Qin Hui, "Looking at China from South Africa" 1

Qin Hui, “Looking at China from South Africa:”  “Economic Miracles” under Conditions of “Low Human Rights Advantage,” Part One[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Readers of Qin Hui’s “Dilemmas of Twenty-First Century Globalization: Reasons and Solutions, With a Critique of Piketty’s Twenty-First Century Capitalism,” also available on our site, will already be familiar with the arguments Qin develops in the text translated here.  The “China Model,” which has brought countless millions out of poverty, is not in Qin’s opinion the long-sought “third path”—an alternative to capitalism and socialism.  Instead, the basic components of the China model are:  China’s “low human rights advantage,” which allows capital, with the consistent help of the state, to exploit Chinese labor through low wages, docile unions, land expropriation and urban-rural status barriers; and the logic of globalization, which opens China to outside investment and at the same time makes available the markets of the world to China’s formidable productive capacity. 

As Qin argues in “Dilemmas,” China’s success has nothing to do with “socialism with Chinese characteristics” unless we understand the most basic of those characteristics to be brutal exploitation of its own people, especially of its rural population.  To drive that point home, Qin, in “Dilemmas” and elsewhere, notes the many parallels between China and South Africa, all based on the construction of systems of status barriers that create groups of people without rights or political power.

The present text is a much longer elaboration of this theme (some sixty pages of Chinese text when downloaded from the web), rendered with Qin’s characteristic intellectual energy and mordant wit (for example, he describes the South African apartheid system as one in which “blacks work according to their abilities; whites earn according to their needs”).  The basic argument is not complex:  South Africa discriminated against blacks; China discriminates against peasants.  But the evidence presented, particularly concerning South Africa, is richly detailed and to my mind irrefutable.  His target audience is clearly fellow Chinese intellectuals who hesitate to accept comparisons between China and a regime universally condemned as racist and retrograde; anyone who might have dismissed Qin’s previous discussions of the issue as too clever by half should have a hard time disregarding the weight of the evidence presented here.[2]  Nor does Qin sugarcoat his conclusions, among which are the observation that South Africa abandoned apartheid, while China’s hukou system continues to deprive China’s peasants of basic rights and equality.  And while the basic data Qin presents are from the 2000s, recent accounts suggest that little basic change has occurred since Qin first published his piece.

Qin’s text was serialized on the website “Ai sixiang” (rather inexpertly; divisions do not respect the organization of Qin’s text, and while endnotes are provided, there are no linking numbers in the text).  We will produce our translation similarly (serially, hopefully not inexpertly), in five or six installments over the course of the summer.
 
Translation  
 
My Country, My People:  Comparing Backgrounds

Latin Americanization or South Africanization?
　　
As critics inside and outside of China have reflected on the Chinese developmental model in recent years, negative comparisons have generally been to India or Latin America.  Generally speaking, pre-reform China often pointed to backwards India as an example of the “unfortunate consequences of following the capitalist road.”  At the time (the 1960s and 1970s), Latin America was in a period of economic growth (the “Brazilian miracle,” the “Mexican miracle”) so Chinese did not talk too much about them.  After the reforms, and especially in the 1990s, when the new round of reforms aimed at marketization with an authoritarian “iron fist,” India was still often cited as a negative example, but now because the unfortunate consequences of “Nehru socialism” or “Soviet-style planning,” which was used by China’s right wing as a negative example of the dangers of “populism.”  China’s left wing increasingly used Latin America, whose “miracles” had passed and whose societies had fallen into crisis, as a “lesson,” demonstrating the evils of “neoliberalism,” which led to discussion of hot topics like “guard against the emergence of Latin Americanization in China” or “China has fallen into the Latin American trap.”

But some Chinese specialists on Latin America did not approve of this Latin Americanization theory.  Even more interesting is that when many Chinese enterprises 中资企业 (especially large-scale state-owned enterprises 大型国企) arrived in Latin American, they discovered a situation that was the opposite of the neoliberal portrait of capital dominating labor.  In Latin America, workers and peasants brazenly “cheated 欺负” capital.  The largest Chinese enterprise in Latin America, Shougang Peru 首钢秘铁, resisted local labor laws, fired striking union workers, and created the “Peruvian worker hero” Juan Gonzales 胡安·坎查理 [?].  Gonzales, viewed by Shougang as a “trouble-maker,” first ran for office with the support of the workers and later served as the Peruvian Minister of Labor, while his daughter was democratically elected to serve as the Mayor of Marcona, where the headquarters of Shougang Peru are located.  The labor movement wound up giving Shougang Peru no end of trouble, to the point that media in China warned that “those who invest abroad must guard against the union trap!”  The bosses of our state-owned enterprises surely know the meaning of the phrase “our workers have strength!”  I should add that the rise in the power of the left in Latin America in recent years means that this sort of incident is not rare.  But the Shougang Peru affair occurred in the 1990s under the Fujimori government, which was widely understood to be rightist.

In addition to Latin America, there are even more vivid examples.  In the past, when our state-owned enterprises build factories or opened mines in rural areas, no one ever talked about “land seizures and demolition 圈地拆迁” [terms used by protesting peasants today].  If tens of thousands of peasants were kicked out, well, they left.  Who negotiated?  However in recent years, when “Chinese capital” seized land in countries like Gabon, they poked around in protected nature areas and in state parks, and ran into protests from environmental and indigenous-rights NGOs “spread by the West.” 

Chinese capital is used to calling on the government to “settle” such matters, but in these cases, government officials didn’t lift a finger, and they were left to their own resources to deal with the “unruly people 刁民,” which, as in Dingzhou 定州 and Shanwei 汕尾[3] in China proper, proved to be extremely difficult.  Of course, in countries governed by the rule of law, Chinese capital has also learned to “play by the rules 循规蹈矩.”  An example is CHALCO’s (Aluminum Corporation of China) exploitation of the Aurukun bauxite mine in Australia.  Despite a previous agreement with the Australian government, and its firm backing, CHALCO still had to spend a year and a half negotiating with an indigenous tribe of little more than one thousand people over the question of land use, because the Australian government had returned land rights to the aborigines.  CHALCO’s “equal treatment” policy was well received in Australia, but this kind of “good example” cannot be championed in China:  the foreign “union trap” is already enough of a headache for Chinese capital.  If the “Aurukun experience” were known in China, and Chinese peasants with their “five thousand years of civilization” learned how to negotiate with a government-backed “alligator” [like CHALCO] like that little Australian “primitive tribe,” well, we couldn’t have that, now could we?

So now we discover that the secret behind the “China miracle” is that no one can negotiate with an iron fist, which reduces what Chinese economists call “transaction costs,” and avoids “democratic problems” such as “the difficulty of dividing property in democracies, the many burdens of welfare allocation, the unions who scare off investors, and the peasant unions who run off property speculators.”

Clearly, talking about a “Latin Americanization” of China in this context makes no sense.  But a Filipino international NGO activist who has been to South Africa many times in twenty years has discovered that the big cities in South Africa at the time were like Beijing today, and today's big cities in South Africa are very similar to Manila! This is quite interesting.

By South Africa “at that time,” he meant the 1990s, prior to democratization [which began in 1994], when the apartheid system was still in place.  That South Africa surely wasn’t like Latin America.  Was it like China?

Today’s left wing in China likes to denounce neoliberalism, while the right wing denounces the welfare state.  But while international liberals and socialists both condemned South Africa at the time, the socialists never said that South Africa’s problem was “neoliberalism.”  On the contrary, it was after the abolition of apartheid that some extreme leftists criticized the democratically elected ANC government for practicing “neoliberalism.”  And liberals certainly never saw South Africa as a “welfare state.”  Although the white majority in South Africa did enjoy high benefits, everyone knows that the majority black population did not enjoy the “freedom to compete,” to say nothing of “welfare benefits.”  The treatment of the black population was worse than in any “neoliberal” country!
 
Comparison of a Few “Technical Terms”
 
How should we describe the South African system at the time?  Let’s look at a few technical terms used by scholars and the South African government:

Dualism.  Scholars often use this term to describe the different treatment of blacks and whites under apartheid.  In China, the term “dual structure” is used to describe the different treatment of urbanites and peasants.  We can trace the origin of the term to W. A. Lewis’s[4] model in developmental economics and J. H. Boeke’s[5] model in the sociology of underdevelopment, and the term is widely used in the context of many developing countries.  However, the "duality" as discussed by Lewis and others only refers to the difference between urban and rural development and social structure, and the term does not refer institutional discrimination resulting in differences in identity status.  Ten years ago, I pointed out that the difference between city and countryside created by China’s institutional discrimination was completely different from what Lewis and Boeke had discussed.  A few insightful people pointed out that calling institutional “barriers between city and countryside” “urban-rural dualism” ran the risk of confusing institutional discrimination with ordinary differences between town and countryside.  Mainstream scholars in South Africa also used this concept to conflate racial barriers (apartheid) with the differences between rich and poor that are often seen in developing countries, which again prompted people to point out that the dualism created by racial barriers is not the concept elaborated by Lewis, but is a kind of institutional discrimination.  What is interesting is that, during the period of rapid economic growth, the division of the population in South Africa’s “white-black dualism” and in China’s “urban-rural dualism” was roughly the same, at about 1: 4.

Migrant laborers.  During the takeoff period, the South African economy relied chiefly on black industrial labor.  The authorities wanted black laborers to work but not live in the cities, so their official residence remained in the “black homelands,” which meant that they were referred to as “migrant labor” in official documents.  Not calling them “black laborers” had the effect of camouflaging racial discrimination.  The Chinese economy during the takeoff period relied chiefly on “peasant laborers.”  Recently, Professor Yao Yang 姚洋 (b. 1964) of Beijing University declared that this name was unpleasant, and formally proposed that it be changed to “migrant laborers.”  I pointed out that this was very similar to the case of the South African blacks, which made him very angry.  Of course, I didn’t think that he was consciously imitating South Africa (he had no idea that the term existed there), but the fact that he came up with precisely this expression…Is this a case of great minds thinking alike?  Or are the two situations in fact very similar?  “Migrant” can mean “an immigrant” or a “migratory bird 候鸟,” “an animal that goes back and forth.”  South African officials used precisely this second meaning, “those working in the cities without migrating there,” or “migrant workers.”  According to the explanation of W. W. Eiselen,[6] the theorist of South African apartheid:  their entry into urban areas was only temporary, and only for economic reasons.  In other words, they were only workers looking for money, and not immigrants with permission to enter.  Isn’t this the case as well with “our” “peasant workers?”  Don’t we call them “migrant birds”?  Or “amphibious people 两栖人?”

Orderly urbanization.  At the outset, this term was proposed by medical personnel in South Africa as migration control recommendations addressing the problems of infectious or sexual diseases that black migrant workers might bring to the cities.  Later, however, the term was widely used, as all urban problems, such as slums, urban squalor, security problems, etc., were all blamed on blacks’ entering the city, and exercising control over the black population became an important “national policy” during the apartheid era.  To this end, South Africa implemented a series of “key control measures”, such as the “Prohibition of Illegal Squatting Act (PISA),” adopted in 1951, according to which black slums were seen as sites of “illegal squatting,” and authorities often carried out raids 犁庭扫穴 in the name of tidying up the city and punishing “squatters.”  South African officials saw the black slums that formed in the cities of the United States and other democratic countries that allowed blacks to enter the cities as examples of “failed, disorderly urbanization.”  Under the name of “order,” blacks could enter the cities as coolies when times were good, but when times were bad they were seen as “surplus people” and kicked out, which meant that blacks were “sacrificed to the needs of orderly urbanization.” 

In China, a similar concept was called “orderly migration.”  South Africa called the huts in which the workers lived “illegal squats,” while in China we called them “illegal construction;”  Yao Yang argues that slums “violate property rights,” which is the same meaning as South Africa’s “illegal squatting.”  The idea of “orderly migration” is to prohibit “blind migration,” for which Zhao Shukai 赵树凯[7] offers a sharp rebuke:  “Even if it is ‘blind migration,’ don’t the peasants have the right to be ‘blind?’  Migration is a basic human right…as long as they are not breaking the law or committing a crime, what’s wrong with ‘blind migration’?”  Progressive people in South Africa offered similar criticisms of “orderly urbanization.”  The only difference was:  when South Africa rejected “disorderly urbanization” they took America’s slums as their example, while when China criticized its “slums” it pointed at India and Latin America.  Because those in American slums were black, and South Africa wanted to exclude blacks.  China didn’t have a “black and white problem,” and admired America’s wealth, so they attacked a poorer India.

What does the comparison of these “technical terms” tell us?
　　
Two “Economic Miracles”
 
As everyone knows, China’s economic growth following reform and opening was very rapid, creating an “economic miracle.”  At the same time, there are many different explanations of this “miracle.”  For this reason, it is interesting to take a look at another.

Chinese impressions of South Africa are largely limited to gold mines and Boer goats, but in fact, South Africa has long had an economy based in manufacturing.  Today many people refer to China as the “factory of the world,” but much smaller South Africa has long been called “Africa’s factory.”  Manufacturing started its takeoff in South Africa after WWI, and during WWII surpassed mining to become the economy’s most important sector.  By 1965, the value produced by manufacturing surpassed that of mining and agriculture combined.  This made South Africa into Africa's only truly industrial country; it occupied only 6% of African population and yet produced more than 33% of its economic output. South African railroads and telephones made up more than half of the African total and their capacity to produce electricity 57%.  People's average use of electricity and water was roughly the same as that in England.  In 1991, it appears that the average income in South Africa was on the level with that of Hungary or Denmark. In terms of overall GDP, the total for South Africa in 1932 was only 4.66 billion Rand, which grew to 9.87 billion in 1940, 20.05 billion in 1948, 41.23 billion in 1956, 68.72 billion in 1964, and 150.52 billion in 1972, finally arriving at 592 billion in 1980.

In other words, South Africa's domestic production in the several decades between 1932 and 1972 can be said to have maintained continuous high growth, doubling on the average of every 7.3 years.  It begin to slow down in the latter part of the 1970s and in 1982 for the first time experienced negative growth. In sum, over a relatively long period, “economic growth in South Africa was comparable to that of Japan, the highest in the world.”  It entered into the ranks of the newly industrialized countries and was called “Africa's economic Giant.”

The South African economic “miracle” also has two features that are very similar to China:  one was its outward orientation, which stemmed from the fact that much of their population (blacks in South Africa, peasants in China) were weak consumers, meaning that “internal demand” was insufficient in South Africa and China for a long time, and both used foreign capital to exploit “external demand,” a common feature of both countries’ “miracles.”  During its extended period of economic growth, South Africa’s “double surplus” in its current account and its capital account often pushed the GDP into “super high speed” growth:  the trade surplus was 1.43 billion USD in 1950 and grew greatly to 74.30 billion USD in 1980, and only began to decline with the crisis in the “South African model,” declining to 53.48 billion USD in 1992.  Capital surplus was 2.15 billion USD in 1965 and reached 23.66 billion USD in 1982, an annual average rate of growth of 15.2% over 17 years, but this fell rapidly following the crisis in the apartheid system.  Capital accounts were negative after 1985 (meaning that capital was flowing out of the country).  But prior to this point, South Africa had relied on “economic globalization plus a comparative advantage in low human rights” to become one of the foremost countries in the world in terms of return on foreign investment, in 1979, the average return on American investment in South Africa was 18%, while it was only 13% in developed countries and 14% in developing countries.  Between 1957 and 1972, 40% of South Africa’s economic growth was the result of foreign investment. 

China is the same, the best example of which is that General Motors lost money everywhere in the world, making minor profits even in its factories in India, while in China profit margins were high.  In addition, McDonald’s was much less profitable in the United States than in China.  As a result, in 1996 one third of all foreign investment in Asia, Africa and Latin America went to China, and in 1997, only 5% of global FDI entered the transitional countries of Central and Eastern Europe, while more than 80% the total amount of FDI entering developing and transitional countries in the 1990s was concentrated in 20 countries, the main one being China.

The second shared feature is that South Africa's infrastructure construction outpaced economic growth. Because of its low human rights advantage, the South African state can easily occupy a black land, something that most democratic countries cannot do. For this reason, South Africa has been able to build a large amount of infrastructure by repossessing land.  For example, South Africa's per capita car ownership is not high compared with that of developed countries, but its highway construction is ahead of most of those countries.   In the 1980s, its mileage was second only to the United States and Germany and ranked third in the world.  This is similar to the current situation in China.  The percentage of Chinese who own cars is not high, but China's highway network is the second in the world.  Many Chinese scholars arrogantly ridicule India, saying that because the Indian state his too weak in terms of “land acquisition and demolition,” it will be impossible for India to build a highway network like that of China.

What is the reason for the rapid growth of the South African economy? At a seminar at the Unirule Economic Research Institute 天则经济研究所 in Beijing. Yang Lihua 杨立华 (b. 1971), a Chinese expert who studies South Africa, criticized my view that the secret rapid primitive accumulation and economic growth in South Africa was “globalization and low human rights.” Professor Yang insisted that low human rights had always been an obstacle to economic growth. Yet other Chinese Scholars of South Africa seem not to look at it this way.  For example, some argue that:

“The racial system has provided favorable conditions for the sustained and rapid growth of the South African economy over a long period. The clearest indications of this are that the apartheid system provided a compulsory and cheap labor force for South Africa's economic development and guaranteed the vast land resources that white farmers and business owners needed for economic development.” In turn, the “rapid development of the economy and the economic power obtained thereby facilitated the maintenance of the apartheid system.”

 “Over a long historical period, the favorable conditions guaranteed by the apartheid system attracted large amounts of foreign capital, technology and migrants, and promoted the development and prosperity of foreign trade, thus contributing considerably to the South African economy.”

The apartheid system was the “critical factor” among “the many reasons explaining the rapid growth South Africa’s economic power.” However, the continuing development of the economy entered into contradiction with the apartheid system: the quality of migrant labor is not easy to improve, and the majority of people are poor, resulting in a small domestic market and insufficient domestic demand. More importantly, "foreign economic activities to some extent became a means for spreading Western human rights ideas, subtly affecting South Africans’ racial views and threatening to burst the dykes of the apartheid system."

Isn't the Chinese situation somewhat similar? The creation of the Chinese miracle similarly is due to many factors, but in the absence the “two critical factors“ of migrant labor (discriminatory cheap labor) and enclosure movements (coercive means to obtain land resources needed to develop the economy) could our miracle have existed? Of course, what we said about the problems and eventual outcomes f the South African model could only fuel the dreams of the Chinese people!

It's true that the “South African miracle” basically enriched white people, but the white rulers often defended themselves by saying that “the standard of living of South African blacks is higher than that (of other black people) anywhere on the continent.”  Such a statement of course obscured the startling difference in income and the economic inequality between blacks and whites, to say nothing of the deprivation of black political rights and other basic civil rights by the authorities outside the economy.   But the statement is true in its way. 

Maintaining economic growth meant that standards of living were improving even for the blacks who were cheated by the system.  In terms of time, things were getting better, and in terms of space, they were twice as well off as the citizens of any of the neighboring black-led countries.  The simple fact is that South Africa has for many years been a place of work for a large number of black workers in the surrounding countries, especially Mozambique, Malawi, Swaziland, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, etc., in numbers that account for a large percentage of the labor force in these countries. Even more distant Tanzania and Zambia also have migrant workers in South Africa.  The situation is just like the “migrant workers’ tide” in the poor areas from China’s central and western regions that stream into the wealthy coastal areas.  Even if the wages these foreign workers receive are less than those of South African blacks, they clearly earn more in South Africa than in their home countries, otherwise they would not come.  And it is obvious that South African black workers earn more than black workers in neighboring countries.  The situation is the same for China’s migrant laborers:  they are better off than in the past, and their standard of living is twice that of those that stayed in the villages, but this does not hide the unfair treatment they receive in the cities. 

During apartheid, black South Africans made up three fourths of the population, but their individual income was one fourth that of whites.  In terms of wages in the mining industry, whites earned 10.7 times more than blacks in 1936, 17.5 times more in 1960, 20.3 times more in 1970, and 12 times more in 1974.  In terms of a horizontal comparison, in the 1980s whites earned 10 to 15 times more than blacks in gold mining, 10 to 12 times more in processing, and 4 times more in extraction.  In 1982, the average monthly wage for whites throughout South Africa was 1073 Rand, compared to 278 for black, a ratio of 3.9 to 1.  In 1987 the numbers were 1959 and 593, meaning that the ratio had decreased to 3.3 to 1, or in other words that black wages had grown by 113.31% and white wages by 82.57%, but the absolute gap between them grew from 795 Rand in 1982 to 1366 Rand in 1987.  Another set of data shows that between 1980 and 1988, the average annual wage of black workers in South Africa increased from 2,688 rand to 9,430 rand, while the average annual wage of white workers increased from 11,472 rand to 32,906 rand. In other words, black wages increased by 250.82%, and white wages increased by 186.84%. In relative terms, black wages grew faster than those of whites, and in nine years, white wages narrowed from 4.27 times that of blacks to 3.50 times. However, in absolute terms, the gap between whites’ and blacks‘ annual salaries of nine years earlier was 8784 rand, and nine years later, it was 23,476. So the gap has actually grown.

In China, whether we compare urban and rural incomes or those of migrant workers and “municipal workers [i.e., those legally permitted to work in the cities]” the gap has also expanded significantly in the past decade, and while in South Africa the gap between black in white shrunk in relative terms but grew in absolute terms, in China the gap grew in both.  This is similar to the situation in South Africa prior to the 1970s, and worse than the situation in the final years of the apartheid system.
 
“Blacks Work According to their Abilities; Whites Earn According to their Needs:”  “Socialism” with Status Barriers
　　
Another feature of the South African economy is the notable presence of the state-owned economy.  Although South African politics was extremely anti-communist prior to democratization, the economy was nonetheless quite “socialist.”  Even at the end of the apartheid era, when the state-owned economy was already in bad straits, the public sector still accounted for 58% of national fixed assets, 26% of output value, more than 50% of exports and 25% of imports in 1986.  For that reason, South Africa at that time might be described an economy where “blacks work according to their abilities, whites earn according to their needs.”  As the well-known leftist scholar Shamir Amin[8] put it:  even if South Africa was part of the “capitalist world system, what was funny was that the ‘central government command economy’ of the former white rulers consistently placed South Africa in the ‘second world’ generally associated with socialist countries.”  Is this not a lot like China?

This situation was created by the descendants of the original Dutch settlers (who now call themselves Afrikaners, and who used to call themselves Boers) who constitute the majority of the white population.

The colonial history of South Africa can be summed up as follows:  whites conquered the majority black population, and in military terms, the British defeated the Dutch in the Anglo-Boer War, after which the two arrived at a political compromise that allowed the Dutch to rule South Africa.  In South Africa after the Anglo-Boer War [1899-1902], the English-speaking whites with their urban traditions readily adapted to industrial and commercial competition, and most of them were entrepreneurs or white-collar workers, the driving force of the marketization and globalization of South Africa’s economy.  By contrast, the Afrikaner-speaking whites, more numerous than the English-speakers and politically advantaged, were traditionally farmers and herders (Boer means “farmer” in Dutch).  They did not engage in commerce, and when they moved to the cities, they worked for wages, many becoming “poor whites.”  They saw themselves as less competent managers than the English whites, and less willing to work than the long-suffering blacks, which explained their need for the protection of racial privileges. The discriminatory attitudes of these Afrikaners toward blacks was even greater, and is similar to the rejection of migrant workers by many urban workers in state-owned enterprises in China. 

The Boer “poor whites” not only supported policies of racial oppression for a long time, but also became the social basis for the white “extreme right” that stubbornly resisted black rights during the period of transition to democracy.  In order to maintain racial privileges, safeguard vested interests, and maintain the tradition of "Boer unity," South Africa to a considerable degree implemented a collectivist system 大锅饭制度 for the Afrikaners, and established many state-owned enterprises to provide "iron rice bowls" to Afrikaner workers, providing high social welfare, and guaranteed lifelong employment.  “Organized white workers” “took aggressive action” to maintain apartheid, and the “political alliance between capitalists and white workers” on ethnic issues lasted through the end of the 1970s.  In 1922, white workers even "combined racial chauvinism with military action and opposed capital under the banner of socialism, launching an armed uprising protesting the possibility of allowing black labor to ‘invade’ the industry and proposing the establishment of a ‘white workers' republic.’" The South African Communist Party actively participated in this at the time.  The rebellion was suppressed, but South Africa’s “racial socialism” traces its foundation to this incident. 

Hence scholars have remarked that, in distinction to the cases of Taiwan and South Korea, which very successfully managed the transformation of rural migrants into urban citizens, South Africa maintained a system of “accumulated exclusion” of blacks hoping to enter the cities.

Of course, the precondition of this “racial socialism” was a cruel oppression and enslavement of black people.  But this oppression and enslavement clearly had nothing to do with “neoliberalism” or with any “market-competition winner-take-all” under conditions of laissez-faire.  In fact, “class differentiation” within the black and white worlds hardly existed.  Solely from the perspective of whites, South Africa was a “welfare state almost as developed as Northern Europe.  And black entrepreneurs only emerged after apartheid was discarded; prior to this all blacks were poor.  Yet there remained a huge gap in between “white equality” and “black equality.”

This system is much like China’s.  The only difference is that in South Africa it was the black-white difference that mattered, while in China it was the urban-rural difference.  I should note that, after the 1950s,  "peasants" in China cannot be defined by the type of settlement (many peasants actually live in cities and towns, especially in the county towns of China, where before reform and opening, most of the residents were "peasants" of the "communes just outside the city gates"). Nor could they be defined by profession (many “peasants” do not farm, whence the concept of “migrant workers” and “farmer entrepreneurs”), or by class (because not only are there “migrant workers” and “peasant entrepreneurs”, there is also the distinction between the cadres and the masses).  The “peasants” are defined by their “residence papers” and in the absence of special permission to change are condemned to be a hereditary low status caste. 

Before reform and opening, China had no classes but many hierarchies, of a complexity that resembles a caste system, and the so-called equalities that existed within particular realms of the hierarchy coexisted with immense gaps between those realms.  In 1978, China's Gini coefficient, calculated in terms of income, was only 0.164 in urban areas and 0.227 in rural areas. However, if the urban-rural difference is included, the national Gini coefficient is 0.331, which is not much lower than that of developed market economies. In the era of the planned economy, China’s development displayed the characteristics of the so-called Preobrazhensky model of “exploiting” peasants to achieve “primitive socialist accumulation,” which led to the tragedy of tens of millions of peasants starving to death.

Over the past thirty years of reform, there has occurred a clear class division between China’s cities and villages, but we should note that in comparison with the treatment reserved for those entering the city to work, the Chinese system has treated the poor holding “urban papers” (especially those of special municipalities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen) quite well, just as South Africa has treated “poor whites.”  Still, strictly speaking, the level of welfare enjoyed by South African “poor whites” is higher than that of the poor in Chinese cities.  This is because at the time, at least whites in South Africa had a democratic system, and white workers had powerful independent unions that could effectively protect workers’ privileges, and the labor vote also had a great impact on the government. 

China lacks these conditions, which means that the position of China’s urban workers is somewhat better than that of migrant workers and South African blacks prior to democratization, but was lower than that of white South African workers at the time.  Similarly, the exclusion of migrant workers practiced by China’s urban workers was not as pronounced as that of South African whites toward blacks.  Migrant workers mainly suffered discrimination at the hands of power-holders in the cities.

In the age of the market economy and globalization, “socialism with special privileges” also bestowed “special characteristics” on “competition.”  As I already mentioned, the Afrikaner-speaking Boers were not as good as the English-speaking whites in industry and commerce, but given the support of the state, there were many Boers that made quick fortunes in finance and real estate.  Thus after the 1970s, South Africa evolved to a society in which English-speaking whites made up most of the class of mangers of private industry, commerce and foreign capital, while Afrikaner-speaking whites, in addition to serving as officials in the state security apparatus (military, police, etc.), basically relied on the state in economic terms, with some people establishing nation-wide monopolies, and the more numerous “poor whites” becoming “privileged workers” in state-owned monopoly sectors providing high wages and benefits.  Young blacks mostly worked for private enterprises in the cities, or in state-owned enterprises, doing the kind of dirty, tiring or dangerous jobs that the whites did not want to do, while many of their relatives remained confined to their “black homelands” as prescribed by their residence papers.

China after reform and opening was also like this:  in competitive fields, private industrial and commercial firms grew rapidly; in the fields of finance and real estate there appeared a swarm of oligopolistic “carpet-baggers” with official backgrounds; and the monopolistic state enterprise sector relied on the “state’s extractive capacity” and the power of monopoly, so that not only did its managerial class come into sudden wealth, but there also appeared a class of aristocratic workers like those of an electric company where the “meter readers earned wages and bonuses of 10,000 RMB.”[9]  (And even if the phenomenon of non-monopolistic middle-sized and small state-owned enterprises disintegrating, “reorganizing” and shedding workers whose status declined precipitously was not often seen under apartheid in South Africa, after democratization, the privatization by the new government of the state enterprises that had served as a collective economy for the Boers created a similar phenomenon of Boers’ losing their jobs).  And 200 million "migrant workers" became the mainstay of China's manufacturing industry and the main body of the blue-collar workers. Their families became left-behind children, left-behind women and left-behind elderly in the "new socialist villages."

As I argued above, there can be no “neoliberalism” under conditions of “racial socialism,” any more than there can be a “welfare state,” even if the ample state treasuries of South Africa and China provided similar social guarantees to Chinese city dwellers and South African whites (these two groups occupied more or less the same ratio of the population at the outset, a minority of one out of four).  However, the vast majority of the population was excluded from welfare, and also enjoyed little “freedom.”  Both of these groups “without freedom or benefits” were very similar.  The difference was that because there was democracy for white South Africans, welfare was provided as well.  And in China, where city-dwellers had no democracy, the welfare system came with many special privileges, what I have called “negative benefits.”  In addition, the movement for black rights in South Africa understood things clearly, and as already noted, fought for both freedom and welfare for black people.  Yet in China, many of those “thinking through the reforms” remain confused, the New Left denouncing neoliberalism and the right wing decrying the welfare state, which suggests that they think the people have too much freedom and too many benefits! 
 
Are “Low Human Rights” Meant to Protect “Sovereignty?”  Deformed “Nationalism” and the Theory of “Cultural Self-Respect”
　　
Over the course of the history of South Africa, both English-speaking whites and the Afrikaner-speaking oppressed blacks.  But because the English-speakers excelled in industry and commerce, they relied less on special privileges and respected the freedom of competition, they were somewhat more enlightened on racial issues, and finally responded to human rights concerns expressed by an international society dominated by English-speaking countries. 

All peoples have a history that evolves from barbarism to civilization. The British and American countries have not always respected human rights. Both have disgraceful pasts on human rights issues, both internally and externally, including human rights violations in their colonies.  Nonetheless, we should admit that the progress of modern human rights truly first appeared in these countries, initially in terms of domestic human rights, and then in the international arena.  The two Human Rights Declarations of the United Nations reflect the efforts of the international community to promote the protection of human rights in all countries, and the English-speaking countries are clearly the most important promoters of such efforts, as is the case with South Africa.  Of course, Britain and America have always practiced both “interest diplomacy” and “moral diplomacy.” 

From the perspective of interests, because capital in these market economies was unwilling to sacrifice money-making opportunities in South Africa, they were reluctant to endorse sanctions fully, which meant that sanctions were often formal rather than real, and objectively speaking South Africa was let off the hook.  But from the perspective of “human rights diplomacy,” even the most formalistic sanctions still constituted a kind of moral pressure the impact of which on South Africa should not be underestimated, especially given the reaction of English-speaking whites in South Africa.
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On the other hand, the British mistreated the Boers historically, and through violence destroyed two Boer Republics and imposed a British colony, creating a sense of anti-British nationalism among the Boers.  There were massacres of the Boers during the war, and many Boers died in concentration camps, leaving lasting wounds in the Boer psyche. There are monuments, museums, and historical sites from the British-Boer War everywhere in South Africa, reminding the Boers—now the Afrikaners--not to forget the past.  Boer resistance, even during the period of British colonization after the war, meant that Afrikaners, including the “poor whites” continued to dominate South African politics, a trend even more pronounced after independence.  Hence they paid little attention to the advice, criticism, and sanctions of the English-speaking world, dominated by England and the United States, on the subject of their oppression of black people, feeling that they, the Afrikaners, had been maltreated in the past by the British, so why should they listen to them on questions of human rights?

The South African President Botha once arrogantly proclaimed:  “My people’s struggle against colonialism is the earliest in Africa’s history, and the descendants of these colonialists are meddling in our internal politics, forcing us to understand the racial apartheid system from the point of view of our enemies.  We will never give in and will instead create a new system.  We will never engage in the one-person one-vote system they propose.”
Hence the Afrikaner oppression of the blacks and their insistence on their own racial superiority took on a veneer of “justice” based in “anticolonialism,” “independence and autonomy,” and “a refusal to allow others to interfere in our internal affairs.”  It is not hard to understand why South Africa clung so stubbornly to racial oppression, or why their arguments were so passionate.  In order to maintain their racial privileges, they were willing to abandon the Commonwealth, belittle the United Nations, sever the relationship between the South African Dutch Reformed Church and the original church in the Netherlands, and challenge the international community.

As early as 1834, when the British colonial authorities announced the abolition of slavery in South Africa, the Boers “viewed it as a shameful insult” and angrily denounced the move, which would undermine the “propriety” of the relations between whites and blacks.  The tensions this created between the British and the Boers would lead to the eruption of the Boer-British War some decades later.  In 1910, the formerly British Cape Colony and Natal merged with the colonies of the two Boer republics, Transvaal and the Orange Free State, to form the Boer-led South African Union.  The constitution established by the Boers at this point abolished certain black rights that had formerly been accorded by the British (they had been permitted to buy and possess land, to elect their own representatives in black areas, to set up assemblies with limited powers, etc. 

After independence the Boers said that these were all parts of “British colonialism” and scrapped them).  Blacks responded by organizing a delegation to go to London for assistance, pleading that the British block this process, for which they were condemned as “traitors to South Africa,” and “British accomplices” who were helping the British to interfere in South African internal politics.  When Boer theorists presented their arguments about “orderly urbanization” and the like, they often denounced both England and the United States, as in the case in 1930 when John Holloway (1890-1979), who was in charge of the Native Economic Commission in the South African Federation in the 1930s, claimed that the US policy black-and-white integration was a failure and could not be imposed on South Africa.

Religion in South Africa had the same problems.  The Anglican Church established by South African English-speaking whites was quite opposed to apartheid, and even elected a black archbishop, Desmond Tutu.  But the South African Dutch Reformed Church stubbornly supported apartheid, and, unwilling to accept the anti-racist attitude of the mother church in Holland, established its own independent branch.

Later, in the process of the Afrikaners’ throwing off British rule in pursuit of independence, the discourse of using “anti-colonialism” to resist the universal values of human rights and equality became ever more strident.  In February of 1960, the British Prime Minister Harold McMillan (1894-1986) visited South Africa and gave a famous speech before parliament entitled “The Winds of Change are Blowing in Africa,” encouraging the South African government to reform apartheid.  The speech instead provoked a wave of indignation among Afrikaners, who saw this as British meddling in their internal politics, and in October, South African whites, the majority of which were Afrikaners, voted to leave the Commonwealth, abolish the symbolic status of the Queen of England and establish the Republic of South Africa. The same year, another example of “foreigners meddling in internal affairs” was the Nobel Peace Prize accorded to Albert Luthuli (1898-1967), President of the African National Congress.  South African authorities were once again outraged, seeing this as an example of “prejudice of Western liberals toward Afrikaners.”

In contrast, the black liberation movement at the time had a positive impression of the English-speaking world.  Nelson Mandela once called himself “pro-British”, saying that “For Afrikaners, English is a foreign language, while for us, it is a language of liberation.”  In 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill, the two great leaders of the English-speaking world, published the “Atlantic Charter,” which defended the principle of universal human rights.  Afrikaners turned up their nose at this, but the ANC was greatly encouraged, and published its own “African Charter” based on the Atlantic Charter, demanding that blacks receive universal human rights.  The South African Anglican Church became a foundation for the struggle of resistance of black Christians, creating an elite, like Archbishop Tutu, the supported black liberation.

Another reason white South African “nationalists” stubbornly supported the apartheid system was the “theory of cultural difference,” which led them to oppose universal human rights, arguing that white standards for human rights could not be applied to blacks.  If blacks demanded the same freedoms as whites, it was only because they had been poisoned by “British colonialism” and thus “Westernized.”  The only way they could be loyal to their “illustrious tradition” was to be content with slavery.  As a scholar associated with South African authorities put it:  “Just as in the case of racial-biological characteristics, the right to maintain national identity and their cultural identity is a basic and primary human right.”  According to this theory, whites like freedom, and blacks like to be enslaved.  These are their respective “cultural characteristics,” and the most important human right is that of preserving the “cultural characteristics” of each race.  And since blacks also value preserving and protecting their own cultural characteristics, racial apartheid serves to maintain black culture.

Separating blacks and whites so that “each can develop” allows them to avoid outside influence and realize their own cultural “revival.”  For this reason, all races in South Africa should have their own homeland where they can develop their own culture, and the black homeland was “Bantustan.”  The “tribal self-rule” practiced in Bantustan would work to maintain and develop the “natural character” of the black races as well as their cultural traditions, “developing their own racial pride.”  Thus after the Boers took power, they abolished the indigenous parliaments permitted during the period of British rule and forced the “restoration” of the autocratic “Bantu system” of the traditional chieftains.
Black leaders in South Africa rejected these arguments out of hand.  Nelson Mandela pointed out that:  “Human rights are essential to all peoples and nations.  The people want democracy, and the Bantu management system is a reversal of democracy.”

Does China not have something like this?  Facing criticism from the outside world, some Chinese, like the Boers of South Africa, make claim to a sense of “justice” on the basis of having been mistreated historically by outsiders, and argue that foreigners who have mistreated us are not qualified to criticize us.  Yet the process of democratization in South Africa proves that this logic cannot stand up to the tide of history.
 
Translator’s notes

[1] 秦晖：”从南非看中国—‘低人权优势下’的“经济奇迹,’” available online at http://www.aisixiang.com/data/33585.html , published on Aisixiang on May 12, 2010.

[2] In fact, Qin’s work is roundly condemned by those who embrace more conventional ideas of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”  See for example Cao Jiuqiang 曹久强, “Low Human Rights Advantage:  A Misunderstanding of China’s Economic Miracle 中国经济奇迹的误解——低人权优势,” published on February 12, 2012, and available online at http://www.caogen.com/blog/Infor_detail/33651.html .

[3] The references are to places—Dingzhou in Hebei, Dongzhou 东洲 (Shanwei) in Guangdong—where there were clashes between peasants and authorities over inadequate government compensation for  confiscated land in 2005. 

[4] W. A, Lewis (1915-1991) was an economist, originally from the Caribbean, who taught in England, the West Indies, and the United States.  He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Sciences in 1979.

[5] J. H. Boeke (1884-1956) was a Dutch scholar of economics, whose work focused particularly on colonial economies.

[6] Werner Willi Max Eiselen (1899–1977) was a South African scholar and one of the architects of the apartheid system.

[7] Zhao Shukai (b. 1959) is a leading scholar of questions related to China’s villages.

[8] Shamir Amin (1931-2018) was an Egyptian-French political scientist and world-systems theorist.

[9] See http://talk.163.com/06/0627/09/2KK6VKNK00301IJI.html .