Sebastian Mallaby blows a gasket over China's policy on Sudan and slams China's foreign aid and development programs

"Chinese understanding of development threatens to undermine the Western one. Western development aid is increasingly linked to measures of good governance, and investment from Western corporations and banks comes with conditions designed to ensure that ordinary people benefit. This promising advance cannot succeed if African dictators can ignore Western conditions with Chinese assistance.

"But then there is an even more disturbing question: What does China's policy toward Sudan say about the West's policy toward China? The West is engaging with China on the theory that economic modernization will bring political modernization as well; otherwise, the West would merely be assisting the development of a communist adversary. China's Sudan policy is an assertion that this link between economic and political modernization is by no means inevitable, even in the extreme case. You can construct oil refineries, educate scientists, build ambitious new railways -- and simultaneously pursue a policy of genocide."(1)

Pundita,
I'm assuming you saw Sebastian Mallaby's Washington Post op-ed yesterday about China's aid to Sudan. What interests me particularly is that his view of China's threat to Western development and aid programs tracks exactly with yours. So now there's two of you shouting at Washington from inside a glass booth, but I think his harsh criticism of China is new for him.
Jan in Reston

Dear Jan:
From what I have read of his columns, I think Sebastian Mallaby "tracks" more with the view in Brussels, which supports the Chirac School's multipolarity doctrine. The doctrine tolerates just the kind of foreign policy that has now greatly upset Mr Mallaby.

Mallaby was out in front of the rest of the media on the Darfur story and his reports on the situation lit a fire in official Washington. The genocide in Darfur is his special cause. So Hu Jintao picked the wrong country on which to make a stand regarding China's foreign policy. Whatever Mallaby thought about China's policy before Hu's trip to Sudan last week, Hu said the magic words when he called on the world to respect Sudan's sovereignty then wrote a check to build a palace for Sudan's president.

Now that Mr Mallaby is hopping mad about China's aid and development programs, the West European media will take note. From there, we could see movement from Brussels; eventually that could translate into the International Monetary Fund working themselves up to a stand about China's aid and development policies.

All that plus 50 cents won't get us far, if Beijing is allowed to make a token bow to world opinion about the Sudan issue while continuing to write big checks to despots. The token bow is China's modus operandi whenever their record on human rights comes before the United Nations.

The only way to deal with China about their development policy toward third world countries is if the major multilateral lending institutions, with the World Bank leading the charge, threaten to scale back China's shareholder status unless Beijing stops overwriting their development policies.

With regard to China's foreign aid policy, the lead has to come directly from the G7 governments. I don't see the eighth member of the club -- Russia -- making a stand against China on such matters, but China's aid policies should be an issue for this year's G8 meeting. The issue should stay on the table, no matter how many token bows Beijing makes in the runup to the meeting.

All this said, I have two disputes with Mallaby's wonderful scorched-earth essay. The first is that he contends that "15 years" ago the West "discarded" the kind of development policy that China now practices. It is true that a consensus started to build in the 1990s, but the World Bank -- the world leader in development policy -- did not put teeth into their anti-corruption policies until Paul Wolfowitz took the helm at the Bank. The uncompromising approach has met stiff resistance from many quarters, even from within the World Bank.

If I sound as if I am nitpicking about the dating of the revolution in development circles, I think Mr Mallaby has been nitpicking about the way in which Wolfowitz has instituted and pushed anti-corruption policies. So now that his pet cause is getting stomped on, maybe he will help put some wind behind Wolfowitz's sails.

And maybe now Mr Mallaby will take a closer look at the fine print in the multipolarity doctrine. If a government makes furthering multipolarity into a guiding principle, it has a toothless argument against despotic governments that demand the same accords as the democratic nations.

My second dispute with Mallaby's essay is more of a question that Pundita has been thinking about for many months. If you remove mention of China and Sudan, how much do you disagree with the statement that a nation's sovereignty should be protected? China argues that it's a slippery slope for nations to intervene in the affairs of other nations in the name of human rights abuses. Do you think that is a valid argument?

Mallaby is correct when he observes:

... since the end of the Cold War, the Western view of sovereignty has grown increasingly contingent. If a nation slaughters its civilians (think Rwanda, Kosovo), harbors terrorists (Afghanistan) or refuses to cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors (yes, Iraq), it forfeits its right to sovereignty. It may not be invaded, but it certainly can expect to face sanctions.

Sudan, by these standards, is an easy candidate for sanctions. But China's talk of "sovereignty" is code for the opposite policy. As well as paying for a presidential palace, Hu used his trip to cancel $80 million of Sudanese debt, to announce a plan to build a railway line and to visit an oil refinery that China partly owns, basking in the fact that 80 percent of Sudan's oil goes to his country.

Hu's visit was a statement that, in the Chinese view of the world, the principle of sovereignty trumps even the most appalling human rights abuses: It brushed aside the memory of the Rwandan genocide and the Holocaust.(1)

But is the rationale underpinning the contingency a defensible one when governments argue with other governments on the issue? China says no. What do you think?

This is a foreign policy blog, so what Pundita thinks on the matter is that she wants US policy to bash China back over the line yesterday, not sometime in the coming century. From that viewpoint, governments are on thin ice if they fall back on political philosophy arguments in the effort to prod China's government to action on development policy. If they want action, the best course for the G7 governments is to keep the discussion very narrow. For example:

If China belongs to the World Bank while at the same time running development policy that completely works against Bank policy, you can ask Beijing why they bother to belong to the Bank.

This approach does not mean ducking the philosophy questions; it means that you are not going to win an argument that has many shades and sides, which is not even resolved among the developed nations, and which is a sore point among the developing nations. The developing nations don't want the developed countries to attach strings to aid and development if the strings violate their sovereignty. Yet the argument is on solid ground if you limit it to a government's responsibility as a member of a multilateral lending organization.

China's aim is to see that more developing nations have a bigger say in how the World Bank and its Asian and European counterparts are run -- in particular, the ones that stand solidly behind China's policies. In other words, unless the developed nations make China's aid and development policies a battlefield, even the most enlightened development assistance can be forced back into the antiquated model that Sebastian Mallaby decries.

1) A Palace for Sudan: China's No-Strings Aid Undermines the West by Sebastian Mallaby. February 5, 2007; Page A-15, The Washington Post.