ChinainAfrica

Against the wishes of those in Beijing who warn against awarding Chinese dissidents the Nobel Peace Prize, Hu Jia has found himself on this year’s shortlist. According to Forbes’ Tina Wang: 

Hu Jia has advocated, through political articles published online, in support of awareness of rural AIDS sufferers, democratic rights, religious freedom and Tibetan self-determination. He directs a U.S.-based organization that commemorates the “June Fourth Movement,” the protests in Tiananmen Square that resulted in the government crackdown of 1989. He also directs a health institute in Beijing and founded Loving Source, an AIDS nongovernmental organization.

The only other China-related honoree thus far is the Dalai Lama, who received the prize in 1989. The Nobel Committee’s choice of a Chinese activist would amount to a strong nod to critics of Beijing’s policies.

Bloomberg.com’s William Pesek speculates on how China might be dragged down by the Wall Street crash

Chavez appears to be turning away from the US and towards China as the future major importer of Venezuelan oil, according to Forbes’ Paul Maidment.

Chavez paid a three-day visit to Beijing in late September during which he and Chinese leaders struck deals to build four oil tankers and to construct or upgrade more oil refineries in China capable of processing Venezuela’s crude. PetroChina (nyse: PTR - news - people ) just upgraded the Liaoyang refinery to that end. China and Venezuela also agreed to build a refinery in Venezuela’s Orinoco Basin and launch a joint oil-development project there, potentially one of the world’s largest oil fields.

China currently buys 4% (330,000 barrels of oil a day) of Venezuela’s crude. Chavez wants to get that up to 1 million barrels by 2012. China also recently signed a $3 billion oil deal with Iraq, and is meant to begin receiving oil supplies from Turkmenistan in 2009. Coupled with its deals with Angola, Nigeria, Russia, and Sudan - among several others - it seems that “non-interference” has its advantages.

Duncan Green puts the American bailout in international perspective: 

To put the proposed Wall Street bailout into perspective. $700bn:

• Would clear the accumulated debt of the 49 poorest countries in the world ($375bn) twice over
• Is almost 5 times the annual amount of extra aid needed to achieve all the Millennium Development Goals on poverty, health, education etc ($150bn a year)
• Is about 7 years of current global aid levels ($104bn in 2007)
• Is enough to eradicate all world poverty for over two years (UNDP  calculates it would take $300bn to get the entire world population over the $1 a day poverty line).

On the other hand it’s

only a quarter of the cost of the Iraq war ($3 trillion on Joseph Stiglitz’ calculation )

a half of annual global military spending ($1339 bn)

Those at the World Bank’s AfricaCan blog are also speculating on the impact of the crisis on Africa. To this I would add that the current crisis has put China in a rather advantageous position vis-a-vis its African ‘friends’ - at least for now.

The folks over at the World Bank’s PSD Blog have produced a map of China’s Administrative Divisions labeled as other countries with equivalent populations. By my count there are close to 40 countries (!) that together comprise the population of Mainland China. Take a look.

Gideon Rachman has a column in yesterday’s FT in which he suggests that the recent US economic troubles may signal a shift in global political power, though perhaps not as quickly as one may think. Citing Pan Wei, director of the Center for Chinese and Global Affairs at Beijing University, Rachman captures the Chinese sentiment:

“My belief is that in 20 years we will look the Americans straight in the eye – as equals. But maybe it will come sooner than that. Their system is in chaos and they need our money to rescue them.”

Yet according to Rachman there are three key reasons why this reality may not be so quick to materialize:

1. Even if the American market is no longer the be-all-and-end-all for China and India, it is still extremely important.
2. The Chinese economic engine has already been sputtering, for other reasons. In Beijing and Shanghai, the price of smart apartments has been falling sharply, and the Shanghai stock exchange is down 60% over the past year.
3. The fact that American consumption is falling for the first time in eighteen years inevitably means that China will grow more slowly in the coming year

And, with today’s drop in Asian stocks, the global shift surmised by Pan Wei seems less likely.

During my recent absence from the blogosphere several new and noteworthy development blogs have emerged for your reading pleasure:

• The newest addition to the World Bank Group family of blogs, Africa Can End Poverty, spearheaded by Shanta Devarajan. 
• Oxfam’s head of research, Duncan Green, has an excellent development blog, From Poverty to Power (not new, but certainly noteworthy) 
• And it would appear that Bono (yes, Bono) has become the latest development blogger, blogging from the Millennium Development Goals Conference.

In a series of earlier posts I had noted Turkey’s growing interest in forging relations with Africa. According to The Jamestown Foundation, Afro-Turkish relations are indeed an emerging force in South-South cooperation: 

Turkish interest in Africa is underwritten by soaring bilateral trade: while Turkey’s trade volume with the entire African continent was $5 billion in 2003, Gul noted that with government encouragement, Turkish-African trade had been increasing annually by double digit figures since 2004 and exceeded $12 billion last year, a figure that his government hoped to increase to $30 billion by 2010

According to the report, it appears that Turkey’s approach to developing trade with African nations differs from that of China, or even the US. Unlike the macro-projects pursued by most Western donors (and China), Turkey is concentrated on lower profile development issues such as agriculture, which carries the promise of affecting positive change in the lives of many across the continent. The underperformance of the critical agriculture sector remains a major drag on Africa’s development, and has been neglected by both donors and governments over the past two decades.  Turkish assistance may prove to be precisely the boost the continent needs.

According to a report released by PREM entitled Rising Income Inequality in China: A Race to the Top, income inequality in China has increased at rapid rates in the past two decades, as noted in Figure 1:

At the same time, strong growth has meant that all income groups have seen pretty substantial economic gains. Authors Luo and Zhu explain:

The dynamics of divergence across these sub-national areas have taken the form of a “race to the top”—meaning that all segments of the population, including the poor with low education in lagging inland rural areas, have experienced gains in average income

Moreover: 

for all eight provinces, rural poverty headcount more than halved from 50.1% in 1989 to 22.4% in 2004; urban poverty headcount fell by a-third from 19.0% in 1989 to 13.5% in 2004

Coupled with these phenomena, however, is an even more interesting one: as income inequality has grown in China, the distribution of capital in the form of education has actually decreased. In other words, access to education has become highly concentrated in wealthier coastal and urban areas and is a fundamental factor underlying the surge in income inequality. Indeed, the increase in returns to education often initially leads to an increase in inequality. As David Dollar observes, however, such changes will ultimately tend to reduce inequality if equality of opportunity, especially equality in access to education, can be achieved over time. 

Long story short: poverty reduction occurs not only when a country opens its economy to the world, but also when it is able to support a sound education system and an educated populace.

Dell Inc. unveiled four low-cost computer models for emerging markets today. The computers, priced at around $450, are targeted especially at China and India, two of the fastest growing economies.  According to the New York Times:

The move reflects a growing focus by global computer, automobile, consumer goods and other companies on creating products for increasingly prosperous customers in China, India and other emerging economies.