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Why Africa’s growth prospects may be looking up

March 4, 2026

By Reuters

This transcript [of Reuters Big View podcast] was created using speech recognition software, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript.

Peter Thal Larsen: What is the future for Africa’s economic development? Over the years, periods of high hopes for the continent’s prospects have swung to disappointment and back to hope again. Right now, it’s fair to say the mood has turned a bit gloomy again. Many African countries have been whacked by Donald Trump’s tariffs, which have upset their export markets. The United States, United Kingdom, and others have slashed aid budgets, and climate change is adding to the challenges facing many fragile African nations on top of the historic burdens of colonialism, slavery and the scourges of debt, disease and armed conflict which have blighted it in the past.
Peter Thal Larsen: The true picture is much more complicated than this. And there is a more positive story to tell, one where a handful of African countries have, with careful planning and thoughtful policies, transformed their economic prospects and where a population boom is creating the potential for future development and growth that have eluded most African nations in the past.
Peter Thal Larsen: So today on The Big View, we’re going to talk about African growth, the past, and more importantly, the future. It’s what we do at Reuters Breakingviews. We tap our best sources around the world for fresh insights into the biggest stories in business, finance, and economics. I’m your host, Peter Thal Larsen.
Peter Thal Larsen: Some people argue that it’s pointless to try and generalize about a continent which is home to 1.5 billion people spread across more than 50 nations spanning different history, geography, culture, and language. Others maintain that the conditions facing African countries are so historically and geographically unique that it is a mistake to try to compare their economic development to the experience of countries in Asia and South America. It’s fair to say my guest today disagrees. Joe Studwell is a journalist and academic who is currently a visiting senior fellow at the Overseas Development Institute. He’s spent much of his career living in and writing about Asia. But for the last five or six years, he’s been involved in an intensive and in-depth study of Africa. He’s written up his findings in a fascinating new book. It’s called “How Africa Works: Success and Failure on the World’s Last Developmental Frontier”.
Peter Thal Larsen: Joe Studwell, welcome to The Big View.
Joe Studwell: Hello Peter.
Peter Thal Larsen: So let’s start with perhaps the obvious question. I mean, you spent a big part of your career living in and writing about Asia. Your last book, admittedly some time ago, was called “How Asia Works”. You say in the introduction to this book, the project began by a mistake. What happened?
Joe Studwell: Well, there were two mistakes, really. One mistake was the Ethiopian and the Rwandan governments asking me to go and see them. And I said, well, I don’t know anything about Africa, so that would be pointless, even if it’s lovely of you to ask me. And they said, no, no, you don’t need to know anything about Africa. We want to talk to you about Asian development policy. And then the other one was a meeting with Bill Gates, who liked the last book. And with Gates I talked for an hour about Asia. But at the end of it, he said, “oh, you know, but what I’d really like to know is what you think about Africa”. And it was these events that got me thinking, you know, that perhaps there was something to be done. I knew it was going to be a huge project because there are 55 countries in Africa and it was going to take a lot of time. But Gates, the Gates Foundation, and Omidyar, which is one of the eBay founders, together said they were willing to fund the research. And that’s how it started and kicked off.
Peter Thal Larsen: And so you, you spent something like seven years, is that right?
Joe Studwell: I don’t think it was as much as seven years. It was five, six years in total. I wasn’t doing it the whole time, but I was doing it a lot of the time. You can imagine with stuff that you’ve covered in your career that you’ve got to get the historical backstory of different countries. You’ve got to recognize that there are different drivers of economic development in different places. It takes a long time, but I found it fabulous. I didn’t have a bad experience in Africa actually, and I met some really interesting, straightforward, get-ahead people. I thoroughly enjoyed doing the work.
Peter Thal Larsen: Because there is, I mean, there’s another potential challenge facing a book like this, which is how can you possibly generalize? As you say, there is more than 50 countries, different sizes, geographies, languages, political structures, colonial histories. So what made you confident that there was something that could be said that would be sort of relevant on a continent-wide scale?
Joe Studwell: I wasn’t confident — but I got into it and I thought, if there are themes, I’m going to find out what those themes are. And yeah, in the middle of the project, I thought I’m never going to find anything, any commonalities here, it’s just 55 different countries. But ultimately, as I pulled together more and more research, I began to see that no, and there is a pattern in Africa. And it’s a pattern that surrounds demographics, which was not something that I’d ever paid — it wasn’t that I hadn’t paid attention to it in Asia, but I hadn’t ever needed to be concerned because East Asia and South Asia always had sufficient demographic density for economic development, at least after the Second World War. You’d have to go back into the 19th century to find parts of East Asia, Southeast Asia, particularly, that were sort of problematic in terms of demographic density. But when I looked at Africa, what I realized was that that was the major constraint on the continent. We think about Africa today, people, I suppose, particularly in Europe and the US, are starting to get frightened by the population numbers that they’re beginning to get familiar with. So at the end of the Second World War, there were only 230 million people in Africa. Today, there’s 1.5 billion. In 2050, there will be 2.5 billion. At the end the century, there’ll be 4 billion people in Africa. So, you know, the standard reaction to this is the, is the Malthusian one that, oh my God, we’re going to sort of breed ourselves to extinction. But the developmental story, the real developmental story in Africa, is a different one. And it is that in 1960, at the time of independence, when some people were quite optimistic about African development, population density per square kilometer was under 10 people, fewer than 10 people per square kilometer. It’s not a lot. It’s about the same as historians reckon there were in Europe in 1500. And in 1500 in Europe, how much growth was there? Well, there wasn’t any growth. And the reason was there were not enough people. Today, we’re just getting in Africa to the population density that we had in Asia in 1960. The end of this decade we’ll be there. So even though it’s a couple of billion people at the end of this decade, in density terms, it’s only getting to where Asia was in 1960. And that is hugely important because without a minimum amount of demographic density, it’s really impossible to develop because you don’t have markets. You can’t afford infrastructure because when you work out the cost of infrastructure on a per capita basis, it’s just too expensive to build a road or a reservoir or whatever, per person. You don’t get the division of labor that you get with more people and you don’t get a bunch of other what economists call economies of agglomeration. So when all that stuff is missing, you’re really stuck. And that has been — and the core argument of the book is that has been — the biggest constraint on Africa to date, you know, the literature has tended to tell us that it’s been problems of governance, problems of corruption, kleptocracy, problems of ethnic conflict, problems of other civil strife. But those to my mind of mainly been proximate problems. The fundamental problem is that Africa hasn’t had enough people.
Peter Thal Larsen: That’s really fascinating. And I think, I mean, you even sort of, you make the point that, that this goes right back to even the sort of the pre-colonial period, and the colonial period, that actually the way in which the, the colonial countries administered their African colonies was with relatively little investment or kind of oversight?
Joe Studwell: Yeah, I mean, we tend to look back at colonialism in Africa and focus on the fact that it was quite brutal, but it’s more useful in understanding what happened in the colonial era to understand the finances of it. And the dearth of population meant that colonial governments couldn’t raise tax or they couldn’t raise sufficient tax to do anything very much apart from put very small numbers of people, of foreigners, of Europeans, in place, and then rule rural areas in Africa through either chiefs who existed already or chiefs who were put in place by the colonial powers. I mean, there’s research that’s looked at the colonial numbers were put in place in terms of expatriates that were put into place in British colonies in Africa. And each person, each colonial officer, which was usually a district officer, was looking after an area the size of Wales, which would be the size New Jersey in the United States. And so you can imagine. With a horse. You’re not going to get a lot done.
Peter Thal Larsen: Right — I suppose that’s probably right. So it’s clear, as you say, the demographic picture is changing very quickly now. Now you sort of present this as clearly as an opportunity in terms of this enables certain things. But it also, people also think about it as a risk. I mean, there’s a sort of Malthusian argument, but there’s also a sort of, I think the World Bank and others make this argument that you have lots of people who are reaching sort of working age in Africa and just, there are insufficient jobs to support them then — then what happens? I just wonder how you think about the balance of opportunities and risks?
Joe Studwell: I think obviously there are huge risks, but the point I make in the book is that you’ve got to have these people in order to be in the developmental game. Because if you don’t have sufficient density of people, at least, as I say, what we had in Asia in 1960, you’re not going to — you’re not going to get your economies moving. I came away from it preferring to feel optimistic, but I think you can look at the situation and be very pessimistic if that’s the kind of person that you are. I feel somewhat optimistic because the bit of the economy of Africa that you would expect to respond first to greater demographic density, which is agriculture, as was the case in Asia, is responding. So since 2000, we’ve had average agricultural growth, value added growth per year in Africa of about four and a half percent, all right. So that’s the fastest rate in the world. You wouldn’t expect most places in Asia to be faster now because they’re relatively mature in terms of their agriculture sectors. But nonetheless, it’s pretty impressive. And, you know, you can look around the continent, look at, you know, look at Nigeria, as one often has to because it’s the most populous country in Africa. Frequently described as chaotic, ungovernable. But since 2000, the data show that agriculture has been growing at nearly 6% a year, right? So that’s pretty impressive for a chaotic ungovernable country.
Peter Thal Larsen: You talked about how Ethiopia and Rwanda were interested in you talking to them about the Asian development, and you write quite a lot — Ethiopia and Rwanda are two of the examples that you explore in terms of where there’s been some lessons to be learned in part. I’m just wondering a bit about that comparison with Asia. Because what strikes me about the Asian development story, and what I took from your last book, “How Asia Works”, was really that they did things that were against the sort of the economic orthodoxy of the time, right? So that the countries that successfully developed in Asia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, you know, they had tariffs, they had capital controls, you know, kind of, they didn’t open up their markets in the way that sort of that the consensus, the economic consensus would have suggested. What you’ve got here — but they didn’t really have, there wasn’t a template to follow. They were just sort of, they were just doing things differently. Whereas here it seems like there’s a more conscious effort to try and say, well, it worked in Asia, maybe it can work for us too. Is that fair?
Joe Studwell: I mean, that’s fair for Rwanda and Ethiopia, which have very, very definitely been trying to replicate Asian models. I mean Rwanda, very interesting, very focused on the Singaporean model, which sounds ridiculous, right? Because Singapore’s this little island on the main shipping lanes of Asia, and Rwanda is bang in the center of Africa. But actually, when you, when the Rwandans explain to you their logic, it does make some sense. Because they say, well, we are so remote and the cost of moving things here by truck is a multiple of what shipping from Asia or wherever costs, we can actually use our isolation to produce manufactured goods that wouldn’t be competitive in the world economy, but are competitive in the center of Africa. So them and the Ethiopians where, yeah, there’s just been a phenomenal appetite to absorb the lessons of development elsewhere, and people are fantastically well-read. Every other minister seems to have done a PhD on the side while being a minister, and the PhDs are all kind of looking at developmental problems. So they are like that. And other countries I would say are sort of less aggressively thinking that they’re going to replicate what’s happened in East Asia. But in a country like Nigeria, you’ll meet politicians like the current vice president who are very interested in learning lessons from East Asia, and then other countries, again, you don’t get a lot of direction to the sort of developmental thinking. But that isn’t quite the end of the world because what we see in Africa, and this is quite different to Asia where most development was state-led in some way or state-orchestrated in some way. What we see Africa and other African countries where there isn’t strong political leadership is we see the private sector leading. And most obviously at the moment, because of the growth, 25 years of accelerated growth in agriculture now, so we see private sector really being very active in the manufacturing bit of agriculture, which is basically making processed foods, everything from milling grain to actually producing packaged foods. And already we see a pattern where quite big companies are coming into being, working across eight, nine, ten countries, producing enough cash flow then to go into other businesses. So in Tanzania, one firm I talk about a little bit is Bakhresa. It’s the biggest agribusiness in Tanzania. It started in milling, bought mills in different countries when they were privatized by African governments. And now they’re in everything from petroleum products to real estate to a TV station, and I think they’ve got a football club as well. You know, so, and quite similar, I mean, Peter, I’m sure you’ll see the analogy or the comparison here, quite similar to those kind of Christmas tree businesses that grew up in Southeast Asia. So you think of CP Group in Thailand or the Salim Group in Indonesia or Astra in Indonesia —
Peter Thal Larsen: Big conglomerates doing lots of different things —
Joe Studwell: Yeah, but they all come out of agriculture. They all originally come out of agriculture, and then the cash is there, and they go and pursue a bunch of different opportunities.
Peter Thal Larsen: So this may be a good segue. I mean, you’ve talked about agriculture as being one of the key, the key sort of things to solve or is in the process of being solved perhaps. There’s manufacturing and obviously manufacturing was a huge part of the Asian development, for the successful Asian development. I guess the counterargument would be today that manufacturing has changed. Everybody’s adopting robotics and artificial intelligence. It’s a little bit the way people talk about India as well, is that the opportunity to do in Africa what was done in South Korea and Taiwan and other places that that moment has gone. How do you think about that argument?
Joe Studwell: I don’t think so. I mean, I think that technologically manufacturing is changing, but very slowly. But I think when you get very large, very low-cost labor supplies, that people remain very competitive against robots and AI. Manufacturing wage rates in Africa now are like $65 to $90 a month, compared to $600 or $700 in China. And then if you compare that with robots, if you look at garmenting, the sort of absolute lowest value added area of activity that countries first go into, a garmenting robot usually can’t do a huge amount of stuff because material, of its nature, is flexible. And robots like working with solid things. But I mean, it’s not going to cost you less than $100,000. And the problem with robots and putting robots into factories is you pay upfront the full amount. You know, you compare that with bringing labor in and laying labor off, which, in poor countries, you can always hire and fire labor as you want it. So a lot of manufacturers, that’s a lot more attractive at $65 a month than potentially overcapitalizing a manufacturing line. So I just don’t think that we are at the point where if you’ve got sufficiently affordable and reliable labor and political stability, that manufacturers are going to say, no, no, we’d rather work just with robotics. I think the more serious challenge to Africa’s ambitions in manufacturing is the competition that there will be from Southeast Asian states that still have a lot of low-cost labor, so Indonesia and South Asia. So is India going to bring a very large number of people into manufacturing? And if they do that with really good government support, then that I think can be more problematic for Africa. But still, at the end of the day, one thing that Africa has very much on its side is the logistics relationship with Europe. I mean, North Africa, totally so, right? I mean, Morocco, you’re 14 kilometers from Spain.
Peter Thal Larsen: You mentioned two important words there, political stability. Obviously, it’s very easy to say that there has been a history of particularly civil war in Africa. But also, I think one of the things that’s striking to me from reading your book is that actually, even against that backdrop, some countries have managed to do very well. You talk about Ethiopia, which obviously had the terrible famine that we all remember from the 1980s and then a period of growth, but also a really gruesome civil war in the 2020s. And yet the economy has continued to grow. And Rwanda came out of this terrible genocide and has had a lot of political upheaval and still managed to keep growing. I wonder how you rationalize that. From the outside, you would look at that and say those two things are inconsistent?
Joe Studwell: Yeah. I mean, again, I think one can look at Africa today and be an optimist or a pessimist in terms of conflict that you see going on around the continent. To me, the main concentration of conflict and coups that we’ve seen in recent years has been the Sahel region, where you have a very particular story. It’s a very particular environment. It is very impacted by climate change, and so forth. And I don’t, so I don’t think that that is symptomatic of a political malaise more generally. But, you know, do you see conflict in other places? Yes, you do. I mean, we can’t deny that. And, you know, the ethnic diversity of the continent is at the root of this. And again, it goes back to demographics. I mean, historically, thousands of different ethnicities could survive in Africa because population was so low. And there was actually very little by European standards, very little conflict between different groups. And if you got in a disagreement and an argument, you could move off and find new land to inhabit. So ethnic strife is going to continue to be a problem. Ethnic conflict is going to continue to be a problem. I think though that one positive that I would point to, maybe not normally one that’s pointed to, is that if you look at protest in Africa over the last, say, five years, and you look at protests that we’ve all seen on the TV in Kenya, in DRC, in Mozambique, in Ethiopia. What’s quite striking to me, is that you see more and more evidence of protests being cross-ethnic. You see different ethnic groups. So it’s no longer about I’m this and you’re that. It’s about the issue. And I would actually point to that as potentially the front end of a positive trend in in Africa. But, you know, that said, unrest will continue to be a problem. We’ve just got to keep it in a bit of perspective. I mean, if you look at the number of people who’ve been killed in incidents in wars or domestic unrest with more than a thousand casualties since 1960, it’s reckoned to be around 6 million. Six million is the top end of the estimates of the number of people who died in Europe in the Napoleonic Wars, which were like a dozen years. So you’ve got to have a bit of perspective on this. It’s kind of too easy for us to look at Africa and say, oh, they’re violent people. I mean, anybody who knows the history of Europe would say we are extremely violent people.
Peter Thal Larsen: Yes, no, absolutely. Yeah. Well, and, you know, not that we, not that you want to get into a numbers game, but when you start looking at, you know, people who died in China during various great leaps forward and things like that, famines. One thing I’m just curious about, because I think there’s two things that probably feature less in your book than in most of the discussion about Africa that you hear or read at the moment, which was basically debt and China. There is this issue with a number of countries that are very heavily indebted, and trying to get out of their debt, complicated by the fact that they’ve also borrowed heavily from China. There was this whole argument that China’s sort of somehow trapped these countries into a sort of, into a debt dependency. I just wonder, I mean, obviously, again, it’s quite hard to generalize from country to country, but how do you think about that issue when it comes to Africa?
Joe Studwell: I mean, the first thing I think about is that African lending, to infrastructure projects and power projects in Africa, has brought capacity and resources that just would not be there otherwise. So if you add up what principally the Chinese policy banks have lent, but at other banks as well, it’s about $150 billion, okay. And that money was not going to come from anywhere else. So I would say that that’s been actually very important to African development, and Africa getting some basic infrastructure resources in place to begin to take advantage of its demographic growth. That said, has China overlent to some countries? And has it been opaque, in the extreme, in the agreement surrounding that lending? Yes, I think that’s certainly true. I mean, for instance, Angola, which is the biggest China debtor, we just don’t know. There’s a lot of speculation, but we just really don’t really know what exactly is in those loan agreements —
Peter Thal Larsen: Which is part of the problem —
Joe Studwell: Yeah, which is part of the problem. But I don’t see this as a Chinese conspiracy. I think that they really did, you know how they do everything as a campaign. I think they really did think that they were taking over the world and they were going to lend all this money to Africa and it was all going to get paid back. And they made some very poor decisions along the way. That has to be cleaned up. I mean, what I’d say from an African national perspective on this is that the number of countries in genuine debt distress is a small subset of all those in Africa. And one way or another, as with all debts, it’s going to have to be resolved.
Peter Thal Larsen: But you don’t see that as a — as a sort of a lasting impediment to development?
Joe Studwell: No, I don’t think so because I think most Chinese lending in Africa has paid for infrastructure and utilities that were needed. And in general, China has delivered those construction projects at a big discount in cost terms to what it would have cost to get the work done by European or US firms. And that’s what we tend to to forget, right? I mean, as with everything, China has cut half, or more, off the cost of doing infrastructure projects.
Peter Thal Larsen: We’re running out of time. I just sort of, just wanted to end on a, you know, as you said, you were sort of your — you chose to be an optimist about this. I thought there was, there’s an interesting sort of line at the end of the book where you say, “If you live outside Africa, whether in the Americas, Europe or Asia, Africa is going to be a bigger part of your life in trade, investment, tourism, literature, and music.” You sort of compare it almost to the impact that Asia was beginning to have in the 1960s and has had since then, which is quite an intriguing prospect. I mean, sort of, yeah, how would you sort of — how would you advise people to prepare for that?
Joe Studwell: I mean, there’s lots of interesting places to go and visit in Africa. People of our generation, if you want to see the deserted beaches that you saw in India or Southeast Asia in the 1980s, then you really need to go to Mozambique or Togo or another African country, because those are the only places that you’re going to see that. Yeah, it’s the last — it is the last frontier in that, in that respect. And, you know, it is also kind of a nice place to go if you’re coming from Europe, because there’s no jet lag, right? It’s all pretty much the same time zone.
Peter Thal Larsen: I see. Well, you’re doing — you’ve got a bright future as part of the African Tourist Board or something like that, if all else fails. But I won’t ask you which continent you’re going to write about next, but we can leave that for another time. But this was really fascinating, Joe. Thank you so much for taking the time.
Joe Studwell: Thank you for having me.
Peter Thal Larsen: That’s all we have time for this week. Thanks to Joe for that fascinating discussion. And as always, thanks to you for tuning in. This podcast was produced by Oliver Taslic, with the help of Mike Coupland and Jon Hodge in the studio in London. You can check out a new episode of The Big View every Tuesday. Don’t forget to tune into our sister show, Viewsroom, every Thursday, and all the other great podcasts from the Reuters team. To get in touch with feedback, questions and ideas, please email us on [email protected]. That’s [email protected]. If you like what you heard, please rate the show and leave us a review. And check out our views on the biggest stories in business and finance every day at Breakingviews.com and Reuters.com.

Tags:economic development, How Africa Works, How Asia Works
Posted in Africa, Asia | Leave a Comment »

The Big View podcast and Tyler Cowen’s podcast.

March 3, 2026

Here is a link to a Reuters Big View podcast about How Africa Works. You can also find it on Spotify and Youtube. And here is a link to Tyler Cowen’s podcast about How Africa Works.

Tags:Demographics, Development, economic development, How Africa Works
Posted in Africa, Asia, Ethiopia, Mauritius, Nigeria | Leave a Comment »

Key themes in How Africa Works

February 16, 2026

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.

How-Africa-Works-1-Africa_Becomes_A_Little_More_Asian.pdf

How Africa Works 2 The_Birth_Of_African_Demand

Tags:Africa, Demographics, How Africa Works
Posted in Africa, Asia, Ethiopia, Mauritius, Nigeria | Comments Off on Key themes in How Africa Works

How Africa Works, Global Developments review

February 16, 2026

Joe Studwell Turns To Africa

Oliver Kim

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.

Tags:Demographics, Development, How Africa Works, How Asia Works
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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

Listen to this story

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

Tags:Africa, Demographics, Development, How Africa Works
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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.

Tags:agriculture, Demographics, Development, How Africa Works, manufacturing
Posted in Africa, Asia, Ethiopia, Mauritius, Nigeria, North-east Asia, South Asia, South-east Asia | Comments Off on How Africa Works, first of the podcasts

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

Tags:Africa, agriculture, Demographics, Development, How Asia Works, manufacturing
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The US and China in perspective

April 2, 2021

Bill 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:

China-and-America_-A-New-Game-in-a-New-Era-Overholt-0321 Download

Tags:BRI, Cold War, Economic competition, Multilateral institutions, Sino-US relations, South China Sea, Thucydides Trap, US institutions
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Xinjiang versus Tibet

April 2, 2021

Below 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

…

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

More on:

Tibet

China

Human Rights

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.

Tags:Ethnic cleansing, Journalistic standards, Tibet, Xinjiang
Posted in China | 2 Comments »

Biden and China: getting real

March 23, 2021

Below is an excellent piece from The Atlantic about the recent US-China high-level meeting in Anchorage, which may come to be seen as the moment the US, and its allies, began to deal effectively with Xi Jinping’s regime.

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The original is here.

The U.S. and China Finally Get Real With Each Other

The exchange in Alaska may have seemed like a debacle, but it was actually a necessary step to a more stable relationship between the two countries.

MARCH 21, 2021

Thomas Wright

Senior fellow at the Brookings Institution

Thursday night’s very public dustup between United States and Chinese officials in Anchorage, Alaska, during the Biden administration’s first official meeting with China, may have seemed like a debacle, but the exchange was actually a necessary step to a more stable relationship between the two countries.

In his brief opening remarks before the press, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that he and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan would discuss “our deep concerns with actions by China, including in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyber attacks on the United States, and economic coercion toward our allies. Each of these actions threaten the rules-based order that maintains global stability. That’s why they’re not merely internal matters and why we feel an obligation to raise these issues here today.”

Blinken’s comments seemed to catch the Chinese off guard. The last Strategic & Economic Dialogue of the Obama administration, in 2016, began with a conciliatory message from then–Secretary of State John Kerry and resulted in a declaration identifying 120 different areas of cooperation.

In response to Blinken, China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, said that because Blinken had “delivered some quite different opening remarks, mine will be slightly different as well.” He spoke for 16 minutes, blowing through the two-minute limit agreed upon in torturous pre-meeting negotiations over protocol. “Many people within the United States,” he said, “actually have little confidence in the democracy of the United States.” He went on to say that “China has made steady progress in human rights, and the fact is that there are many problems within the United States regarding human rights.” He also took aim at U.S. foreign policy: “I think the problem is that the United States has exercised long-arm jurisdiction and suppression and overstretched the national security through the use of force or financial hegemony, and this has created obstacles for normal trade activities, and the United States has also been persuading some countries to launch attacks on China.”

As the press began to leave, assuming that the opening remarks were over and to make way for the private discussions, Blinken and Sullivan ushered them back in and challenged Yang, telling him that “it’s never a good bet to bet against America.” Determined to have the last word, Yang and China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, responded again. Yang began by saying, sarcastically, “Well, it was my bad. When I entered this room, I should have reminded the U.S. side of paying attention to its tone in our respective opening remarks, but I didn’t.”

The opening exchange did not appear to materially affect the rest of the meeting. A senior administration official told me that the moment the cameras left, the Chinese side went back to business as usual, working through the list of issues on the agenda, including nonproliferation and Iran. The official told me that the U.S. delegation believed Yang’s opening gambit had been preplanned and was not an off-the-cuff response. The Chinese delegation had come, the official said, with the intention of delivering a public message, which they did in dramatic fashion. China believes that the balance of power has shifted in its favor over the past 10 years, especially during the pandemic, and wanted to play to the audience at home.

For an astonished press, witnessing the exchange was like being present at the dawn of a new cold war and seemed to sum up just how bad the U.S.-China relationship had become. Writing in The New York Times, Ian Johnson warned, “These harsh exchanges will only contribute to the dangerous decay in relations between the world’s two most powerful countries. Both sides seem to be trapped by a need to look and sound tough.”

But this view misunderstands what is needed in U.S.-China diplomacy right now. The meeting would have been a failure if it had resulted in general declarations to cooperate while minimizing competition, a common U.S. strategy when China’s intentions were not as clear. Organizing the relationship around cooperation is theoretically desirable as an end goal but will be unattainable for the foreseeable future, given the unfolding reality of an assertive, repressive China and a defiant America.

Last year, as it anticipated a win for Joe Biden in the U.S. election and then during the transition, China signaled that it wanted to effectively reset the relationship regarding cooperation on climate change and the pandemic. The Biden team saw these overtures for what they were: a trap to get the U.S. to pull back from competing with China in exchange for cooperation that would never really materialize. Biden officials told me that any reset would have been rhetorical only; China would have continued to push forward on all other fronts, including its quest for technological supremacy, its economic coercion of Australia, and its pressure on Taiwan.

Had the Biden administration embraced China’s offer, any agreement would have collapsed beneath the weight of Beijing’s actual behavior, as well as opposition in Washington. Biden would have been forced to adjust course and take a more competitive approach anyway, under less favorable conditions, including nervous allies and an emboldened China.

By skipping this step in favor of a strategy of competitive engagement—meeting with China but seeing it through the lens of competition—the Biden team not only saved time, but it flushed Beijing’s true intentions out into the open for the world to see. In his remarks, contrasting “Chinese-style democracy,” as he called it, with “U.S.-style democracy,” Yang implicitly acknowledged that the U.S.-China relationship is, and will continue to be, defined by a competition between different government systems: authoritarianism and liberal democracy.

The Biden administration understands that a more assertive U.S. approach is jarring to many in the American foreign-policy establishment, which is accustomed to decades of cautious and cooperative engagement in high-level meetings. But friction is necessary, given China’s play for dominance over the past several years. “It is increasingly difficult to argue that we don’t know what China wants,” said the senior administration official, who asked for anonymity so as to speak freely about the meeting. “They are playing for keeps.”

Biden’s priority rightly seems to be creating a greater common cause with allies against China, especially on technology and economics. Sullivan refers to this approach as building a situation of strength, echoing the famous formulation by Truman’s secretary of state Dean Acheson, who made clear that strengthening the Western alliance was a necessary precondition for any talks with the Soviet Union. The U.S. has had considerable success with the Quad, the informal strategic alliance among the United States, Japan, Australia, and India, although the U.S. needs to be far more imaginative and ambitious in getting European nations on board with its efforts to compete with China.

The question after Anchorage is what role should bilateral diplomacy with Beijing play in America’s overall strategy to deal with China. Now that the dramatic public exchange has set a more honest approach for a competitive era, the two sides can progress to a much harder next phase.

The rules-based international order is over. Beijing and Moscow concluded long ago that a world in which China and Russia generally acquiesced to U.S. leadership, as they did in the 1990s and 2000s, was untenable, a Western trap designed, in part, to undermine authoritarianism. They were not entirely wrong about that—many Americans saw globalization and multilateralism as having the desirable side effect of encouraging political liberalization around the world.

The truth is that the United States does pose a threat to the Chinese Communist Party’s interests (although not necessarily those of the Chinese people), while the CCP surely poses a threat to liberal democracy and U.S. interests. Ultimately, Washington and Beijing will have to acknowledge this to each other. That will be difficult for the Biden administration, which is accustomed to assuming that American interests are not a threat to any other government, but broadly benefit all major world powers. It will be even harder for Beijing, which goes to great lengths to conceal its revisionism behind a shield of insincere platitudes.

Such an acknowledgment will allow a truly frank strategic conversation to occur about how these two countries’ systems will relate to each other as they compete. These systems are incompatible in many respects, but they are also intertwined in a myriad of ways. The goals of U.S.-China diplomacy should initially be modest, to avoid unintentional provocations and to facilitate transactional cooperation on shared interests. Eventually, if China’s behavior and the geopolitical conditions are favorable, the two sides could explore broader cooperation and even the possibility of a détente—a general thawing of tensions—but that is a long way off.

Historically, the most volatile periods of rivalry between major powers is in the early stages; think of the late 1940s and the 1950s in the Cold War. The red lines become apparent only through interactions in crises. The greatest risk is for either side to miscalculate the resolve or intentions of the other. By getting real in Anchorage, both sides have taken the important first step toward a more stable relationship by acknowledging the true nature of their relationship.

THOMAS WRIGHT is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and the author of All Measures Short of War: The Contest for the 21st Century and the Future of American Power.

Tags:Anchorage, Joe Biden, Putin, Sino-US relations, Xi Jinping
Posted in China, EU, United States | Comments Off on Biden and China: getting real

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