It’s a great pleasure for me to come back to South Africa to attend the 4th meeting of China-Africa Think Tanks Forum. This would provide me with an excellent opportunity to meet old friends and get acquainted with new friends. Therefore, I’d like to express my sincere appreciation to the organizers, sponsors, supporters and participants of the forum and wish the meeting a complete success!

 

The title of my speech is A CHINESE’ UNDERSTANDING OF AFRICA AND SOME PERSONAL OPINIONS, and I’m going to talk about 3 aspects: my encounter with Africa, experience and lessons gained and my personal reading into Africa’s future.

 

1. Almost all my life I’ve been devoted to promoting mutual understanding, friendship and cooperation between China and Africa in general and those among the political parties in particular. In the year 1977, I graduated from Beijing Foreign Languages Institute and was assigned a job with the International Department of the ruling political party in China- the Communist Party of China (CPC). I started as an interpreter, and became a researcher later. The first African delegation I received in 1978 was a group of “freedom fighters” that went into exile after the Soweto massacre in June, 1976. And the first time I came to Africa was to accompany the CPC representative to attend the 2nd national congress of the ruling CCM of Tanzania in 1982. Next time I myself became a member of the CPC delegation when we were invited by the FRELIMO Party of Mozambique in 1983. My last visit to Africa was last February, to attend Forum of African Progressive Parties and CPC, in Addis Ababa. In between, I’ve visited some 40 African countries, meeting leaders, presidents and secretary generals of various political parties.

 

I have also met with some people under a different “hat”. In 1981, CPC, together with other political parties, mass organizations, and important personages from all walks of life, formed the Chinese Association For International Understanding (CAFIU), for which I’m now a vice-president, but at the very beginning I worked for its “research center”. My first visit to South Africa in 1991 was accompanying the secretary general of CAFIU and we were invited by South Africa Foundation. And then, I, as a researcher of CAFIU, came to SA again and spent some time with Wits University.

 

My efforts to understand Africa also included international academic exchange. The Ford Foundation of the U.S. supported 6 American universities to form a U.S-China African Studies Exchange Committee, and, through that arrangement, I went to the U.S. thrice to attend the African Studies Association (ASA) annual conference. We also received Africanists from the UK, France, Russia, etc. The culmination of my experience in  international academic exchange was a joint project of comparative study of Chinese, Swedish and American foreign aid to Tanzania jointly conducted by scholars from four countries. The project was supported by Swedish government and the result was published by McMillan.

 

One of the features of my encounter with Africa is integration of theory with practice. This was partly resulted from China’s “emancipation of mind campaign” at the very beginning of the reform which established the thesis that the sole criterion to judge truth is practice. Here, by theory, I mean theories proposed by Africans, Americans and Chinese alike, and the same is true for practice. But I certainly cherish my own practice more than that of other people. I certainly regard my experience as Chinese Ambassador to the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia between March, 2001 and August, 2004 as the climax of my encounter with Africa, and during my tenure the 2nd ministerial conference of Forum for China-Africa Cooperation was held in Addis Ababa.

 

2. What have I gained from all these encounters with Africa?

 

First, let me say a few words about what I regard as “Chinese” methodology and theory of knowledge. As I mentioned just now, my encounter with Africa coincided with China’s reform and opening-up, the starting point of which was to discard dogmatism and emphasize a better understanding of what we call the “actual national conditions” prevailing in the country. So, in my endeavor to understand Africa, I also started with a Marxist dialectic and historical materialist methodology, trying to understand present-day Africa by learning as much as possible about its history. But, at the same time, thanks to the emancipation of mind campaign and international academic exchange, I didn’t refuse to learn from other “Africanists’” achievements. Yet, the most important part of my knowledge about Africa is the daily practice of the African people themselves that I observed on the spots. They are not only “explaining” the continent, but also actually changing the continent all the time. And, through cooperation in all sectors with them, we Chinese are also participating in their practice, and this is the most reliable source of true knowledge of Africa. And, this is a continuation of the traditional Chinese philosophy and theory of knowledge: integration of knowledge and practice.

 

Secondly, I wish to emphasize that I’m optimistic about Africa’s future. In the last 40 also years, together with Africans, I’ve experienced both jubilant and difficult moments in contemporary Africa. Through all the twists and turns, I believe, one African country after another, have found the development path and strategy that suit their national conditions in this globalizing world. Let me talk about my experience with Ethiopia as an example. After the dramatic change in the former Soviet Union and east Europe, Mengistu regime collapsed and Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) came to power. For a moment, there seemed real danger for the country to split and disintegrated just like the former Yugoslavia, not to mention the hunger and draught that haunted every now and then. An EPRDF delegation came to visit us in 1994, the purpose of which was to observe what we were doing to promote economic development in general, and agricultural development in particular. We explained our experience, both positive and negative ones, and encouraged them to carefully study their own national conditions and explore the development strategy that suited them. Three years later, I paid a return visit, and was informed by the now “old friends” that they had found their “path”-an agricultural development-led industrialization. Instead of building socialism, they would concentrate on developing “market economy”, but that didn’t mean that the state would have nothing to do. Actually, there were two things that must be done by the state: infrastructural-development and capacity-building. I was a little bit surprised. But, after a field trip to the northern part of the country, I was convinced that they meant what they were saying. Another four years later, I was dispatched to Ethiopia as the Chinese Ambassador. That was the best job I could hope for. As the ruling party had a very clear development strategy, it was not difficult at all for me to decide what I should do: to encourage Chinese to participate in various ways the host government’s efforts of building infrastructures like road, power and telecommunication, and human resource development, all in mutually-beneficial way.

 

I left Ethiopia in 2004 and started to return in 2010. Each time I would find something new. What’s more, in country like Angola, I’ve found qualitatively higher level of bilateral cooperation between China and Africa. As Chairman Mao used to say, those who are in daily practice have the real knowledge.

 

3. What will these experiences inform me about Africa’s future? Or, what, in my personal opinion, are the new trends in post-2015 development and African relations with the world?

 

Under the present circumstances of the world economic situation, most people are cautious if not pessimistic. The advanced economies are more divided, and there are still a lot of uncertainties. The signs of recovery in the U.S. might not be strong enough for the Federal Reserve to raise the interest rate this month, but hesitating for too long may miss the opportunity to get ready for the next recession. The debts in Europe are still high. Even the emerging economies are slowing down and there has appeared in China a New Normal of mid-high speed of growth and more urgent need to improve the growth model and uplift its place in the global production and value chains.  These slowing-downs have already affected the global prices for commodities, which is certainly no good news to Africa, a continent of raw material producers. And in Africa, people talk about the dilemma that superficial high growth rate might not lead to transformation of the economy and a sustainable development. But in China, we are confident that all challenges are at the same time opportunities for us to reform and readjust, something we might hope to postpone under different conditions.

 

I’m more optimistic about Africa than many other people, as I have already explained. I have seen not only the GDP growth rate figures, but real development sustaining them. I’ve seen clearer strategies, better defined targets, more effective policies, improved environment for business sectors, stronger efforts to mobilize and implement, as well as better coordinated international cooperation. I still remember what the late Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said in 2010, during my first return to Ethiopia after my tenure as ambassador, that the economies of China and Africa had become a lot more complimentary to each other.

 

Compared with 2000, the year first ministerial conference of FOCAC was held, I’d like to say, both China and Africa have made tremendous progress, and we now have almost all the resources needed to expand cooperation: strong consensus among top-level leaders, huge demands for improved infrastructures, engineering corporations with more advanced technology and more experience, better financing facilities, etc.   But there are always room for better mutual understanding, improved arrangement for project selection and implementation.

 

Now I’d like to conclude by saying that I feel that I’ve had a very worthy life. Dr. Henry Kissinger, after meeting with President Xi Jinping, pointed out that Xi’s generation was the first generation in China in one and half century that has not experienced any war. I belong to that generation. In that sense, we are very lucky. We’ve seen tremendous change in our lifetime. We don’t simply see them. We join the efforts to realize them. And all these started with a better understanding of our motherland, and then move to a better understanding of the world and our era.

 

For me, I’ve concentrated on a better understanding of Africa, through concrete practice of cooperation, among the political parties, as well as think tanks, and have found a lot of satisfaction in the process. I wish to say that there remains a lot to be done.