The present convergence of finance and wireless technology has generated considerable enthusiasm in development circles about the promise of connectivity and FinTech to improve quality of life and create wealth on the African continent. The prototypical example that proponents point to is M-Pesa, a service run in Kenya by Safaricom. Launched in 2007, M-Pesa is a form of mobile banking which uses cellphone accounts as a financial service, permitting transfers and credit extension facilities. Initially funded by the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID), the service was commercialized through a joint venture by Vodafone and Safaricom.

By 2018 there were 30 million customers and 6 billion yearly transactions. By most assessments, the service is a success. This blogpost revisits that conclusion by asking how these kinds of FinTech technologies, in their current configuration, perpetuate neocolonial relations. Replacing direct military rule, neocolonial relations can be understood as the coordinated exploitation of developing countries by advanced capitalist ones through their clout in international political economy. If such a claim at first appears like a stretch because it appears conspiratorial, it is worth recalling how European imperial and colonial practices were naturalized and normalized for most of modernity.

While ‘the methods of neo-colonialists are subtle and varied’ let us begin with the obvious. Desires to ‘bring Africa online’ in the 2000s had to confront stark realities born from both (i) the legacies of colonial infrastructure planned primarily to support resource extraction or settler communities, and (ii) the IMF imposed structural adjustment policies that slashed state maintenance budgets and social, economic, and political infrastructure. So, when digital neo-modernization advocates maintained that without access to the internet people in the Global South would face a digital divide which would exacerbate poverty that stemmed from the already asymmetrical relations in the global system, they overlooked the very history that gave rise to those inequalities and deficiencies in the first place. But this rhetoric of digital inclusion tended to overlook the historical materialist method at the heart of discussions about digital inequalities. Indeed the ‘connectivity paradigm’ currently promoted by the World Economic Forum and Facebook focuses on building infrastructure to create markets and customers, which will bridge the digital divide. However, this conceptualization ignores the insights of the scholarship around uneven and combined development or the research on the spatial fix required by capitalism to stall social problems in metropoles. In other words, for all the discussion about connectivity when digital neo-modernizers deny the connections of history; they deny how some polities are rich because others are poor.

Take the case of rising household over-indebtedness mediated by micro-lending platforms like M-Pesa. Sociological studies of the working-class in Kenya, like that by Kevin Donovan and Emma Park, demonstrate how these digitally mediated financial markets create debt traps for this class. In effect their earnings are used to pay off debts and more loans are taken against future earnings to service existing debts. This digitally mediated indebtedness of the working class is facilitated by the combination of the increase in the volume of rents extracted in the modern financial economy as well as, crucially, analysis of user generated data to assess their creditworthiness. In short, social reproduction is articulated through the logic of this financial system in turn causing severe maldistribution. Through this employment of FinTech ‘poverty is understood as a new frontier for profit-making and accumulation.’ These are the kinds of processes that Dan Kotliar and Abeba Birhane have in mind when they write about data orientalism and the algorithmic colonization of Africa respectively.

While the excellent critical literature on FinTech in Africa is growing, too often this work is lost in the analytical (and political) noise of neo-modernization. As the connectivity paradigm illustrates, this ideology has a naïve comprehension of technology as a social form. By contrast, when approached from a critical perspective, FinTech is not confined to reconfiguring or extending new services. Rather it involves creating new markets, introducing new machinery to reduce labor costs and more generally aiding inter-sector competition. But most importantly, FinTech is concerned with enclosing and capturing the value in existing informal lending practices the African working class has already built themselves. For example, South African informal saving networks are estimated to hold US$3 billion. To put it another way, the purpose of FinTech is to readjust the balance of power between capital and labor. This means that the central issue is not about the outcomes this technology produces, nor is it even a matter of access. The fundamental question is about how control rights of this technology reside with a minority of shareholders and how their interests are adjacent to the interests of their firms’ customers. And through indebtedness, FinTech is effectively creating a ‘digital-creditor-debtor-divide’ in Africa.

There is considerable value in revisiting Kwame Nkrumah’s Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism to understand the neocolonial components of algorithmic capitalism (informational or cybernetic capitalism). Published in 1965 and written in the wake of British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s 1960s Wind of Change speech in the Parliament of South Africa in which the Conservative British government signaled that is would no longer actively oppose independence movements, neocolonialism as Nkrumah described it, was a technique of indirect rule kept in place through a combination of economic arrangements and treaties, innovations in communication technology, and with the assistance of local sympathetic agents. In short, Nkrumah argued that European politicians like Macmillan and Charles de Gaulle offered disingenuous statements about the formal end of colonial rule, in part because newer mechanisms of colonial exploitation were possible to implement.

As a quick illustration of the durability of neocolonialism as a form of imperial rule, consider how, sixty years after formal political independence, the CFA franc has kept former French colonies under the influence of France monetary policy and structuring the economic relationship between France and these former colonies. Fanny Pigeaud and Ndongo Samba Sylla’s recently published Africa’s Last Colonial Currency concretely shows how 162 million people in 15 states have France mediate their monetary policy. When paired with the frequent military interventions that still take place, as Nkrumah accounted for, African populations continue to be subjects of scientific and financial experimentation by global powers.

Even reviewing Nkrumah’s sequence of chapters gives an early indication of the larger argumentation and stakes of his thesis. “Exercised through economic or monetary means” and “by a consortium of financial interests” imperialist finance and its currencies enable capitalists to establish corporations dedicated to extracting raw materials from concessions. By pressing labor—whose wages are artificially depressed through monopoly in economic sectors and the monopsony of labor (a market situation in which there is only one buyer) like in many African extractive economies—the profits of which are repatriated to metropoles through monetary zones and foreign banks. Indeed, at the time the book even caught the eye of the CIA in November of 1965. Nkrumah’s government would not last even four more months. It was deposed in February 1966 by a military coup. While it is difficult to adequately discuss Ghanaian politics in the 1960s in this venue (and more generally we must resist mono-causal explanations) it is nevertheless telling that Nkrumah’s removal set in motion a ‘diplomatic realignment’ that benefited the West.

Indeed, it is this kind of protracted material struggle between oppressor and oppressed that gave rise to the neocolonial critique. In the 1989 edition of The Black Jacobins, CLR James included an appendix ‘From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro’ in which he writes that about the intellectual encounter between the West Indians like Marcus Garvey and George Padmore and Africans like Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah. Calling this “one of the strangest stories in any period of history”, James described how encounters between sets of migrants in European cities led to the formation of groups like the International African Service Bureau, as Theo Williams has previously discussed on roape.net. Being in metropoles these Pan-Africanists had front row seats to witness the transition from ‘the old colonial system’  that had stood since the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference to ‘neocolonialism’ that emerged after World War Two. Through their ‘criticism of the weapon’—to employ a line from Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right—the Pan-Africans made their theory ‘a material force.’

While there are several tendencies in African studies, neocolonialism and neo-modernization represent two divergent conceptualizations of actions occurring on the continent. Despite protestations otherwise, neo-modernization is institutionally, philanthropically, and academically entrenched. It provides the initial frame of reference for design of empirical studies. And it is precisely “because they have already established a near monopoly of what is written on the subject” to enroll some of Walter Rodney’s remarks, that space is made for the neocolonial critique. This critique can, for example, show how local intermediaries facilitate neocolonial rule. Walter Rodney called these local agents’ allegiance to, or cynical cooperation with neocolonial powers, part of the ‘elementary conditions’ of neocolonial rule. For example, as it applies to algorithmic capitalism, the Kenyan government owns 35% of Safaricom. This means that the state gains revenues from the indebtedness of its citizens and the commodification of their data that Donovan and Park describe. But here arises a contradiction, because these revenues may be offset by costs spent to address the social consequences of indebtedness like homeless and mental illness. Indeed, depending upon their mandate, parts of the Kenyan bureaucracy are likely working at cross purposes from one another. This adds conflicting interests to any intra-governmental discussions on how (or if) to regulate lending apps like M-Pesa.

To recap, aside from the skews and parameters that arise from internal properties, it is true that there is nothing intrinsically exploitative about digital technology. That said, due to the global supremacy of the private property regime, the meaning and operation of these digital infrastructures is overdetermined by capitalist values. Accordingly, using neocolonialism in studies of digital sociology can help us focus less on the mechanisms of this or that platform, and more on how platforms are part of the basic forms of a society that shape social relations. In this vein, neocolonialism provides a different methodology—a counter-narrative that foregrounds the experience of the oppressed—that comes to vastly different conclusions to the neo-modernization perpetuated in the elite ‘fintech-philanthropy-development complex’.

This complex promotes platforms to advance economic liberalization and skirting existing regulations believing that such policy courses can nominally improve material conditions for Africans. However, in practice due to platform mediated financialization setting up conditions of perpetual insolvency, the lived-experience of the African working class is delimited by the interests of metropolitan capital, an arrangement that is reminiscent of the same kinds of subordination that Nkrumah described in the latter half of the 20th century. Much like in the 20th century this most recent iteration of neocolonialism will have long reverberations.

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This article was first published in the Review of African Political Economy Journal.

One afternoon in the heart of the Waso rangelands in Isiolo County, I was debating with Borana elders on the best measures to mitigate the effects of the recurrent droughts. An elder rose and gave wise counsel, saying he was nostalgic about the good old days, “when we had plenty of milk and households in Waso could effortlessly fend for themselves without help”.

The elder said that because of climate change and “external help”, they slaughter and sell part of the herd at a low price to be eaten by others for nutritional gain. He concluded, “if they share our concern, tell the external agents to outwit the vultures and come earlier”, implying that most support arrives too late, at the height of an emergency, when herds have been partly decimated by the drought and the vultures have already arrived to scavenge for carcasses.

While said tongue-in-cheek, the elder’s request underscores the frustration felt by the “beneficiaries” because of the external agencies’ apparent lack of a basic understanding of dryland dynamics and the challenges of getting needs right.

The drylands

The drylands are an extremely heterogeneous environment characterised by among others, low erratic rainfall, high inter-annual climate variability and ecological uncertainty. Globally, drylands occupy 41 per cent of the earth’s land surface and are home to approximately 35 per cent of its population. The dominant livelihood systems in the drylands are pastoralism, agro-pastoralism, and some rain-fed agriculture where the local communities tap into their knowledge to live with uncertainty. In Sub-Saharan Africa alone, an estimated 50 million pastoralists rely on the drylands environment for their livelihoods.

Although historically these regions are considered to be of low economic potential, their diverse pastoral groups play an important role in the modern economy. For example, livestock production in the drylands contributes over 35 per cent of the agricultural sector’s contribution to Kenya’s GDP and accounts for over 80 per cent of household income in the drier regions, employing thousands of people in livestock production and marketing.

Yet despite the potential of the arid and semi-arid areas, the majority of the population in this regions of Kenya lives in deep rural poverty. According to a recently published socio-economic blueprint for Frontier Counties, about 20.5 per cent of Kenya’s poor live in the frontier counties and 64.2 per cent of this population lives below the poverty line, compared to a national average of 36.1 per cent.

The reasons for this lie in both how national planners and policymakers view dryland areas and how investment decisions are made in these regions. Although there have been some changes in some drylands counties following devolution, the knowledge base that has shaped development in this region largely remains the same.

Common misconceptions

Knowledge is key in the interaction of humans with the ecological system, especially in arid areas. However, understanding the challenges facing this important region has been impeded by a number of misconceptions including that: compared with other areas which have traditionally been recognised as “high potential areas”, drylands are remote, poor and degraded and are of little potential except for tourism; dryland areas have low biological productivity compared to the highlands and as such, they are of little economic value apart from providing a means of subsistence to those who live there; dryland communities are a helpless group with weak means and a low adaptive capacity to manage uncertainty; drylands cannot yield a satisfactory return on investment due to the climate risk associated with variable and erratic rainfall; dryland communities are weakly integrated into markets because of their remoteness, their poverty and their reluctance to sell their animals.

Most externally-driven technical solutions continue to be based on misconceptions, including critical elements of planning which are based on partial values of these areas, rather than their total economic value. Being unable to place a value on marketable assets in the arid and semi-arid areas of Kenya, decision-makers dwell much more on the erroneous narrative that pastoralists are not market-oriented. Substantial resources are spent on trying to make pastoralists responsive to the market without addressing the underlying structural challenges of the livestock value chains.

Over the years, the government’s attempts to tap the livestock wealth of pastoralists have not been systematic but have come in waves. These attempts started in the mid-1930s and provoked the famous Akamba Political Protest against forced destocking and the failed attempts to develop stock auctions. Then came the era of the ecological argument that is based on the carrying capacity of the range, and the efforts to force a higher offtake rate in the second half of the 1950s. There followed a number of disjointed livestock development programmes in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Scholars argue that “unfair terms of trade” made these government-led initiatives unattractive.

Pastoralist value chains

Although livestock has traditionally constituted an important currency in most African societies, this is no longer the case in Kenya which has a “crop bias” where agricultural products like tea and coffee are priority export crops and are therefore given the necessary policy support.

This bias was introduced during the colonial era where the settler-occupied “White Highlands” constituted the political and economic core. While there was a fair demand for livestock products in the downcountry, the market was tailored to the needs of the white settlers who influenced the location of key infrastructure, regulations, and governance that barred African herd owners from integrating into the national marketing structure. A good example is the location and operation of the Kenya Meat Commission, which was purposely designed to support the movement of animals slaughtered by white settlers and had little consideration for African herd owners.

Little has changed since independence and post-liberalisation. Persisting elements of colonial legislation such as restrictive livestock movement permits, unfavourable movement schedules and restrictions on trading licences have historically skewed the pastoralist’s relationship to the market.

To date, markets are largely controlled through the organisation of ethnic trade networks where some non-pastoralist groups have better connections to the urban space and a more supportive business environment and subsequently control important activities downstream of the chain.

A good example is the trade network for sheep and goats that extends from Moyale to Kariobangi in Nairobi that systematically locks other pastoralist groups out of the downstream trade at the terminal market. The ownership of slaughter facilities and connection to specific clients for largescale slaughter offers members of this trade network certain preferential trade advantages.

Markets are largely controlled through the organisation of ethnic trade networks where some non-pastoralist groups have better connections to the urban space.

Generally, the trade in livestock from the arid north has always been risky and full of technical pitfalls. Even for today’s professionals, it is booby-trapped with many uncertainties that call for constant creativity and business shrewdness to survive the perennial losses.

The trade in live animals presents multiple risks in the form of quantity losses (reduced weight and number) and quality losses such as altered physical appearance. Animals have a limited shelf life, particularly in the urban environment; after being taken out of their production environment, their appearance deteriorates due to the different climatic conditions and lack of proper forage, which reduces their potential selling price. At times, major losses occur when the animals cannot be sold immediately and their upkeep at the terminal markets leads to high transaction costs.

There are also economic losses, which represent the difference between the potential and the actual economic benefits. In effect, at almost every stage, the livestock entrepreneur is faced with the daunting task of making risky decisions mostly based on incomplete information and under duress.

A second technical problem is the lack of clear demand and supply specifications. Different markets favour different types of livestock while the retail prices fluctuate all the time in tandem with changes in these forces of supply and demand. A trader must make delicate decisions almost every day as to what kind of animals they should buy, in which areas they can buy the livestock, and which of these areas offer supplies at the lowest price. At the same time, the trader must also have some knowledge of which terminal market in the downcountry will offer him the widest profit margin.

As the trade network extends towards the terminal markets in Nairobi, trade relations between the pastoralist traders and the clients who could share more precise market information are further weakened, widening the gap between supply and demand and increasing the economic losses of the traders. It is thus essential that traders have accurate day-to-day information about the shifting supply and demand.

The third problem that faces traders are the unfavourable terms of trade along the pastoral livestock value chain due to the many structural challenges related to price volatility, information asymmetry along the chain, high transaction costs and weak livestock marketing policies.

The long absence of a comprehensive livestock marketing policy (the livestock and livestock product marketing board bill was only passed in 2019) set the stage for minimal investments in marketing infrastructure such as meat processing facilities, cold chains, logistics, and limited coordination among actors.

This has resulted in weak governance of the value chain and contributed to post-harvest losses. Although some marketing aspects were incorporated into the National Livestock Policy Sessional Paper no. 2 of 2008, it still does not specify in detail ways to streamline livestock marketing investments and the sustainable integration of pastoralist livestock producers into the value chains.

Inclusive value chain

As the northern arid areas increasingly become indispensable to the national economy in the face of the emerging oil boom and the expansion of infrastructure corridors, there is a need to realign the value chain agenda with government, donor, and private sector investment priorities.

Already, many county governments in arid and semi-arid counties are leaning towards the regionalisation of livestock markets through the construction of large-scale abattoirs (in Marsabit, Isiolo, Samburu, Wajir and Garissa Counties) and targeting of high-value meat export markets in the Arabian Peninsula. While such efforts are welcome, they should be preceded by discussions on the governance of the value chain, particularly on the position of pastoralist producers in the chain, models of the proposed trading arrangements and opportunities to tap into livestock traceability and other associated opportunities for premium pricing of pastoralist livestock.

The key to unlocking the pastoralist value chain is establishing standards and linkages. The coordination of the value chain from upstream to downstream, improving the flow of market information and price accuracy, and providing a wider choice of potential buyers to livestock entrepreneurs and producers from arid areas are all necessary interventions. In some countries, more transparent trading arrangements, such as livestock auctions, have been tested and have proven successful at improving price transparency, coordination of sales and offering price competitiveness to livestock producers. To this end, the earlier we embrace an ICT trading platform as a step towards improving access to livestock market information the better.

The key to unlocking the pastoralist value chain is in establishing standards and linkages.

In effect, it is important to invest in appropriate ICT technologies that can offer a mechanism to crowdsource market prices to make real-time price information available to buyers and sellers, create a platform for open purchase and sales, improve logistics by maximizing availability and use of transport, and publicise the availability of water, vaccinations, breeding and financial services, among others.

Although still in their early stages, online livestock trading platforms such as Cowsoko are emerging to fix supply-side issues, address limited demand-side market information and improve accessibility to quality cattle.

Invest to produce quality animals

Improvement in rangeland management is another important aspect that needs proper investment. This should start with participatory rangeland mapping to articulate priorities such as the protection of key grazing resources and seasonal access. This could be complemented with a Geographical Information System (GIS) to produce digital maps displaying high spatial precision resource distribution.

Empowering local level governance systems such as Dhedha — the highest geographical unit for resource management among Borana herders — should follow such participatory mapping exercises. County assemblies should support these local grazing management institutions by developing appropriate by-laws. This will necessitate capacity building in by-law formulation and facilitating the by-law development process by the county assemblies. Investment in rangeland governance through agreements and the development of enforcement mechanisms in selected arid and semi-arid counties will also reduce incidences of conflict and foster peaceful coexistence within an agreed governance framework.

The earlier we embrace an ICT trading platform as a step towards improving access to livestock market information the better.

To improve the quality of animals, interventions in animal production should focus on boosting inputs and extension services. Input markets are flooded with sub-standard products, which expose livestock producers and affect the quality of their product. There is a need to streamline production support by embracing modern e-financing tools such as through the e-voucher, a customised debit (ATM) card containing different “e-wallets” which livestock owners can use to make purchases from selected agro-vets, enabling them to access various inputs such as vaccines, medicines, feed, feed supplements, extension services, veterinary care, Artificial Insemination services, among others.

In this regard, valuable lessons can be learned from the IFAD-financed Kenya Cereal Enhancement Programme – Climate-Resilient Agricultural Livelihoods Window (KCEP-CRAL) project where an electronic “e-voucher” scheme was extensively utilised to improve farmers’ access to Agri-inputs and to offer coordinated solutions through Public-Private-Producer Partnerships.

Today, Russian ideologues and propagandists are raising alarms over the “West’s attempts to introduce ideals and norms alien to Russia. They denounce the Russian opposition, which allegedly operates under “orders from the West.” And they stoke fears among television audiences that the West is preparing “nothing short of a war” on Russia. In turn, American, British and Western European commentators accuse the Russian government of waging targeted attacks on Western institutions and conducting an information war against the West.

While all this noise can be tuned out, if you pay attention for just a moment, you quickly realize that the point of all this sensationalism isn’t the content itself but the feeling of comfort these ideologues and publicists evoke. Amid all thе accusations of “Western operatives” and “hybrid warfare,” there’s a nostalgia for the former bipolar order in which Russia — or perhaps more specifically, the post-war USSR — had a clear and leading role. Western politicians and authors, meanwhile, long for times past when they were triumphant champions of the twentieth century’s global conflict.

Preparing for a war gone by

All of these mutual threats hark back to the Cold War, which was more than just a frozen standoff between two superpowers (played out in regional wars). It was also a clear and comprehensible system of international relations, especially when viewed from Moscow and Washington. Each of these global poles flew a flag that other countries were compelled or enticed to rally around — cozying up to the (capitalist) West or to the (socialist) USSR.

From the Western point of view, the twentieth century was dedicated to a deadly standoff against the ideologies of fascism and communism, followed by another one between capitalism and communism as political and economic systems. All of these worldviews and doctrines were formed in Europe more than a hundred years ago. In this sense, Vladimir Putin — who never tires of evoking Russia’s triumph in World War II and the resulting repartition of the globe — holds a distinctly Western point of view. His position may be contentious, but it’s framing is rooted in Westernism all the same.

Meanwhile, hidden by the pall of conflict between capitalism and socialism was another confrontation entirely. The Cold War ruthlessly dragged in third countries, quashing their pursuit of decolonization, sovereign nation building, and the formation of their own political systems, writes Yale historian Odd Arne Westad in one of the best books on the history of the Cold War.

From the Western point of view, the twentieth century was dedicated to a deadly standoff against the ideologies of fascism and communism, followed by another one between capitalism and communism as political and economic systems

From a non-Western point of view — or more precisely, from the point of view of most non-Western people — the main global development of the twentieth century was the appearance of independent nation states from the ruins of European and Asian empires. Of course, people in Egypt, India, China, Pakistan, and Thailand, can imagine what worries Americans and Europeans (indeed, thanks to the ubiquitous spread of the English language, this isn’t so difficult for them to do). But the world looks different “from the other side.” From the perspective of those outside of Washington and Moscow, what’s important isn’t the conflicts “within the Western world,” but rather the relations between former colonies (or states caught in the orbits of these empires) and former colonizers.

Human rights and democracy as neocolonialism

In this prolonged and painful conflict with the West, which goes back much further than the Cold War, Russia occupies a unique and dualistic position in terms of both geography and history. In a recent meeting with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov signed a joint declaration, “on several issues of global governance,” which stated that human rights should be protected “in conformity with national specificities.”

Legal mechanisms aimed at protecting the rights of the individual first appeared in international agreements and legal documents in the 1940s, at the end of World War II and the beginning of the post-war era.

The authors of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Charter of the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, the European Convention on Human Rights and other documents from that period were driven by an effort to protect the groups and nationalities that were victims of the crimes exposed at Nuremberg and in other post-war trials. It was therefore imperative to create a concept of human rights acceptable to conservatives simply because up until the 1940s, the idea of human rights itself was associated with the revolutionary tradition of droits de l’homme and the communist movement. It was important for the Christian Democrats and other centrist parties to create a “Judeo-Christian democratic” version of human rights that denied the communists (who were popular in post-war world) a monopoly on human rights.

The mass killing and widespread suffering of those persecuted during the war years was heightened by the exceptional difficulties Jews and other refugees had crossing borders. Some countries wouldn’t let them out, while others wouldn’t take them in (this included the United States, as evidenced by the unforgettable tragedy of the Voyage of the St. Louis). Human rights protection thus had to exist at a level above borders. The idea of human rights protection, which was established in the Universal Declaration and other post-war documents, arose from the existence of a moral absolute that reigned supreme above nations’ sovereignty over their territory.

This in turn became a predicament for the Soviet Union, even though it was founding member of the United Nations and its ambassador, Alexander Bogomolov, participated in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The leaders of the USSR and the leaders of other socialist states and countries, which in the second half of the twentieth century were called the “third world” (in the sense that they were initially neither capitalist nor communist) came to see “western” human rights as a pretext for interfering in their affairs.

The communists and their satellites saw their human rights not as political and civil rights, but as social rights: the right to have a roof over one’s head, clothes to wear, employment, and social services. While, the West reproached the communists for violating human rights (through suppression of opposition and lack of elections), the communists reproached the West for violating of social rights (due to unemployment and extreme inequality).

Even though Russia has grown closer to China and comes out on China’s side in the battle with the West, Russia still belongs to the “historical West” and, as such, faces grievances from China — and the exact scale of these grievances remains unknown.

Today’s Russian leaders are fond of emphasizing their conservatism and consider themselves guardians of traditional values. Yet the version of human rights they choose is not conservative democratic — it’s socialist. That is to say, it’s based on social rights, rather than civil or political ones.

China has long been at odds with its Western partners over human rights. “China, along with the rest of the developing world, chooses to first prioritize economic and social rights, as opposed to the Western focus on civil and political rights,” explains Phil Ma, a researcher at Duke University. “These rights emphasize collective values and opportunities for economic growth, not just democracy promotion.” More importantly, criticism for human rights violations in Tibet and Xinjiang are taken by Chinese politicians not in the context of the recent Cold War, but in the context of the Century of Humiliation, the period that ended with the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949.

The period from 1842 (the defeat of the Qing Dynasty in the First Opium War) to 1949 (the establishment of the People’s Republic of China), during which China lost a significant amount of territory and economic independence. China suffered one defeat after another at the hands of Western powers, which dictated trade conditions, including supplies of opium to China and taking Chinese cultural treasures to Europe. The destruction of the Old Summer Palace, burned and looted by the British and French during the Second Opium War in 1860, stands as a symbol of China’s foreign humiliation during this period.

In a broader context, contemporary Chinese state leaders act as representatives of a preeminent non-Western power trying to overcome challenges they inherited from the colonial period. These leaders therefore perceive human rights and the spread of democracy as nothing other than the West’s attempt to teach eastern barbarians to be “civilized.” Makau Mutua, a Kenyan-American professor at the SUNY Buffalo School of Law, calls this the “savages-victims-saviors” construction. This approach, in his opinion, is dangerously close to the old imperial notion that western civilizers are called to come and save eastern savages from themselves.

China’s Communist Party bases its legitimacy not in ideology, which lost its relevance when the Cold War ended, but in its role as a nation-building power. It was the party, after all, that brought an end to the era in which China suffered territorial and economic losses from the actions of great powers, namely Great Britain, France, the United States and, yes, Russia.

Celebrating victory over Russia

The Indian essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra opens his book “From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia,” with a story of what the defeat of the Russian navy in the 1905 Battle of Tsushima meant to the world outside the West. Japan, which won the battle, was not the only country celebrating. This good news covered the pages of newspapers in Egypt, China, Persia, and Turkey. It marked the first time in the new era when a non-European country was able to defeat a European power in a full-scale military conflict.

Intellectuals and reformers from the non-European world have regarded that day as a pivotal milestone. Mustafa Kemal, who would later come to be known as Atatürk, wrote that he became convinced at that point that modernization according to the Japanese model could change his country. Jawaharlal Nehru, the then future first prime minister of independent India, recollected how news of Tsushima gave him a breath of inspiration and hope for Asia’s liberation from their subordination to Europe. American civil rights leader and intellectual William E. Dubois wrote of a worldwide surge of “colored pride.”

Historically, Russia has been one of the colonialist powers. At the dawn of the new era, Russia was part of the West; it acted like a Western empire and was regarded as such by the non-European world. China’s grievances towards Russia, which essentially remain in place to this very day, are the standard objections of a former colony to a former colonial empire. When Deng Xiaoping met with Mikhail Gorbachev in Beijing in 1989, the Soviet leader was taken back by the array of “old” issues raised by the Chinese leader. Gorbachev had arrived to iron out relations with the USSR’s partner, only for the Chinese leader to remind him of Russia’s Tsarist policies, humiliations from years past, the territories ceded to Russia in the Treaty of Aigun and the Treaty of Beijing, and China’s resulting territorial disputes.

The communists and their satellites saw their human rights not as political and civil rights, but as social rights: the right to have a roof over one’s head, clothes to wear, employment, and social services.

Gorbachev, like all Russian leaders existing within the Western political agenda, couldn’t come up with a response “Protocol dictated that Gorbachev reply by laying out our position, our vision, but he didn’t do that, as he wasn’t prepared for such a reception. He was silent, effectively agreeing with Deng Xiaoping’s rendition,” recalled Andrei Vinogradov, a China specialist from the Institute of Far Eastern Studies, in a recent interview. In China, the 1969 Sino-Soviet border conflict is also seen as a “pushback against the northern aggressors.” On a recent anniversary of the clash in China, participants of the events were honored with awards.

In March 1969, an armed conflict broke out between the USSR and China over Damansky Island (Zhenbao Island), which is located near Manchuria. The Soviet Union regarded the island as its own, while the PRC saw it as territory Russia obtained thanks to colonial treaties. The clash killed 58 Soviet military personnel and injured 94 others. Estimates of the Chinese casualties range from 100 to 300, though the exact number remains unknown.

The island went to China after the border demarcation in May 1991. China acquired several other islands and territory totaling more than 300 square kilometers (nearly 116 square miles) during demarcation in 2005.

A Different historical perspective

Although the European Union continues to be Russia’s main trading partner, trade with China is on the rise. While seven years ago, the volume of EU trade with Russia exceeded trade with China five times over, today it’s only twice as large. China has already overtaken Germany in the role of Russia’s primary supplier industrial equipment. The relatively modest amounts of Russian natural gas exported to China are now increasing. Military collaboration is becoming ever closer and is most evidently expressed in the form of joint drills. There are realistic prospects of Russia gaining entry into China’s technological sphere of influence, specifically in the area of 5G network construction.

In his research examining the prospects of Russian integration into Pax Sinica (China’s geopolitical space), Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center, has found that for the time being China is exploiting its economic advantage, mostly by extracting better terms of trade — specifically, reduced prices for oil and gas. As Russia’s dependence on China grows, Chinese politicians could very well start to pressure Russia in areas other than commerce, for example to end military alliances with PRC antagonists, or to convince Central Asian countries to permit Chinese military presence on their territory as security for the Belt and Road Initiative. Short-term gains for Russia could turn into long-term losses.

While it’s still expedient for Kremlin politicians to play the role of zealous warriors against the West, Moscow’s non-Western partners have a much longer memory than the Russians do. The Kremlin’s logic is clear, but it’s dictated by views that were formulated during the Cold War years. The Russian perspective encompasses merely several decades, while Chinese politicians view Russia — and the rest of the world — from a centuries-long perspective. Thus, even though Russia has grown closer to China and comes out on China’s side in the battle with the West, Russia still belongs to the “historical West” and, as such, faces grievances from China — and the exact scale of these grievances remains unknown.

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Editors note: This article was first published in English by the Russian publication, Meduza.