The President of Colombia's Senate Hernán Andrade Serrano has just finished a one-week long trip to the not-long-ago sleeping giant: China. Andrade, a staunch conservative, was accompanied by other officials in a visit to set up a parliamentary cooperation with the aim of strengthening bilateral relations. The first meeting was with Wu Bangguo who together with other 8 comrades belongs to the all powerful Politburo Standing Committee. It is here where major decisions are taken. But what is really the purpose of such a trip?
Wu Bangguo was quoted as looking forward to working together with the Colombian legislature to improve democracy and the legal system. Many would interpret this statement as meaning that the Chinese are eager to learn from Colombia’s achievements in these areas, however at the current state of Colombian political affairs it seems that the Chinese may be in a better position to instruct Andrade and Uribe’s government how such ‘foreign’ areas actually work.Needless to say, neither the Chinese nor the Colombian lawmakers want to truly start a democratization process or anything remotely similar. In fact, Andrade would be extremely interested in imitating the Chinese government’s monopoly on power with their single party rule. Colombia is an exceptional pupil. After all it could be argued that Colombia has reached, if not surpassed, China in human rights violations, wage exploitation, deterioration of workers rights, numbers of internally displaced citizens, crackdowns on minorities and their discrimination.
Something else that Andrade may learn is ‘guanxi’, which may not be familiar to Colombian politicians, but what it stands for certainly is. ‘Guanxi’ can be roughly defined as “relationships between or among individuals creating obligations for the continued exchange of favors”. In the Chinese political and business world this is a euphemism for corruption, which costs China more than it spends on education every year. Hopefully this is a statistic that Colombia is not close to surpassing.
Officially the reason for the trip, as Andrade candidly points out, is obtaining Chinese investment and technology. Of course the technological knowledge will not be easily transmitted. In the end the Chinese, against all odds and obstacles, were and are being capable of catching up, in technological terms, the only superpower. Hence, it is the abundant capital to be invested in infrastructure, energy development and port construction among others that is behind the tour.
As ‘guanxi’ indicates, this kind of cooperation does not come cheap and the Chinese will certainly make sure that they can squeeze as much as possible, and more. China’s appetite for land, natural resources and commodities to fuel its growth seems inexhaustible it now being the world's third largest economy and steadily growing. Just last November China released its first policy white paper on Latin America and the Caribbean. In 2006 China released its white paper on Africa and it is well known the role that China has played in internal conflicts in Sudan, Zimbabwe, Congo, Equatorial Guinea and Nigeria among others.
Colombian politicians do not have a problem in changing laws, promote human rights violations, increase poverty levels, foment the number of displaced and spread the wealth from the rightful owners of the land and natural resources to foreign companies. In other words the government would be selling the country to another foreign power; one that does not publicly criticizes human rights violations and the assassination of trade union leaders. This cooperation is based on mutual non-interference; ‘guanxi’ at its best.
Author Sebastian Castaneda is Colombian studies psychology and political economy at the University of Hong Kong
