CHAPTER 7: WHOSE IDENTITY, WHOSE CONSTRUCTS AND WHOSE INTEREST? THE SYNTHESIS OF PRIMARY AND SECONDARY DATA IN
2.5. Zambia-China Relations during Southern Africa’s Independence Struggle
As has been mentioned in the previous section, Zambia was one of the first Southern African countries to gain independence. This feat came with a lot of responsibility: the country had to offer succour to liberation movements from other southern African countries that were still agitating for their own independence. Zambia formed a part of what was then called the Frontline States (Shaw 1979), an organisation of Southern African nations that was created in order to aid the birth of non-racial democracy during apartheid in South Africa. This reality impacted on Zambia’s foreign policy and credibility as a non-aligned power. The dynamics of the day were that liberation movements, like the South African Communist Party and the African National Congress, received a lot of Soviet aid and hence were more inclined towards the Communist camp in the Cold War. China was also to prove an important player in this regard as it also supported certain liberation movements (Peh and Eyal 2010; Kragelund 2014) enjoying Zambia’s succour, like the Zimbabwe African National Union. The fact that Zambia hosted countries that had strong ties to the communist camp questioned Zambia’s commitment to non- alignment in its foreign policy.
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China recognised Zambia a few days after the latter gained independence (Taylor 2006). Kaunda described Zambia and China as “all-weather friends” (Kopinski and Polus 2011; Duggan 2016), an allusion that the two countries maintained close relations irrespective of prevailing circumstances in the international system. Kaunda, of course, was not invariably incautious of China. Taylor (2006:31) reports that “Kaunda was extremely wary of allowing Zambia to become a centre for liberation intrigues as well as being suspicious of Communist China’s motives.” This brings in perspective the chequered nature of China-Zambia relations. According Carmody and Hampwaye (2010), relations between Zambia and China have undergone three phases. They argue that the first phase was characterized by solidarity, the second by geopolitics and the third by geoeconomics (see also Mensah 2010). The lynchpin of solidarity between China and Zambia was the intersecting interest of ending colonialism where it was extant, and hegemonism in global politics.
While interested in ending white rule in other African countries, Zambia also hankered for lesser or no dependency on white-ruled Rhodesia and South Africa. One of the major points of dependency was the Rhodesian route used to transport Zambia’s exports. China played a pivotal role by constructing the Tanzania-Zambia railway (TAZARA) from the port city of Dar-es- Salam in Tanzania to the Kapiri Mposhi district of Zambia (McGreal2007; Ndulo 2008). This project was huge both in its monetary demand and political significance. It confirmed China’s commitment to end Zambia’s reliance on the southern route (Hampwaye, 2008). It also presented China as a credible anti-colonialist power more than Western countries to whom that idea had been broached and mooted but was never entertained. Van Dijk (2009:10) writes that China undertook the TAZARA project “because no other donor was willing to provide the necessary support to the socialist government of Tanzania.” At the time China was still a “very poor”
country but still undertook the massive project (Chen and Myers 2013). According to George Yu (1971) the railway line was a landmark in China’s foreign policy. For Tanzania and Zambia China’s commitment represented the culmination “of a long and frustrating dream … which would contribute both to the economic development of the two countries and Eastern Africa and to the support of ‘the liberation struggle in Southern Africa’” (Yu 1971:1101).
An empirical research done by Song (2015) has recently revealed that the construction of the railway was mooted from as early as 1963 before Zambia got independence. The declassified
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material Song uses states that both Kaunda and Nyerere had made continuous appeals to the United States, Britain, the World Bank and the USSR, with their appeals failing to attract aid.
China was at the time involved in a conflict with the Soviet Union and was thus reasonably eager to find allies at the international level. Its decision to carry out a project from which richer players had shrunk was a victory to China’s anti-colonial propaganda and firmly established it as a strong member of the Third World. It has to be said that Kaunda was initially reluctant to enlist Chinese aid and to put a high premium on Zambia’s relations with China (see Taylor 2006).
However, the seeming reluctance of bigger economies to help with the construction of the railway, and the Unilateral Declaration of Independence by Ian Smith’s Rhodesia, gave more urgency to the necessity of the railway and China’s willingness to commit to its construction convinced Kaunda of China’s intentions in ending dependency on colonial powers and minority- ruled countries (Song 2015).
Ideology still played a role in cementing relations between Zambia and China after Mao’s death.
However, these relations were also influenced by post-Mao China’s pragmatic approach to international relations (emphasis on economic development rather than usage of ideology as the only basis of international relations) (Anshan 2007) and a growing agitation for democratic reform in one-party ruled Zambia. There was at the time, a general lull in China-Africa relations.
Despite this let-up, however, in the 1980s China embarked on another major investment in Zambia which came in the form of the Zambia-China Mulungushi Textile Factory in Kabwe (Carmody 2009).
Ian Taylor (2006:172) argued that compared to the earlier period of China-Zambia relations, “aid to Zambia was allowed to decline before Tiananmen.” The anti-government protests of 1989 at Tiananmen Square were to prove a turning point in international opinion on China’s foreign policy. China had been thoroughly trying to rehabilitate its international repute after Mao, and was shedding much of its communist fanaticism. However, the high-handed means used to end the protest, and the resultant death toll, shattered Western goodwill towards China. Africa, and Zambia in particular, was more sympathetic to China’s mode of ending dissent and more credulous to China’s explanation that Western censure after Tiananmen was driven more by the West’s imperialist tendencies and instinctual interference in Third World politics. Tiananmen also showed how tenacious China was in retaining political homogeneity and preventing the
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predicted defeat of communism which had swept most of East Europe at the time. China was once again alive to Africa’s importance in international affairs. It made donations towards building medical clinics and upgrading “the Engineering School at the University of Zambia”
(Taylor 2006:172).