Myths & Misconceptions: How the West biases our perception of China

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OPINION

By Nnanda Kizito Sseruwagi

We are interesting animals, humans. Interesting! Nobel Laurette and profound cognitive psychologist Daniel Kahneman, author of “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, has argued that our brains are predisposed to give priority to bad news. That negative perceptions stick to our psyche faster than positive perceptions. If true, nowhere has this attribute of human psychology been more manipulated and caused gross danger than in Africa. Not only has the West captured the intellect of our elite class and used it against us as a people, but it has also prejudiced our understanding, perception and relation with our more developmental partner, China.

As of 2023, China’s investment portfolio in infrastructure projects in sub-Saharan Africa totalled $155 billion over the past two decades. Whereas the West is an equally important partner for Africa, granting us different aid packages into different sectors including pumping money into our Non-Government Organisations where our middle-class elites find easy sustenance, regurgitate Western biases against Africa and forget about our structural-developmental needs, China comes different.

Unlike the West, China has a fresh memory of underdevelopment and knows what it takes to transform from a backward agrarian society to a modern, industrial powerhouse. It shares in Africa’s painful experience of political and economic domination by foreign countries. Therefore, where the West arrogantly lectures us on how to govern ourselves having supported our national budgets with a few dollars, China concentrates on investing immensely in more transformative projects in energy, infrastructure, communication, and others.

China’s relationship with us is more sincere because, unlike the West, they practice in Africa exactly what they practice at home. Their infrastructure spending as a share of the country's GDP in 2021 was nearly 10 times higher than that of the United States and significantly higher than anywhere else in the world. So, we can trust their intentions in Africa when they equally spend more on our infrastructure projects.

In 2022, America spent $877 billion on their military, constituting nearly 40 percent of the total military spending worldwide. However, they would conceive any other global power’s increased military spending as an act of aggression. Therefore, they do not practice what they preach and their intentions cannot be trusted.

And yet America, as the archetype of the West, still controls the global narrative of them as the good guys, and China as the bad guys. Perhaps nowhere has the West’s lies against China been more devastating than with the so-called ‘debt-trap diplomacy’ claims. One of the world’s leading experts on China-Africa relations, Professor Deborah Brautigam of Johns Hopkins University defines debt trap diplomacy as the narrative that China deliberately seeks to entrap developing countries in a web of debt to secure some kind of strategic advantage or grab our national assets.

Uganda has not been insulated from this myth. In November 2021, one of local dailies published a false story, “Uganda surrenders key assets for China’s cash” where it claimed that Entebbe International Airport and other national government assets were exposed to potential takeover by China. Elsewhere, similar allegations have been peddled by Western media. Sri Lanka has been one of the most highlighted victims of these false media stories.

Why is it easy for us to believe lies told to us about ourselves and our Chinese allies by the West? Answers might be found in “Orientalism”, a work of the great Palestinian-American academic, literary critic, political activist, and musician Edward Said. Edward articulates the practical and cultural discrimination that was applied to non-European societies and peoples in the establishment of European imperial domination. He argues that in justification of imperialism, the West claims to know more “essential and definitive knowledge” about the rest of us than we know about ourselves. They have cultural representations derived from fictional Western perceptions of us.

Through the history of colonial rule and political domination, they distorted our intellectual objectivity and skewed us to be culturally sympathetic to them. To aggravate Edward Said’s observations, the British post-colonial theorist, cultural critic, and historian Robert Young questions the very concept of history and the West.

In “White Mythologies: Writing History and the West”, he argues that it is difficult to write history that avoids the trap of Eurocentrism and that our history could simply be a Western myth. If unchecked, today’s prejudices against Africa and China by the West will condense into tomorrow’s history. 

We therefore need to decolonize our intellects collectively as Africans. China also needs to invest more in African Think Tanks and Organisations to support the global narrative that counters Western prejudices against them.

According to the World Bank, China has funded the easement of African countries' debt burden and actively implemented the G20 Debt Service Suspension Initiative for Poorest Countries and has the highest deferral amount among G20 members. They have also not confiscated a single project in Africa because of failing to pay loans. Yet, with all these facts in their favour, Western myths and misconceptions seem to prevail.

The writer is a Lawyer and Research Fellow at the Development Watch Centre