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@SecBlinken is the latest in a long string of US Secretaries of State to propagate the widely-held myth that China imports large amounts of workers to work on infrastructure projects in Africa -- something scholars have debunked numerous times. 1/7
In a virtual meeting yesterday with African students, Blinken cautioned them about China: "are they bringing their own workers with them or are they giving jobs to people in the country where they’re making investments?” 2/7
The evidence just isn't there to support this assertion. Instead, data from scholars like @estariade & @WeiweiChen16 show that local employment rates on Chinese construction projects are often as high as 90% in places like Ethiopia and 74% in Angola. 3/7
https://www.soas.ac.uk/news/newsitem141431.html
https://www.soas.ac.uk/news/newsitem141431.html
Researchers Barry Sautman and Yan Hairon survey 400 Chinese enterprises in Africa and found similarly high rates of local employment in countries like Zambia (85%). https://iems.ust.hk/tlb5 4/7
The fact is that China doesn't have the surplus labor to export internationally even if it wanted to. Secondly, the cost of Chinese labor is very high today, so much so that a growing number of companies are offshoring production to other regions with lower labor costs. 5/7
What's concerning here is that if the Secretary is clearly ill-informed on an issue as basic as this one, it's quite likely then that he doesn't have a grasp on the many other more complex aspects of Chinese engagement in Africa and the Global South. 6/7
Equally worrisome is that the State Department does not appear to be evolving its understanding of the Chinese presence in Africa. When four consecutive Secretaries of State over the course of a decade+ propagate the same misinformation, well, that's a problem. 7/7
