employment
The Mauritian economy experienced a crisis brought on by excessive government spending and the second global oil shock at the end of the 1970s and start of the 1980s. However, the attraction of the local garment sector to international investors seeking diversification of production operations, plus a local economic elite pushed by government and fiscal incentives to invest in garment factories, kept the manufacturing sector growing. Indeed, the 1980s turned out to be its boom decade.
During the 1980s, the original woollen knitwear business expanded to a point where Mauritius became the third-biggest exporter in the world. Meanwhile, clothing companies responded to rising costs by becoming more capital-intensive and integrating vertically – larger firms began to make and dye their own fabric in Mauritius. The product range expanded to include everything from shirts to fine-knit items like jogging pants.
By the end of 1990, when the population was one million, there were 89,906 workers employed in 568 EPZ firms — nine out of ten of them in apparel and textile factories. Across its economy, Mauritius had the highest share of EPZ employment of any country in the world. One third of Mauritian workers were employed in EPZ businesses, compared with 10 percent in Singapore, 4 percent in South Korea or 2 percent in Malaysia. The EPZ alone accounted for 12 percent of GDP while sugar-dominated agriculture was 10 percent, down from one quarter in 1970. Unemployment was less than 3 percent.
Across the period from the inception of the EPZ in 1970 through 2000, Mauritian GDP rose by an average 5.8 percent a year, increasing from less than US$300 to US$4,000 per capita. Meanwhile, the rise of manufacturing helped Mauritius become a far more equal society than fellow fast-growth story Botswana because it offered opportunities to almost all Mauritians of working age, not least women. The Gini coefficient of income inequality, where one represents perfect inequality and zero perfect equality, decreased from 0.5 in 1962 to 0.42 in 1975 and 0.37 in 2000 — the latter on par with Taiwan, the economy whose development produced the lowest income inequality in East Asia. By 2000, Mauritius had almost no poverty by World Bank measures.
Manufacturing is special
The impulse to greater income equality delivered by the rise of manufacturing was complemented by policies in agriculture to support smallholder famers. In addition to the exemption from the sugar tax for producers of less than one thousand tonnes per year, government required sugar mills to give smallholders an improved share of sugar extracted from canes and sugar estates to provide parcels of land, as well as cash payments, to any workers laid off. The policies contributed to a degree of social mobility among smallholder farmers and estate workers that did not previously exist.
Subsequent to the garment and textile boom, what were once pure sugar businesses expanded into diversified conglomerates, the largest with turnovers of hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Mauritius, although still an island of only 1.3 million persons, offered or created opportunities in hotels, luxury real estate for wealthy foreigners, offshore financial and information and communications technology (ICT) services, and more. Government continued to support diversification efforts. Mauritian GDP per capita maintained its ascent, from less than US$300 in 1970 to US$11,000 in 2019.
The island’s annual GDP growth from 1970 to 2019 averaged 5.2 percent, or 4.4 percent per capita — compared with 1.3 percent per capita across sub-Saharan Africa. Growth with social equity saw Mauritius rise to ‘high-level’ status on the United Nation’s Human Development Index (HDI) as early as 1996. HDI combines GDP growth with progress in education and life expectancy to give a broader measure of human welfare. Today, Mauritius is the only country in Africa – including north Africa – to be ranked at the topmost ‘very high-level’ by HDI score.
Although the share of manufacturing in Mauritian GDP declined rapidly in recent years, falling from a peak of more than 20 percent in the 1980s to just 11 percent in 2020, its role in the rise of Mauritius cannot be overestimated. As the economist Dani Rodrik showed*, manufacturing is the only sector of an economy that provides an automatic ‘escalator’ for increasing productivity levels. Consequently, only those developing economies which built substantial manufacturing sectors exhibited the unconditional convergence with productivity levels of rich countries that orthodox economics assumes will happen in any poor country with access to global technologies.
Mauritius is unique in Africa for having used a manufacturing strategy to lift itself from poverty to rich-world living standards in just two generations. An agricultural policy that supported smallholders while redirecting capital from large sugar estates to garment manufacturing was the necessary precondition. The lesson about the special role of manufacturing in developing countries ought to be clear to every African state. And yet the continent has almost no other examples of governments developing and deploying coherent manufacturing strategies.
*Rodrik, D., 2013, ‘Unconditional convergence in manufacturing’, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 128(1).
Notes from Africa 3: Botswana
February 23, 2022A series of notes from the world’s developmental frontier…
Botswana is one of only two exceptional African developmental success stories, in the sense of a state that transformed itself from poverty to upper middle income status – meaning from the fourth to the second of the World Bank’s income tiers — in only a generation following independence. (The other genuine success story is the tiny island nation of Mauritius.)
Botswana, in turn, offers two significant lessons for other developing countries, particularly African ones. The first is how Botswana was able to transform a traditional, localised, aristocratic ruling structure, led by tribal chiefs, into a modern, national, democratic political structure in which elite interests were sufficiently accommodated for them to accept the transformative process. The second is the results, positive and negative, that occurred when a poor but well-managed, resource-rich state followed strictly orthodox economic advice about how to employ its natural endowments to develop its economy.
Botswana was defined in the colonial era by being a large, and largely desert-, territory surrounded by white minority-ruled settler states – South Africa, Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and Namibia. As in Namibia, the main viable economic activity was cattle herding on semi-arid land. The heir to the throne of the largest ‘tribal’ grouping (the term the British used although majorities of each of eight designated ‘tribes’ were assimilated rather than descended from common ancestors) was Seretse Khama, who was exiled for more than five years because his marriage to a white British woman was deemed unbearably provocative to the apartheid South African government. Nonetheless, on his return in 1956 Khama worked closely with the last British Commissioner to begin to develop national institutions of government.
A Legislative Council was initially split half and half between African and European members, with Africans elected by a show of hands which ensured that cattle-owning aristocrats dominated the returns. When politicised Batswana – as the people of Botswana are known – miners working in South Africa formed a radical political party, Khama responded by forming an establishment party led by the African membership of the Legislative Council. The Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) went on to dominate Botswana’s politics until the present day.
Khama formed alliances with anyone committed to a national, if conservative, political programme. The most important was with Quett Masire, the son of a headman on the Bangwaketse Reserve, home to the second most populous group, who had been elected to the Legislative Council and went on to be Botswana’s Vice President, and later its second President. Masire was a highly successful agricultural entrepreneur. The British backed and trained Khama’s team, allowing it in the last years of colonial rule to operate like a full cabinet, to undertake policy formulation and to make grant pitches to the British Colonial Office.
Although Khama was a conservative aristocrat, he stood up firmly for the principle of racial equality. In 1962 he moved a motion in the Legislative Council to establish a select committee on racial discrimination. The report the committee published was the basis for ending the racial segregation that was unofficial but ubiquitous. Similarly, Khama saw off efforts by the tiny white minority in Botswana to retain the same political representation – meaning the same number of members of parliament — as the African majority.
Khama forced the political leaders of the white minority to come to terms with the reality of African majority rule and also convinced the chiefs of the eight ‘tribal’ groups to surrender key powers to a new national government. Under the terms of the post-independence constitution, the chiefs could not run for seats in the legislature but instead held unelected posts in an advisory House of Chiefs. ‘Advisory’ meant powerless. In addition, the constitution created District Councils, which took over the staff, offices, vehicles and most of the local government functions of the chiefs and former Tribal Councils. The chiefs were compensated with stipends and ex-officio seats on District Councils. By the time they understood the full extent of their loss of power, it was too late.
Khama, his government and the BDP were also careful to shore up their constituency of economic support. In 1963, a National Development Bank was established to provide credit to well-to-do cattle owners to sink boreholes in the western reaches of the Tribal Reserves, extending on to the sand veld of the Kalahari. In conjunction with big increases in state veterinary services and fencing construction from 1964-5 – the latter to limit the spread of outbreaks of foot and mouth disease – this built on a colonial strategy of subsidising large-scale cattle farmers. The BDP added the nationalisation of Botswana’s abattoir on the South African border, allowing for profit from meat sales to be returned to the big cattle owners who provided the abattoir with the vast majority of its animals. After independence, what became the Botswana Meat Commission (BMC) would also absorb losses onto the government’s account during downturns in the beef market, further subsidising big cattle interests.
The lower rungs of aspirational aristocrats and other entrepreneurs who sought bigger herds, credit and cattle-farming subsidies became the group which dominated among the BDP’s legislators and key supporters. When elections under the new constitution took place in March 1965, the BDP campaigned aggressively in rural areas – usually with the support of the local chief and dominant cattle interests — and won 28 of 31 seats in a new Legislative Assembly. Seretse Khama became Prime Minister and Botswana became independent in September 1966.
A reputation for reliability
Seretse Khama’s approach to politics was pragmatic and conservative, and his approach to economic development was very similar. Unlike the leaders of other newly independent states such as Zambia and Tanzania, Khama did not rush to localise the civil service, instead waiting until adequately-trained and experienced Batswana were available. By the mid-1970s, the number of Batswana civil servants tripled as part of a national training drive. However, the replacement of expatriates in the most senior civil service positions was only just beginning.
When the government lacked sufficient local teachers for its education programme, affordable imports were found in Ghana and India. Large numbers of American Peace Corps volunteers were recruited and given roles, in everything from teaching to the central government bureaucracy. A South African socialist and anti-apartheid campaigner, Patrick van Rensburg, was welcomed to open vocational training ‘brigades’ that enrolled thousands of young people. The approach to state capacity building was to pursue anything that worked.
The BDP leadership also made a point of leading by example. The key examples set were racial integration and frugality. Ministers made a point of joining new, racially-integrated sports and social clubs that were established in the capital, Gaborone. With respect to frugality, Seretse Khama was the only government minister to fly first class. Vice President Masire and other ministers travelled in economy.
The best resources in government were invested in a planning unit that was combined with the finance ministry to be a Ministry of Finance and Development Planning (MFDP). It was led by Quett Masire and set out economic development objectives in rolling five-year plans which were passed into law and could not therefore be changed without parliamentary approval. Under Masire, expatriate economists led by Oxford- and Harvard-trained South African Quill Hermans, and Cambridge-trained Briton Peter Landell-Mills, developed one of the best reputuations in Africa for reliable aid planning and for spending grant funds as promised. Already in the early 1970s, only Congo and Gabon received more aid per capita in Africa.
Botswana in 1966 had the commitment to collective action for national development, the pragmatic, ‘whatever works’ approach, and the nascent planning bureaucracy that characterised the most successful East Asian developmental states. When mineral discoveries were made by foreign companies in Botswana, the government was therefore equipped to manage their exploitation. The first deposits to interest multinational miners were copper-nickel ore around two remote settlements, Selebi and Phikwe, in the east. The second was a diamond-bearing kimberlite pipe at Orapa, in a more central part of Botswana, found by South Africa’s de Beers.
The copper-nickel project’s three linked mines, smelter, dam, rail spur, power station and town required investment equivalent to one-and-a-half times Botswana’s 1968-9 Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Masire and Hermans ensured that all investment risk, including debt guarantees, was held by the miners and financing agencies that supported them. Botswana secured a free 15 percent equity interest as the price of the mining licence, with royalties to be paid on operating profits in addition to corporate tax on profits and withholding tax on dividends. The Botswanan approach was vindicated when copper and nickel prices fell and the mine never made money. However, the mine did fund the build-out of Botswana’s power and water utilities, and road infrastructure.
It was the Orapa diamond mine, which opened in 1971, that changed Botswana’s future. In its first full year, 1972, Orapa produced 2.5m carats and accounted, via the government’s 15 percent share of profits, and taxes, for 10 percent of government revenues. De Beers requested to double its agreed rate of production and asked to commence mining two more diamond-bearing pipes at Letlhakane, 40 kilometres away.
The Botswanan planning team had followed the advice of independent consultants to stipulate that the original contract would be renegotiated in the event of ‘extraordinary’ developments. This clause was invoked and the government demanded the venture become a 50:50 joint venture, with De Beers still shouldering all investment costs. It took three years of negotiations, however the South African company eventually conceded even though, when taxes were considered, the new deal gave Botswana 65-70 percent of profits.
In 1976, the year after the new joint venture agreement was signed, De Beers announced the discovery of a kimberlite pipe in the south of Botswana at Jwaneng. Where Orapa yielded 80 carats per hundred tonnes of extracted material, and Letlhakane 30 carats, Jwaneng would yield 140 carats, leading it to become the most profitable diamond mine in the world. Once the three major sites were all functioning, from 1982, Botswana accounted for around a quarter of global diamond output and this share would rise further.
Botswana’s planning unit produced other important results with respect to the country’s foreign trade regime. Following independence, Peter Landell-Mills set out to renegotiate the terms of Botswana’s membership of the Southern Africa Customs Union (SACU), which had not been reviewed since 1910. The planning unit secured a deal for Botswana based on current customs receipts plus a multiplier of 1.42 to compensate for having a tariff regime set by South Africa. The effect was to immediately increase customs revenues from Rand1.4m in 1968, the last year of the old formula, to Rand5.14m in 1969. When mine development began in the 1970s, requiring imports of large amounts of dutiable equipment and accelerating economic growth that in turn encouraged further imports – customs receipts rose much further, helping Botswana to balance its current budget from 1972.
In 1976, Quill Hermans led the launch of a domestic Botswanan currency, the Pula. Previously, Botswana used the South African Rand, however the MFDP wanted a domestic currency so that foreign exchange reserves generated by mining exports were managed by a new central Bank of Botswana. A national currency, with locally-managed controls on movements of capital, also allowed Botswana to limit the appreciation of the Pula during the mining boom and thereby protect the interests of cattle exporters.
In the first two decades after independence, Botswana’s economy grew at more than 13 percent a year as mining came to account for half of GDP. The share of mining receipts in government income rose even faster, to a quarter of revenues in the mid-1970s, and more than half in the mid-1980s. At the same time, Botswana’s reputation for planning and project delivery maintained high levels of foreign aid. In the second half of the 1970s, aid still constituted one quarter of Botswana’s total government expenditures. From being one of the poorest countries in the world, the question for Botswana became how to employ surpluses.
Absence of policy vision
In deploying surpluses, however, what Botswana lacked was any vision for structural change that would better fit its economy to the needs of its people. There was no vision for the large numbers of small-scale farmers and cattle herders in rural areas and no vision for manufacturing and industrial development to provide jobs for semi-skilled city dwellers. Like the national leader, Seretse Khama, the administration was fundamentally reactive, dealing with opportunities and challenges effectively, but with no overarching, proactive strategy beyond the long-established support for big cattle. The role of orthodox economists – who were not a feature of the early developmental states of East Asia – encouraged this; they looked to make the current state of affairs as efficient as possible, not to structurally re-shape the economy. With the benefit of hindsight, Festus Mogae, Botswana’s third President, concludes: ‘We reacted to situations as they arose but failed to imagine our future.’
MFDP economists concentrated investment in education, healthcare and basic infrastructure. Secondary school enrolment, for instance, increased from 1,531 pupils in 1966 to almost 10,000 a decade later. Hospitals increased from seven in the early 1970s to 30 in the 1990s and life expectancy rose from 48 years in 1966 to 65 in 1990. Paved roads increased from 12 kilometres in 1966 to more than 8,000 kilometres by the end of the century.
These investments, however, were not enough to prevent large swathes of the rural population living in poverty. There was a continuation of the private borehole drilling that effectively privatised communal land to large herd owners who could afford the wells. In Botswana’s Central District – what had been the Bamangwato Reserve and the biggest concentration of cattle grazing – fewer than 500 individuals gained de facto private grazing rights over a quarter of the area.
An inclusive agriculture policy would have prioritised small-scale cattle farming and involved local communities in managing communal land. However, such a strategy was never considered. In the 1990s, an estimated five percent of the population owned half the national herd. It was a large-scale but low-efficiency cattle economy and was accompanied by a steady increase in the proportion of rural families reporting they owned no cattle — from 28 percent in 1980 to 46 percent in 1999.
Such families formed the core of the rural poor – a large block making up about one quarter of Botswana’s working population. From the 1970s, as diamond revenues increased, the government’s policy to address rural poverty was to increase subsidies to arable agriculture. However, rainfed arable agriculture in almost all parts of Botswana is so precarious that it only works as a counterpart to less rain-dependent cattle ownership. The subsidies are in effect disguised welfare transfers.
Apart from small-scale farming, the other sector in which the Botswanan government could help to create employment opportunities for a population with limited education was manufacturing. The mines which produced so much profit employed only ten thousand people and new entrants to the labour force in the 1970s were twenty thousand a year. However, manufacturing policy was incoherent. This reflected the dominance of orthodox economists in government who knew that a mineral-driven economy needed to diversify but who were ideologically sceptical of the use of subsidies to induce manufacturing expansion. A lack of conviction led to dabbling in state-led import substitution projects on the one hand, and an unwillingness to aggressively subsidise private sector exporters on the other.
The Botswana Development Corporation (BDC) was created in 1970 as the country’s vehicle to invest in industrial projects. However, it limited its activities to the most basic, low value-added import substitution, including a brewery, a soap factory and a flour mill. There were no investments in more complex industrial plants, such as cement or large-scale metal working. Over time the BDC put more and more of its investment into real estate projects. The government was unwilling to subsidise credit and electricity prices for export-oriented manufacturers – the types of intervention that underwrote export manufacturing expansion in east Asia.
Instead of subsidising manufacturing at scale with firms’ competitiveness tested by their capacity to export – the crux of the East Asian model — from 1982 Botswana implemented a programme to provide subsidies to enterprises based on their employment generation. The Financial Assistance Policy (FAP) provided up to 90 percent of the capital cost of starting a business, and 80 percent of wages, declining to 20 percent, over five years. The programme ballooned, and was characterised by increasing abuse, over 20 years. The manufacturing share of the economy remained stuck at 4-5 percent as FAP projects closed down when grants ended.
The one area in which government did eventually deliver a little manufacturing success was the cutting and polishing of diamonds, which it was able to orchestrate as part of its periodic renegotiations with De Beers. In a deal signed in 2011, De Beers was compelled to relocate its global wholesale diamond aggregation and trading operation, which sells to its approved ‘sightholders’, or wholesale buyers, from London to Gaborone. As of 2018, eight sightholder cutting and polishing operations were running and total downstream diamond employment was around 3,000 people.
Overall, however, the orthodox economic prescription in Botswana left elevated levels of poverty and inequality despite rapid and sustained economic growth. The sectoral economic focuses of East Asian developmental states such as Japan, China or Vietnam on smallholder agriculture and manufacturing, which brought very broad-based development, were absent. Instead, in a Botswana whose population today is 2.3 million, there are only 340,000 formal jobs. Of these, the private sector accounts for 190,000, of which manufacturing is less than 40,000. The other 150,000 public sector jobs are in central and local government. Four times as many people work for the government as in manufacturing.
The failure to create more private sector jobs leaves large numbers of Batswana dependent on welfare of one form or another — 60,000 employed on a work-for-welfare scheme, 70,000 destitutes and orphan carers who exist on welfare, and 150,000 subsistence farmers who survive through subsidy programmes. Ellen Hillbom, a Swedish academic specialised in Botswana’s development, emphasises the contrast between Botswana and the developmental states of East Asia by describing the former as a ‘gatekeeping state’. The BDP gatekeeper, she argues, delivered a stable coalition based around a cattle-owning elite that managed mineral wealth in a disciplined fashion. However, Hillbom says: ‘Stability has lacked original thinking about how to change society.’
Notes from Africa 2: Kenya
September 27, 2021A series of notes from the world’s developmental frontier…
In logistical terms, Kenya is the most important country in East Africa. British colonial investment in the port of Mombasa and the rail line – dubbed the ‘lunatic line’ because of its cost and ambition — from Mombasa to Kisumu on Lake Victoria, and later to Kampala, means Kenya has long dominated trade access to Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and the eastern portion of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Mombasa also handles a portion of Tanzania’s international trade. This logistical significance, the possibility that Kenya could become a manufacturing centre for the region, and the existence of fertile land along the coast, in the Western Highlands to the north-west of Nairobi, and around Lake Victoria, have long engendered optimism about development prospects.
From independence in 1963 to 1980, Kenyan growth averaged an impressive 7.1 percent. However, the start of a series of fiscal crises and World Bank and International Monetary Fund structural adjustment programmes in 1980 saw average growth fall to 2.9 percent from 1980 to 2003. Since 2004, growth rebounded to an annual average 5.4 percent. In each of these periods, Kenya was comfortably ahead of the overall sub-Saharan growth rate. With nominal GDP per capita of US$2,075 in 2020, Kenyans are the most prosperous citizens among major East African economies. The poverty rate, on the World Bank’s US1.90-per-day measure, fell from 44 percent in 2005 to 37 percent in 2016. Ostensibly the most impressive feat in the long run has been educational gains. In 1967, Kenyans had an average of just 1.7 years of education; today the figure is 10.7 years. Unfortunately, testing suggests that much of the education is of low quality; according to the World Bank, 60 per cent of 19-20 year olds who have been through secondary education still fail to meet basic literacy standards.
Déjà vu colonialism all over again
What stands out most in Kenya is how little government imposed itself on the economic structure inherited from the colonial era. In agriculture, there was a significant redistribution of white settler-owned land. However, this was a response to the insurgency by landless black farmers that started in 1952 – known popularly as the Mau Mau rebellion – which drew a policy response during the colonial era. From 1954, the Swynnerton Plan supported ‘loyalist’ and generally well-to-do indigenous farmers to move into cash crops like coffee, from which they were previously barred, on consolidated and privately-owned landholdings. From 1962, on the eve of independence, the British government funded the Million Acre Settlement Scheme which purchased white settler farms and again generally favoured better-off black farmers, with typically less fertile areas allocated for ‘high-density’ settlement by poorer and landless farmers. The post-independence government of Jomo Kenyatta went along with this approach, with Kenyatta famously dismissing landless Mau Mau rebels as ‘hooligans’. This was despite strong research evidence in the late 1960s that the poorer farmers with smaller holdings, who were also given much less agricultural extension support than better-off farmers, performed better.[i]
After Kenyatta defeated and ousted a minority of progressive politicians in the late 1960s, Kenyan agricultural policy showed striking continuity with the colonial era. The major difference was that the elite of large-scale landowners was now black. The Kenyatta family itself became, and remains, one of the biggest landowners, including a vast tract of thousands of hectares that extends north-east of Nairobi towards Thika and other large farms in what were known as the White Highlands – the region scheduled by the British as a white-only farming area. The redistribution of land to a black elite, limited redistribution to ordinary Kenyans, and the growth of black cash-crop farming was enough to stabilise the rural situation after independence. Tea did particularly well and continues to account for one quarter of Kenya’s export earnings. However, government agricultural policy has been remarkably passive. The great bulk of agricultural exports, including tea, continue to be unprocessed in the absence of investment to add value locally. Only 13 percent of land with the potential for irrigation has been developed and farming remains 98 percent rain fed. And where members of the African Union have been committed for almost 20 years to spending one-tenth of their budgets on agriculture, Kenya’s leading rural research institute, Tegemeo, puts the Kenyan share – including national and local funds – at around five percent. In the past two decades, the estimated contribution of agriculture to overall growth has been higher in Ethiopia, Rwanda and Tanzania than in Kenya.
When significant developments do occur in agricultural markets, they tend – as with so much in Kenya – to be driven by elite political interests or those of particular ethnic voting blocks. Jomo Kenyatta’s successor, Daniel arap Moi, built up the National Cereals and Produce Board, which bought up surplus maize, often at above-market prices. The vast majority of the maize surplus in Kenya comes from Moi’s ethnic Kalenjin base area in the Rift Valley.[ii] Under current president Uhuru Kenyatta, a son of Jomo, the Kenyatta family business Brookside Dairy became Kenya’s dominant milk processor, buying up competitors and acquiring a market share around 45 percent. In 2020, the Kenyan government banned the importation of cheap Ugandan milk, apparently in breach of East African Community (EAC) trade agreements. According to Kenyan economist David Ndii, under the Kenyatta government since 2013, milk processing margins quadrupled, the cost of processed milk to the consumer doubled and the price paid to farmers, at its nadir, halved, although it since increased following protests.
Plans that were not. And now China
Policy plans are sometimes announced in Kenya, but they have never proven to have implemented substance. After the fall of the Moi regime, a much-heralded Strategy for Revitalising Agriculture was announced in 2004. It delivered little before being abandoned in 2010. A grand plan of the current president promised to increase the share of manufacturing in gross domestic product (GDP) to 15 or 20 percent by 2022, with 500,000 or one million new manufacturing jobs created. Different targets appear on different pages of the presidential web site, perhaps an indication of the lack of seriousness the promise.[iii] In the event, according to World Bank data, the manufacturing share of Kenya’s GDP fell from 10.7 percent in 2013, Uhuru Kenyatta’s first year of office, to 7.5 percent in 2019, a record low in the independence era. One, real-world indicator of the state of industrial policy in Kenya is a sprawling, 2,000 hectare dustbowl with a few small buildings 60 kilometres south of Nairobi. This is ‘Konza Technopolis’, a high-tech production centre and suburb announced in 2008, with a master plan approved in 2013. Today, the only real evidence of progress at Konza is a web site with various digital images of what was hoped for.[iv]
The Kenyan government’s inability to deliver on its economic policy agendas may have contributed to its interest in infrastructure projects outsourced to Chinese firms. A journey along the country’s logistical spine, from Mombasa via Nairobi to Eldoret, reveals a large number of Chinese road projects currently under way. Around Mombasa, there are several operational sites including the Dongo Kundu southern bypass with four bridges that will connect the route south to Tanzania to the main Nairobi road. On the south side of Nairobi, the first phase of a planned expressway to Mombasa, currently contracted as far as Machakos 40 km from Nairobi, is under construction. Within the city, there are several other projects. In the north-west of the capital, along Waiyaki Way, the 27km Nairobi Expressway, some of which is elevated, will connect the north-west of the city to the international airport in the east; construction is at full throttle. A second route north-west out of Nairobi via Ruaka and Ndenderu has a Chinese financed and constructed road in progress. Around Nairobi, there are several more ongoing Chinese road construction projects.
Three hundred kilometres north of Mombasa, at Manda Bay near Lamu, the Kenyan government engaged China Communication Construction Company (CCCC) in a US$480m contract to build the first three of 32 planned berths at a new port it claims opened a first berth in May. The facility, in a remote part of the country, is part of the grandiose Lamu Port-South Sudan-Ethiopia Transport Corridor (LAPSSET), designed to link the economies of three countries to Lamu, which requires large additional investments in road networks. In April 2021, the government in Nairobi announced it has signed with CCCC for 453km of highway construction, including a 257km link north-west from Lamu to Garissa, at a cost of US$166m.
Much the biggest, and most controversial, Chinese project is Kenya’s new Standard Gauge Railway (SGR). The link from Mombasa to Nairobi cost a reported US$3.6bn and an extension to Naivasha, 110km north-west of Nairobi, a further US$1.5bn. The logic of the investment was to reduce freight costs, and accelerate freight times, all along the key logistical route through Kenya to Uganda and the rest of central Africa. However, this does not seem, so far, to have happened. While shipping costs per container on the Mombasa to Nairobi section, which opened to freight in 2018, are similar to road haulage, the addition of depot charges and the cost of moving containers from the railway to final destinations increased costs by up to 50 percent. China’s Exim Bank terms for the loans for the line required guarantees of minimum container volumes which in turn led the Kenyan government to compel all inbound containers destined for the Nairobi region to use the rail service. Despite this, the line has posted substantial losses – US$200m (KSh21.7bn) from inception to May 2020 according to the Ministry of Transport. In 2019, China decided not to provide the further US$4.9bn loans required to complete the connection to Uganda.
It remains unclear what the outcome of the rail project will be. At Naivasha, an Inland Container Depot has been constructed for container transfer to trucks, but is not yet operational. At the same time, a 24km link line is being built by Chinese contractors to connect the SGR to the old, colonial metre-gauge railway (MGR), which Chinese firms have been contracted, along with the Kenyan military, to refurbish. At one site in Eldoret in March, a small team of Chinese was overseeing the reshaping of colonial-era railway sleepers with an imported stamping machine. The Ugandan government announced in 2021 that it will also refurbish its stretch of the historic MGR. What this means for freight costs, however, is impossible to say. Containers will have to be moved between rail bogies on different gauge tracks. The temptation for the Kenyan government to force containers to use the two-gauge route in order to recoup its vast investment may be difficult to resist, leading to monopoly pricing. But if freight costs do not fall across Kenya and into central Africa, the economic logic of the rail project is defeated. Kenya already runs a trade deficit of around six percent of GDP, and higher freight costs will only increase the export shortfall. The World Bank’s 2013 report that said the SGR did not make economic sense appears to be vindicated.[v]
Debts up, revenues down
According to the China Africa Research Initiative (CARI) of Johns Hopkins university, Kenya is one of the top five African countries contributing to revenues of Chinese engineering and construction companies, along with Algeria, Nigeria, Egypt and Angola. CARI identified 43 Chinese loans to Kenya, totalling US$9.2bn, by the end of 2020; at US$6.1bn, loans for transportation projects are second only to Angola. From the Kenyan perspective, the Chinese projects saw public debt as a share of GDP rise from 39 percent in 2013 to 66 percent in 2020, with an increasing share from more expensive commercial sources. According to David Ndii, half of debt is now domestic, at rates of interest over 10 percent, accounting for three-quarters of interest payments. Meanwhile, government revenue as a portion of GDP fell from 18.1 percent in 2013-14 to 16.1 percent in 2018-19. The IMF this year described Kenya as ‘at high risk of debt distress’.[vi]
The situation places great weight on Kenya’s vaunted private sector to carry the economy forward. Entrepreneurial innovation in Kenya is certainly impressive. M-Pesa (meaning ‘mobile money’), the mobile phone-based payments and lending service developed by Kenya’s Safaricom, has come to be used by more than 70 percent of the population, and expanded regionally. Kenya produces significant numbers of agile, private-sector start-ups every year. Peter Njonjo, a former Africa executive with Coca Cola, started Twiga Foods in 2014, which provides the logistics to link farmers with small-scale retailers. Unable to overcome the product quality problems of smallholder farmers in an environment of weak government support, Twiga is integrating larger-scale commercial farms in the region into its city-focused distribution network. It is a typical case of the Kenyan private sector adjusting to what is possible and Twiga has won investment from the World Bank’s private sector lending arm and Goldman Sachs. ‘The lack of government involvement has led the ecosystem to evolve in a very informal way,’ says Njonjo. The private sector’s job, he says, is to find a way through this.
Kenya should be a processing hub for farm products. Led by private sector firms, regional trade in foodstuffs is already much expanded. In March, for instance, potatoes on sale in Kenya are likely to be from Tanzania, plantains from Uganda, reflecting relatively stronger growth of regional trade in East Africa compared with West Africa. Nonetheless, the space available to the private sector in Kenya is less than the government’s rhetoric suggests. There are still more than 300 state sector firms operating in the country despite decades of World Bank and IMF-led ‘reform’ programmes — in retail, manufacturing and agri-processing sectors among others. At the same time, as a recent World Bank report observes: ‘Prominent government officials often have large private sector interests and influence public procurement and government priorities through the use of proxy companies.’[vii]
As noted, Kenya has run ahead of the average sub-Saharan growth rate for several decades. To recognise more of its potential, however, the country needs more competition and more export-focused private sector activity. However, it is difficult in the current political climate — dominated by a small number of what Kenyans term ‘royal families’ that consistently failed to frame an economic development agenda — to see this happening. Kenya, for instance, opened Export Processing Zones in the 1990s at the same time as Bangladesh; but policy implementation failings mean that today Kenyan EPZs employ around 50,000 workers versus four million in Bangladesh. The more likely trajectory for Kenya is towards another debt crisis and a new round of World Bank and IMF interventions. Before that, there will be the next Kenyan election, in 2022, and the possibility of renewed ethnic violence on which Kenyan politics all too often feeds.
[i] Leo, C. (1978). The Failure of the ‘Progressive Farmer’ in Kenya’s Million-Acre Settlement Scheme. The Journal of Modern African Studies, 16(4), 619-638.
[ii] Poulton, C. and Kanyinga, K., 2014. The politics of revitalising agriculture in Kenya. Development Policy Review, 32(s2), pp.s151-s172.
[iii] See https://www.president.go.ke/enhancing-manufacturing/ and https://big4.delivery.go.ke/ The manufacturing targets were one element of an agenda called the ‘Big Four’.
[v] See https://africog.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/World-bank-Report-on-the-Standard-Gauge-Railway.pdf for main conclusions.
[vi] See https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2021/04/02/pr2198-kenya-imf-executive-board-approves-us-billion-ecf-and-eff-arrangements
[vii] World Bank, 2020, Systematic Country Diagnostic: Kenya, World Bank, Washington: DC.
The US and China in perspective
April 2, 2021Bill Overholt has written a valuable piece in the Harvard University journal Prism putting US-China rivalry into historical context. It is a reminder of how important an understanding of historical context is enabling individuals and governments to make good decisions.
The original can be accessed here.
Or else the article can be downloaded as a PDF document here:
Xinjiang versus Tibet
April 2, 2021Below is a really great deconstruction, by the estimable Robbie Barnett, of the differences in Chinese policy towards Xinjiang versus Tibet. Sadly, the piece also reminds us just how much under-resourced, bad journalism exists in developed countries. And it highlights how Islamophobia is at the heart of what the Chinese state is doing to Xinjiang.
Tibetan Buddhists walk past a poster showing Chinese President Xi Jinping and former Chinese leaders Jiang Zemin, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Hu Jintao during a government-organized tour of Tibet on October 15, 2020. Thomas Peter/Reuters
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China’s Policies in Its Far West: The Claim of Tibet-Xinjiang Equivalence
Blog Post by Guest Blogger for Asia Unbound
March 29, 2021
8:00 am (EST)
Robert Barnett is a Professorial Research Associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London; an Affiliate Researcher at King’s College, London; and former Director of Modern Tibetan Studies at Columbia University. Recent edited volumes include Conflicting Memories with Benno Weiner and Françoise Robin, and Forbidden Memory by Tsering Woeser. This piece was produced in collaboration with an ongoing group research project into policy developments on Tibet.
Since the wave of mass detentions in Xinjiang became known internationally, a secondary proposition has begun to circulate in the media and among a number of politicians: the claim that Tibetans are experiencing similar abuses to those faced by Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang, the other vast, colonized area in what China sees as its far western territory. That claim is incorrect. Although Chinese policies in Tibet are exceptionally restrictive and repressive, as far as is known they do not include the extreme abuses found in Xinjiang. Of course, we should encourage such questions to be raised and assessed, but scholars, the media, and opinion leaders need to discriminate more carefully between speculation and knowledge, and between advocacy and scholarly findings. The lines between these categories have been blurred increasingly, perhaps deliberately, and can damage everyone if not restored.
Policy Variations: A Bit of History
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The central premise of the Tibet-Xinjiang equivalence claim is that China’s Tibet and Xinjiang programs are similar in terms of mass abuses. Proponents note correctly that mechanisms, terminology, aims, and underlying theories used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Tibet and Xinjiang are similar, and that the current Party Secretary of Xinjiang formerly served in Tibet. These continuities reflect the shared repertoire of Communist jargon and history from which all CCP officials draw, as well as their adherence to the CCP’s overall policy regarding nationalities, which has shown an increasingly assimilationist approach since 2014. However, despite their constant declarations of unity with the Party Center, regional officials are not expected to implement the Center’s policies in identical ways in each region.
In fact, Chinese policies in Tibet and Xinjiang have often differed widely in implementation. This divergence reflects topography, history, and logistics, but also continues the deep-seated debates among revolutionaries since at least the time of the Jacobins and Girondins about how rapid or gradual revolutionary reforms should be. Much the same debate took place within the CCP from even before the founding of the People’s Republic of China. It focused particularly on areas inhabited by peoples such as the Tibetans, Mongolians, or Uyghurs. In such areas, radicals in the CCP—notably leaders of the Northwest Military Region—insisted on rapid, often violent social transformation. Gradualists, such as those in the Southwest Military Region in the first half of the 1950s, argued that Tibetans, being more backward in their view, should be won over by allowing feudal practices to continue while slowly building initial alliances with local elites. The details of this debate have been carefully documented by Benno Weiner in his recent book on the factions that respectively opposed or promoted the gradualist strategy known as the United Front in Tibetan areas of Qinghai in the 1950s. Weiner shows that the gradualist approach lasted in those areas until 1958, when policy switched to immediate reforms of society, land ownership, and religious practice, which usually meant the use of force and culminated with the Cultural Revolution. The gradualist approach was reintroduced throughout China in 1979, when Deng Xiaoping came to power. Not coincidentally, Deng had been the Political Commissar of the Southwest Military Region in 1950; arguing that China was still in the “primary stage of socialism” and thus not yet ready for full communism was a return to the praxis advocated by his faction forty years before.
There was nothing new or specifically communist about this debate over how to manage minorities. In the late Qing empire, Chinese reformers had argued over the same question: whether to incorporate non-Han Chinese peoples within the empire rapidly by force or gradually through education, industrialization, acculturation, or some longer process. In Xinjiang, the Qing had resorted to direct control by invading the region in 1877 and turning it into a Chinese province; Tibet had negligible Han Chinese or Manchu presence at that time. By 1910, the proponents of rapid, forced reform had persuaded the Qing court to allow a policy of direct rule and rapid assimilation of Tibetans, which the Qing representative in Sichuan, Zhao Erfeng, carried out until the fall of the dynasty a year later. Some scholars trace the differential ways of managing minorities in China to much earlier perceptions in Chinese political thought as to which minorities were more “raw” or “untamed” relative to those considered somewhat “civilized” and thus amenable to softer tactics. Today, arguments of this kind are diplomatically concealed behind milder-sounding arguments, such as the current view among CCP policymakers that there are two kinds of religion in China—so-called “non-indigenous religions,” which include Islam, and “indigenous religions” such as Buddhism (notwithstanding that in fact it originated in India, not China). We can easily imagine Chinese policymakers arguing that followers of an “indigenous” Chinese religion are more easily managed and so can be won over with less brutal policies than those who follow a monotheistic, “non-Chinese”—read, less civilized—religion.
Since 9/11, this diffracted version of global Islamophobia has been commonly expressed in China in terms of terrorism, which the current Xinjiang policies are supposed to forestall. By contrast, the spectre of terrorism is rarely invoked in Tibet. There, the threat consists primarily of an idea that Beijing seeks to eradicate: the insistence by “the Dalai” that Tibet was independent in the past. This effort by Beijing has led to extraordinarily extensive forms of repression, control, and social engineering in Tibet, which are increasing almost by the day. But in terms of violence, China has been cautious in Tibet, as demonstrated by the fact that there have been only two or three known judicial executions of Tibetans in politically related cases over the last 35 years, as opposed to scores of executions of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
Whatever the rationale, the Chinese state has often enacted policies in different ways in different areas, even if the policy names and objectives are similar. This is what was so significant about China’s decision to scale back Mongolian language instruction in Inner Mongolia last year: until then, China’s policy of assimilation and bilingual education in Inner Mongolia had followed a wholly different and more accommodating model of policy implementation from those in Tibet, Xinjiang, Qinghai, or any other area. The change announced for classroom teaching in Inner Mongolia’s primary schools was significant because it meant that, after several years of giving primacy to local culture, the region was switching from a gradual to a rapid, forced approach to implementing policy on a non-Han Chinese population.
Mass Detention in Tibet
The contention that Tibet and Xinjiang are coterminous in terms of mass abuses has been made by a number of commentators, journalists, and politicians, including Lobsang Sangay, the current head of the exile Tibetan administration. Sangay has said, among other things, that forced detention camps exist currently in Tibet. There have been some occasions in the last decade when camps were created to hold Tibetans detained without being accused of any crime. Two of those occasions involved serious abuses. These occurred in camps created in 2017 to house monks and nuns expelled from a number of monasteries in eastern Tibetan areas, notably Larung Gar, and then returned forcibly to their home areas within the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), where they were detained for “legal education.” One of these camps was created in the eastern Tibetan area of Nyingtri to reeducate a number of nuns, while the second was in Sog, Nagchu, in northern Tibet, where the detainees seem mainly to have been monks. The detained nuns, comprising at least 30 women, were forced to sing or dance in front of officials to the tune of patriotic Chinese songs, in at least one case while wearing military-type outfits. In the case of the center at Sog, there is one account by a monk who was held for four months in 2017, and it describes incidents of forced reeducation, humiliation, torture, and sexual harassment. These are instances of grave abuse, but they are not similar in scale or duration to the systematic, mass practices of detention and cultural eradication in Xinjiang, where detainees are held and abused for years, forced repeatedly to abjure religious belief entirely, and made to use a language not their own.
There have been at least three other recent occasions in Tibet—in March 2008, January 2012, and May 2012—when camps were created temporarily in hotels, schools, or converted army bases to hold Tibetans for purposes such as “legal education.” The 2008 camp held several hundred monks from monasteries in Lhasa whose place of registration was outside the TAR, and the 2012 detentions were of an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 lay Tibetans held for two months after attending religious teachings by the Dalai Lama in India. In addition, a Tibetan reported being held for two months in a detention center in Driru, Nagchu, in 2016, and I know of two individuals held for about two weeks each in 2019 in some office buildings in a Tibetan area of Sichuan for failing to implement supposedly voluntary “poverty alleviation” measures.
Further details of these cases have not yet emerged, and others may well come to light. However, these cases again differ markedly from the Xinjiang camps in terms of scale or degree, involving an estimated 6,000 to 7,000 people over a decade or more—around 1.4% of the lowest estimate for detainees in Xinjiang during the last four years. In addition, as far as one can tell from interviews with former inmates or those close to them, the Tibetan camps appear to have lasted for at most six months, but usually much less; included limited amounts of re-education, if any; and, apart from the two camps in 2017, are not reported to have involved cultural denigration, physical abuse, or cruelty.
Labor Programs and the Coercion Claim
In September 2020, a report appeared by a scholar that appeared to show evidence of forced labor camps in Tibet and other Xinjiang-style policies in the TAR. That scholar, Adrian Zenz, has done well-regarded work on Tibet and Xinjiang in the past. His more recent work has been attacked and abused by Chinese state media and others, including smears about his religious beliefs by a pro-Chinese denialist called Max Blumenthal, demonstrating a particularly ugly form of hypocrisy. He is also being sued by Chinese companies in Xinjiang and has been sanctioned by the PRC government.
Nevertheless, there are some technical problems with Dr. Zenz’s article on Tibet. Although scholarly in nature, the article was not peer-reviewed, involved no field verification, and did not refer to work by other researchers with expertise on labor, employment, and statistics in Tibet. In addition, the article was coordinated with a prominent media campaign, including simultaneous release of an op-ed in the New York Times, a lengthy article by Reuters, an editorial by the Wall Street Journal, and a report by a political lobby group, the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC).
Dr. Zenz and like-minded writers described a mass program initiated by Chinese authorities to provide labor training for Tibetans, and in some cases to arrange for them to be transferred to other locations for work. These writers are entirely correct that training programs claiming to involve huge numbers of people have been set up in Tibet, alongside a program arranging for people to move to different areas for work. They are also correct that in Xinjiang a program with a similar name appears to have involved abuses on a vast scale. But details of the Tibet scheme are unclear and—so far—do not yet indicate Xinjiang-style implementation: so far at least, around 94 percent of what are described in these reports as labor transfers in Tibet are apparently local, at least some of the small number of intra-provincial ones claim to be short-term, and there is no evidence yet that either of these programs in Tibet has involved force or abuse.
As for actual cases of coercion, there are none in the reports by Dr. Zenz, Reuters, or any other outlets. When I asked a Tibetan colleague about his own research, he described a Tibetan family of seven, all of whom had registered for labor training programs. Only one, however, had in fact attended a course, and the family had not reported any threat of force or pressure to comply. This seemed to suggest that, at least in that case, local officials were aiming primarily to put names on registration forms in order to inflate the number of apparent participants in the program.
This case does not prove anything, but it does raise doubts. If we go back to the article by Dr. Zenz, we will see that it consists of two entirely different statements: one that correctly summarizes Chinese official documents giving numbers for registration or inclusion in labor training schemes and work placements, and one that is purely inference about a possibility of labor camps (as opposed to voluntary training camps) and of the use of force. Those inferences are based on references in official documents to such things as “military-style” training and to photographs of trainees in military clothes. Such an inference is possible. It is not, however, reliable: every school and university student in China has military-style training for a week or so each year and many department stores have military-style training every morning. These trainings involve drills, but not necessarily the use of force, and many people in Tibet and China wear military garb because it is tough and cheap.
Dr. Zenz himself noted in his original report that he had found no evidence for any Xinjiang-style labor camps in Tibet: “There is so far no evidence of accompanying cadres or security personnel, of cadres stationed in factories, or of workers being kept in closed, securitized environments at their final work destination.” He added that “there is also currently no evidence of TAR labor training and transfer schemes being linked to extrajudicial internment.” He later stated categorically that he had never mentioned labor camps.
The Reuters report also had two types of findings: one confirmed the existence of the labor programs, citing two or three official documents not used by Dr. Zenz, while the other repeated the evidence about coercion offered by Dr. Zenz without new evidence. Therefore, the question of force was not part of its “investigation.” The article even said that “Reuters was unable to ascertain the conditions of the transferred Tibetan workers”and that “Researchers and rights groups say…without access they can’t assess whether the practice [of labor transfer] constitutes forced labor.” Nevertheless, it still repeated the same allegations of abuse and force, attributing them to “rights groups.” It added a fact that appeared to be corroborative, stating that “small-scale versions of similar military-style training initiatives have existed in the region for over a decade,” but gave no details of such cases, apart from that of the 30 nuns in 2017, noted above.
The qualifications that the authors of these reports provided were correct and appropriate, but they were too little and too late. The reports included multiple references to coercion, albeit speculative, and more categorical assertions were made in accompanying op-eds and oral presentations. Such speculation is often justifiable and necessary, not least because evidence of major abuses might yet come to light. Tibetan exiles and others are not wrong to be concerned. But the initial reports by Dr. Zenz and Reuters led to a wave of secondary reporting that, regardless of intention, blurred the solid data about the existence of labor training and work placement schemes with speculation about coercion.
Those secondary reports acknowledged Dr. Zenz’s article as the source of their information, but claimed incorrectly that he had reported the existence of labor camps and alleged use of force, about which he had only speculated. The Times of London said China was “accused of imprisoning 500k Tibetans in labor camps” and “as many as half a million Tibetans have been forcibly moved into labor camps this year,” making it a single-source report, with no corroboration, claiming incorrectly that Zenz had alleged imprisonment and labor camps. The BBC declared that the Zenz report had found China to be “‘coercing’ thousands of Tibetans into mass labor camps” and said this had been corroborated by Reuters, although Zenz had not said this, while Reuters had confirmed only the existence of labor programs, not the existence of labor camps or coercion. The BBC added that “the scale of the programme as detailed in this study indicates it is much larger than previously thought,” although in fact this was the first mention of the program outside China. The Guardian was more cautious and only referred to coercion in quoted remarks from Zenz, but, like the BBC, said the Zenz report had been corroborated by Reuters, implying this applied to camps and coercion as well as labor programs. The New York Times did not report the news, but carried an op-ed by Zenz which made stronger assertions about the use of compulsion than his original article had, this time without any caveat. Meanwhile, the Sydney Morning Herald reported without qualification and without any second source that “China is pushing hundreds of thousands of Tibetans into forced labor camps,” none of which is known to be true.
Not surprisingly, this apparent unanimity in the mainstream media implying an equation between the labour training scheme and coercive detention was quickly taken up in the political arena. The Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China referred to “an apparent widespread system of forced labor” and “a large-scale mandatory ‘vocational training’ program” in Tibet, again relying on one source, and again fusing the substantive issue of labor programs with speculation about it being “forced” and “mandatory.” The Congressional-Executive Commission on China, based in Washington, D.C., held a hearing partly based on the reports of “forced labor” in Tibet; the British House of Commons organized a debate on the issue at which a senior British politician, Sir Iain Duncan Smith, asserted categorically that the Tibet labor programs were “mandatory,” “forcible,” and involved “people … being taken from one place and put into camps;” and the Democracy Forum in the UK held a discussion in part about the fact that, according to its chair, China “has sent over half a million Tibetans to labor transfer camps under strict military supervision.”
I have found just one media report that correctly reported on the Zenz report: a tiny media outfit called TLDR. TLDR published a video summary of the Zenz report which is accurate as well as succinct, yet manages to detail the factual claims about the labor training schemes separately from Zenz’s speculation about the possible use of force, which it bracketed as an as yet unverified but potentially important addendum.
Since then, the rhetoric has escalated. The most striking case is that of a scholar and a former journalist affiliated to universities in Australia who hosted a podcast originally called “Tibet-The Final Solution?” The title was taken from a statement by a Tibetan activist that China plans the total annihilation of Tibet or its culture, which was used as the trailer for the program. The actual podcast, the title of which was later changed amid complaints, did not discuss or debate this claim—it was added after the discussion had been recorded and was designed, apparently, only as click-bait to attract an audience. What is going on when a serious journalist, let alone an academic, proposes that China is a Nazi state trying to annihilate Tibetan people or Tibetan culture? China is indeed minimizing the role of the Tibetan language in schools, insulting the Dalai Lama, denying Tibetan history, persecuting dissidents, relocating nomads, and trying to adapt popular understandings of Tibetan Buddhism so that the religion emphasizes or mimics (“Sinicizes,” as the state puts it) neo-Confucian values, amid numerous other repressive policies. But to equate this with the Wannsee Conference is deeply offensive and unethical.
Apart from insulting the memory of those who died, for one thing, there is no evidence of any attempt, at least in the post-Mao era, to annihilate the Tibetan people. As for culture since the death of Mao, as Dr. Zenz himself documented in his earlier work on Tibet, certain aspects of Tibetan modern culture have thrived, particularly prose fiction, poetry, film, fine art, popular music, and to some extent the Gesar epic, horse racing, and certain local festivals. Publications of traditional religious texts run into the thousands. Lay religious events still involve thousands of people. There is an enormous amount of repression, which should be widely studied and publicized, and there are understandable reasons why many Tibetans fear for their culture, alarmed as many are by, for example, the prioritization of Chinese as the language of instruction in many or most schools. But this is not the same as genocide or annihilation: Tibet is not Xinjiang.
Activists and others should of course be encouraged to argue their perspectives and present whatever evidence they have. But for a mainstream media outfit, let alone a university, to use such a proposition as click-bait is disturbing. In the long run, this kind of ideologically-inflamed, anti-Chinese rhetoric will damage Tibetan people and their situation in Tibet, since they and others will have to waste time on debates about what is exaggerated and what is fact. The underlying issue here is not that scholars should not speculate, nor that activists and community members should not raise deeply held concerns: they should do both. But serious writers, publications, and media need to maintain sharp distinctions between what is speculation and what is reliable, confirmed information. The quality of discourse, and even the possibility of developing effective responses to mass abuse, suffers on all sides if exacting standards of evidence and discussion are discarded.