Last week’s global tech news coverage focused on Huawei revealing its Mate 60 smartphone, which occurred alongside the visit by US commerce secretary Gina Raimondo to China. For the Chinese, this was a “show and tell” moment that lifted the veil on the unintended consequences of export controls on American technologies dispatched to China.
A few weeks earlier, Apple, an American national champion whose manufacturing activities are deeply reliant on Chinese assembly, also launched its latest smartphone. The restrictions imposed by the Chinese state on the use of iPhones in the public service and the expected rise in restrictions on technology transfer by Washington are setting the stage for an unprecedented contest in a context that some fear may quickly move from cold to hot.
Are we in an age of techno-mercantilism? Or a green imperialism that can signal the bells of war? It is often difficult to tell, and rather easier to say maybe both? Mercantilism is a term often used to describe the rise in protectionism and the skirting of a rules-based multilateral order in pursuit of national security or climate goals. It has a checkered history as a driving force of colonialism and war on a global scale.
It is not just “a doctrine of money, or of the balance of trade, tariff barriers, protective duties or navigation laws”, as German economist Gustav von Schmoller noted, but rather the path to a total transformation of society and its institutions, including the state and how it relates to its citizens and other states. In these relations, Von Schmoller observed, great economic powers use their economic superiority in international relations to retain weaker nations in dependence through a combination of debt, unfavourable terms of trade, political annexation and, ultimately, economic exploitation.
What is characterised in today’s language as a contest between Beijing and Washington may be better explained as a contest for economic and technological superiority, with its own risks of war and attendant relations of dependence and subordination. Is it then imperialist?
To the degree that technological advances have given rise to a new rush or competition to secure the supply of raw materials for green technology by territorial and regional annexation, and the partitioning of the world between foes and friends in pursuit of this, it can be characterised as such. The heightened interest in the political developments in key source countries and regions for these raw materials is an example.
Where does a country like SA fit into these new trends, and what are the options for different terms of incorporation and structural transformation?
SA needs to leverage its existing relationships in the upstream elements of mining and extractive technology (chemicals and mining machinery) to explore, where it has not already, investment and market opportunities in new mining destinations or across new commodity chains. This will also require meaningful investment in know-how by our scientific community.
Related to the above, SA may want to explore the “reshoring” possibilities associated with a shift away from China, Europe and the US towards other destinations by different contending parties as a nonaligned player, and embed these within mutually beneficial, rather than dependent, relations within and beyond the Global South.
We have started to see such supply destination diversification in some sectors, and SA may want to build such capabilities in elementary and intermediate activities in key electronics, energy, automotive and other value chains.
At the recent Eastern Cape Investment Conference, the announcement of investments in a green ammonia and vanadium redox flow battery project in the province is an example of the opportunities that exist to lessen the relations of dependency and unequal exchange between the developed and developing worlds. It offers a window of possibility in a world changing in ways we are yet to meaningfully understand.
• Cawe is chief commissioner at the International Trade Administration Commission. He writes in his personal capacity.
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