WHAAT? Salaries be this?

SALARIES AND ALLOWANCES FOR MANAGEMENT AND STAFF OF ELECTRICTY COMPANY OF GHANA (ECG) FOR 2013 (AFTER 35% SALARY INCREASE)
POSITION	GROSS SALARY PER ANNUM	ALLOWANCES PER ANNUM @ 25%	SALARY PLUS ALLOWANCES PER ANNUM	SALARY PLUS ALLOWANCES PER MONTH
	GH¢	GH¢	GH¢	GH¢
Head of Department	232,593.00	58,148.25	290,741.25	24,228.44
Senior Manager	177,149.00	44,287.25	221,436.25	18,453.02
Section Head /Manager	135,412.00	33,853.00	169,265.00	14,105.42
Principal Engineer/ Principal Admin. Officer	68,868.00	17,217.00	86,085.00	7,173.75
Senior Engineer/Senior Admin Officer	68,868.00	17,217.00	86,085.00	7,173.75
Engineer/Admin Officer	57,056.00	14,264.00	71,320.00	5,943.33
Assistant Engineer/Admin Officer	57,056.00	14,264.00	71,320.00	5,943.33
Counsel	57,056.00	14,264.00	71,320.00	5,943.33
Accountant	57,056.00	14,264.00	71,320.00	5,943.33
Technician Engineer (HND)	57,056.00	14,264.00	71,320.00	5,943.33
Technician Engineer	57,056.00	14,264.00	71,320.00	5,943.33
Private Secretary	57,056.00	14,264.00	71,320.00	5,943.33
Stenographer	28,563.00	7,140.75	35,703.75	2,975.31
Senior Clerk	20,288.00	5,072.00	25,360.00	2,113.33
Clek	20,288.00	5,072.00	25,360.00	2,113.33
Security Guard	20,288.00	5,072.00	25,360.00	2,113.33
Driver	17,099.00	4,274.75	21,373.75	1,781.15
Labourer	14,410.00	3,602.50	18,012.50	1,501.04

Editorial  

WATERVILLE AND MORE

The decision by the Supreme Court last week that Waterville Holdings (BVI) Limited should refund 25 million euros to the state raises several interesting questions and issues.

The decision is grounded on the fact that the contract between the government of Ghana and the company was no effect because it had not been approved by Parliament as required by law.

The first interesting question is why Waterville was allowed to execute the contract when it was clear that Parliament had not approved the deal.

That Waterville was also paid as much as 25 million euros when it had no valid contract must be extremely worrying.

The Insight is also worried about the fact that only businessman Alfred Agbesi Woyome is standing trial or allegedly fraudulently receiving what is termed as judgement debt.

 Mr.  Woyome did not approve payment to himself and he certainly did not pay himself. He did not break into the vault at the Bank of Ghana to steal the money.

The question is, who approved and effected payment to Mr. Woyome  and did they act properly? Shouldn’t those responsible also be in dock?

In our view the main concern of the state now ought to be how to get back the 25 million euros paid to Waterville.

We urge the law enforcement agencies to do all they can to get the money paid back into state coffers.

FOOD SOVEREIGNTY GHANA SPEAKS

Duke Tagoe, Deputy Chairperson for FSG

Ghana must urgently place a moratorium on the cultivation, importation and consumption of genetically modified foods. We are making this appeal as a Ghanaian grass-roots food advocacy movement, after credible reports of the start of cultivation of GM seeds in the country. Our group calls for the need for Ghanaians to clearly understand the full implications associated with the cultivation of genetically modified foods before embracing the technology. Various statements from the Ministry of Agriculture, and other agencies indicate that Ghana is poised to roll out its first row of genetically modified seeds into our food chain. This is totally unacceptable. We take this opportunity to sound the warning that if Africans fail to get our act together, GM patent domination of our agriculture could be far worse than the combined effects of Apartheid, Colonialism and Slavery! Remember the words of Kissinger, "Food is a weapon"!

Ghana is a democratic and a sovereign state, and the issue of what we eat and grow affects the well-being of each and every Ghanaian. Hence there is a need for a broad consensus after a thorough, open and transparent debate before embarking on a process of gene contamination in our food chain that is absolutely irreversible. We believe that a decision of such far-reaching implications is a matter that cannot be left solely in the hands of trade negotiators, investment experts, or agricultural engineers. It is essentially a matter of political economy, public health, national security, biodiversity, and environmental sanity, in which we are all stake-holders.

All we are told is that, “There is currently not a single side effect that can be attributed to the use or consumption of GMO.” Those who are vigorously making these assurances however oppose any attempt to the study of any possible side effects. They are against all forms of labelling. So, if after eating any food that is genetically modified and one dies of a heart attack, there is no way of directly linking it to the culprit, simply because it is not labelled! People can eat and die a painful death from cancer whilst Monsanto's shareholders keep smiling to the bank. After vigorously resisting any attempts at labelling, which make it impossible to trace the long-term effects of their foods by humans, they are now claiming, "There is currently not a single side effect that can be attributed to the use or consumption of GMO"!

We conclude this statement with a quote from George Monbiot, as food for thought and action: – Organic Farming Will Feed the World: "We have, in other words, been deceived. Traditional farming has been stamped out all over the world not because it is less productive than monoculture, but because it is, in some respects, more productive. Organic cultivation has been characterised as an enemy of progress for the simple reason that it cannot be monopolised: it can be adopted by any farmer anywhere on earth, without the help of multinational companies. Though it is more productive to grow several species or several varieties of crops in one field, the biotech companies must reduce diversity in order to make money, leaving farmers with no choice but to purchase their most profitable seeds. This is why they have spent the last ten years buying up seed breeding institutes and lobbying governments to do what ours has done: banning the sale of any seed which has not been officially – and expensively – registered and approved."

……………………………………

Duke Tagoe

For Chairperson

MINORITY ON THE WATERVILLE CASE 

Minority Leader, Osei Mensah Bonsu

The Supreme Court of Ghana on Friday, June 14, 2013 unanimously ordered a construction firm, Waterville Holdings (BVI) Limited to refund the sum of 25 million Euros paid to it by the Ghana Government on the basis that the firm had no valid contractual agreement with the government.

The Court reasoned that the purported agreement entered into on April 26, 2006 and entitled "Contract -for the Rehabilitation (Design, Construction, Fixtures, Fittings and Equipmen9 of a 40,000 Seating Capacity Baba Yara "Sports Stadium, Kurnasi, Ghana" was unconstitutional because it had contravened Article 181(5) of the 1992 Constitution which provides that any agreement the terms and conditions of which involve international transaction or economic activity 'Should be laid before Parliament and approved by a resolution of the House before it becomes operative, enforceable and binding -on the Republic of Ghana.

 The judgment followed a-civil "Suit commenced in the Supreme Court 'by a-former Attorney-General of Gha.na, Mr. Martin Alamisi Amidu against Waterville Holdings (BVI) Limited and Mr. Alfred Agbesi Woyomea businessman and bankroller of the National Democratic Congress.

The Minority Group in Parliament joins hands with Civil Society groups and other individuals to commend without reservation, the singular effort embarked upon by Mr. Martin Amidu in the pursuit and achievement of fairness and justice for the government and the people of Ghana. The Minority Group appreciates Mr. Amidu's resilience and tenacity of purpose in that enterprise in the midst of the hostility and acrimony that his action provoked within "Some sections of the society. Mr. Amidu in the course of seeking justice for the people of Ghana lost his position as Attorney-General for inexplicable reasons but he remained undaunted, courageous, focused and purposeful. He deserves the accolade of "First Citizen Vigilante of Ghana" and posterity will laud him for the transparency and incorruptible 'Stimulus, his initiative has instilled into our democratic and constitutional development.

The pace has been set by Martin. Amidu to enable the people of Ghana appreciate that fighting corruption and fraud is a collective enterprise involving Parliament the overarching institution, but as well as civil society and patriotic individuals. The Attorney-General must hasten-to recover the 2:5 million Euros to avoid rendering the judgment nugatory 'even though our initial -reaction was that the amount of €25 million being claimed 'Should have; attracted interest. After all an essential aspect of the -claim by Waterville for"€2'5million was an interest component.    , .

            ,                      -~

When the NPP Minority Caucus first -raised the .matter about dubious judgment debt processing and payments we came under the gravel of sycophants, bootlickers and cheerleaders but we had no illusions about the improprieties and flagrant display of incompetence and connivances by attorneys and or other individuals acting on behalf of the State. We remain eternally hopeful that posterity will vindicate our position.

It will be recalled that prior to the commencement of Mr. Amidu's court action, the Minority Group in a Press Conference on the payment of weird, unlawful and illegitimate judgment debts had cited the payment to Waterville Holdings (BVI) Limited, CP Construction Company, Alfred Agbesi Woyome and others as some of them. The Minority Group is hopeful that the ongoing hearing, findings and recommendations of the Sole Commissioner on Judgment Debts (Mr. Justice Yaw Appau, a Justice of the Court of Appeal) will unearth similar outcome to vindicate the serious apprehension of the people of Ghana on the payment of dubious judgment debts or extra judicial settlement debts.

The Supreme Court refrained from making any pronouncement on the merits of Mr. Alfred Agbesi Woyome's involvement in the case because of an action covering his own subject matter in the Commercial Division of the High Court. The Minority is hopeful that the Commercial Court will hear and determine the said action with dispatch as the Supreme Court has done for the sake of the anxious people of Ghana because justice delayed is justice denied. In the meantime the Attorney-General should take steps to protect the Nation's Funds.

We call on the Attorney-General to apply to the High Court to order Mr. Alfred Agbesi Woyome to deposit the sums of money paid to him in court pending the final determination of government's action against him. This is to ensure that at the end of the case there will be money to revert to the State.

In the face of these is it not amusing that Mr. Alfred Agbesi Woyome recently alleged that the Minority Leader met him (Woyome) at Schipol Airport and the former ran away from him? Let Mr. Woyome amuse himself whilst it lasts. Our advise to him is that he must stand firm. The long arm of justice will soon catch up with him we trust.

Ayekoo, Mr. Martin Amidu,Ghana is proud of you. We urge you not to rest your oars.

Signed:

Hon. Joseph Osei-Owusu
Minority Spokesperson on Legal
and Constitutional Affairs

Date: Wednesday, June 19,2013 

MKO Abiola, Susan Rice and a Deadly Cup Of Tea

 

Susan Rice, US National Security Advisor

By Femi Kayode

Ambassador Susan Rice was up until recently the American Ambassador to the United Nations. Her long-standing aspiration of becoming the Secretary of State for her country was dashed when the Republicans in the Senate started sharpening their knives in anticipation of her formal nomination for that position by President Barak Obama.

Sensing that her nomination would not scale through the Senate and that she would not be confirmed as Secretary of State due to the role she played in the cover up of the Benghazi affair in which the American Ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, and three other American citizens were murdered by a group of islamist terrorists, her nomination was withdrawn.

Instead of Secretary of State, President Obama has now nominated her for the position of National Security Advisor which is a job that does not require Senate approval or confirmation. I wish Susan Rice well in her new assignment but I am constrained to ask the following questions. What did she put in the tea that she served to Chief MKO Abiola on July 8th 1998 just before he died? She was one of the last people that saw him alive, she served him some tea, he coughed violently and one hour later he dropped dead. What was in the tea? Was it Abuja ''green tea'', Darjeeling, Earl Grey, Liptons or some other more exotic brand?

Can someone please ask Susan Rice what her role was in the death of MKO Abiola? Who sent her to do the job and who was she working for? At that time she was Assistant Secretary of State for America in President Bill Clinton's government. Was she acting on his direct instructions or simply on the instructions of her boss and controller in Langley?

Chief MKO Abiola was the winner of Nigeria's freest and fairest elections. That election took place on June 12th 1993. The following day it was annuled by General Ibrahim Babangida. Shortly after that, as a consequence of the sheer outrage that was generated by the annulement, Babangida was compelled to ''step aside'' and hand over power to Chief Ernest Shonekan. In what was clearly a strategic manouver he left General Sani Abacha (his own Chief of Army Staff) behind to be the Minister of Defence for the incoming administration.

A few months later Abacha toppled the Interim National Government of Chief Ernest Shonekan which he had served and seized power for himself. Abiola was arrested and detained. He was never granted his freedom again. Four years later Abacha himself was murdered by forces that are yet to be identified and General Abdulsalami Abubakar took power. Exactly 30 days after Abacha was killed, those same forces that killed him murdered Abiola as well in an attempt to ''balance the equation''.

These are the facts and sequence of events. One thing is self-evident and cannot be denied no matter which side of the divide one may have been on in the June 12th saga- certain questions must be answered. And some of those questions are as follows. Who killed MKO Abiola? Who killed Sani Abacha? What role, if any, did officials of the Abubakar administration play in the murder of both Abacha and Abiola? What role did the CIA play and exactly what transpired in the room when Assistant Secretary of State Susan Rice (as she then was), Ambassador Thomas Pickering and two other faceless and nameless officials from the American Embassy met with Abiola on the very day that he was meant to have beeen released. Sadly instead of being released on that day he dropped dead in what can only be described as mysterious and questionable circumstances.

This is all the more so because Abiola's security officer and the man that was charged with looking after him and protecting him throughout the time that he was incarcerated (an honest, upstanding and courageous police officer by the name of ASP Zadok) told the Oputa panel in 2002 that Abiola was ''hale and hearty'' and in ''very high spirits'' just before going into the meeting with the Americans. He went further by telling the panel that as he was about to enter Aguda House (the premises where the meeting was scheduled to be held) with Abiola he was asked to leave his principal, to step out of the premises and to go and pick up another car from somewhere else by one of General Abdulsalami's security officers. He promptly obeyed the order but half an hour later when he came back he found Abiola in a terrible condition, coughing violently, writhing all over the floor in pain and breathing his last breath. Thirty minutes later he gave up the ghost.

I have no doubt that this was murder but the question is whose call was it and why did it have to happen? Was it done in an attempt to pave the way for an Obasanjo Presidency one year later? Could General Olusegun Obasanjo have been released from jail and elected President if Abiola had lived and if he had insisted on claiming his mandate? The Nigerian people have a right to know the truth and it is about time that those that have wielded power in this country for the last few decades told them. The powers that be must appreciate the fact that they cannot sweep things under the carpet forever and that one day, no matter how long it takes, they will be held accountable by God and the Nigerian people for the morbid, secret and oftentimes homicidal choices and decisions that they made.

Yet the truth is that the military operates like a cult and we may never get an honest answer from any of them about what really happened. This is because there are very few Col. Abubakar Dangiwa Umar's in the Nigerian military. Very few of them are prepared to break ranks with the leadership and break the ''omerta'' code of silence like Abubakar Umar did over the June 12th election. Very few of them are prepared to call a spade a spade, speak the truth, expose the lie and damn the consequences. Most of them continue to spin the yarn and tell the dirty lie that Abacha and Abiola's deaths were both from natural causes and that it was just a coincidence that one dropped dead on July 8th 1998, just 4 days before the 5th anniversary of June 12th, and the other droped dead exactly one month later on July 8th 1998. As they say ''the secrets are embedded in the sequence of events and the dates'' and, in this case, the sequence of events and the dates really do tell an interesting and revealing story.

Yet no matter how hard they try to cover her up and silence her, truth is stubborn and she cannot be drowned. She is like a pack of straws that are held together and pinned down by an all-powerful hand at the bottom of a river. As long as she is held at the bottom of that river she cannot be seen or heard. Yet one day, in the fullness of time, that all-powerful hand that seeks to supress her forever will get tired and let go and at that point Lady Truth will happily float to the top of the water where she will be seen and heard by all. It is in the same way that one day, in the fullness of time, the pernicious and perfidious verdict of "death by natural causes" or "act of God" that the powers that be have claimed are the causes of Abiola and Abacha's deaths respectively will be exposed for what they are.

Those that continue to spin that lie and continue to conspire to hide the truth will pay a heavy price for their murderous deceit either in this world or in the next. The most filthy and despicable creature under God's sun is the unrepentant and compulsive liar and he or she that bears false witness, that sheds innocent blood and that seeks to kill, jail, maim, defame and destroy the innocent in the name of the state. Their evil knows no bounds and they will surely burn in hell. Those that continue to perpetuate the lie, to hide the truth and to spin the tale that there was nothing untoward or mischevous about the death of Chief MKO Abiola, whose only crime was to win a free and fair election and refuse to renounce it, shall fare no better.

The fact of the matter is that until these questions are answered and justice is done Nigeria will not know lasting peace and cannot possibly achieve her fulll potentials. It is a spiritual thing. Abiola gave his life that we may have a better tomorrow yet we refuse to acknowledge it or to bring his killers to justice. We are repaying his good with evil and the consequences of that are set out in the Word of God. Whatever anyone may have thought of him as a person, the fact remains that had it not been for Abiola's sheer resilience, courage, steadfastness, sacrifice and gallant refusal to bow before the Nigerian military and give up his 1993 Presidential mandate we would not have democracy in Nigeria today. He was faithful to his cause to the very last. In return for that the least we could do is to ask the relevant questions, demand the appropiate answers and expose the bitter truth. We owe MKO Abiola, his wife Kudirat (who was also murdered) and all the other June 12th and NADECO footsoldiers and martyrs that much.

Greece ousted from index of 'developed' countries

In an unprecedented move, Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) has added insult to injury to debt-ridden eurozone member Greece by downgrading its status to “emerging market,” the first such shift since the index was created.

The birthplace of democracy, the Olympic Games and political science, among a number of other stunning achievements, was informed on Tuesday that it no longer ranks among the developed nations of the world.

The MSCI statement said that Greece failed to qualify for the developed market index criterion for size for the last two years, and pointed to investors' concerns about the restrictive nature of the "in‐kind transfer" and "off‐exchange transaction‐like facilities" that were introduced in 2008 by Greek officials.

“The minimum standards that currently prevail in Developed Markets reflect continuous market improvements introduced by authorities in other countries over the years,” the statement continued. “However, very few of these improved market practices have been reflected in the Greek market.”

“Multiple bailouts by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund, a sharp contraction in gross domestic product and a still-large debt burden mean Greece now has more in common with Hungary than France,” summed up The Wall Street Journal.

The decision marks the first time the MSCI demoted a country from its "developed" to its "emerging-market" category since it began the emerging-markets index in 1987.

Greece is still struggling with its debt payments and investors are staying away, despite the fact that Athens accepted harsh austerity measures in return for international loans that kept the country inside the eurozone.

Greece is grappling with its sixth consecutive year of recession with unemployment at 27 per cent and youth unemployment at 62.5 per cent.

MSCI tracks 79 markets and classifies them according to size and liquidity, market accessibility, ease of capital flows and firmness of institutional structures. Markets with large stock markets and fewer restrictions on foreign fund movement are classified as developed markets.

An estimated $7 trillion of investments follow MSCI's indexes.

Greece has been an emerging market before. MSCI had Greece categorized as an emerging market until May 2001, when it was reclassified as a developed market after adopting the euro. 

Will the Chinese Be Supreme?

By Ian Johnson

During the turbulent Maoist era from the 1950s to 1970s, China clashed militarily with some of its most important neighbors India, Vietnam, the Soviet Union and embarked on disastrous interventions in Indonesia and Africa. But by the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping had put China on a development-first policy, advising the country to hide its capacities and bide its time. This wasn’t exactly reassuring implying that at some point China would reveal its true intentions but from the 1980s through the mid-2000s China had relatively few confrontations, despite its rising economic, political, and military power.

Suddenly, it seems this modesty has evaporated. China’s territorial claims to islands and waters in East Asia are long-standing but they have turned insistent, bellicose, and even provocative, causing a sharp rift between China and many of its neighbors. Most recently, the Philippines and Japan announced that they would become strategic partners in settling their maritime disputes with China anathema to Beijing, which prefers to see these disputes handled separately. Regardless of the merits of China’s claims and actions, from a realpolitik standpoint these disputes and new alliances bespeak major policy blunders in China’s past.

The most serious conflict involves Japan. While China’s actions in Southeast Asia cause many angry statements, most countries there lack the capacity to prevent Chinese ships from patrolling waters they claim as their own. But in Japan, China faces one of the world’s most capable maritime powers. Unlike the Philippines, which hasn’t been able to stop Chinese ships from encroaching on its territorial waters and even dropping markers onto disputed reefs, Japan has actively defended claims to several disputed islands known as the Senkaku in Japanese, Diaoyu in Chinese, and Tiaoyutai by nearby Taiwan (which also claims them, largely based on the same historical arguments used by China).

While other disputes have ended after a few days or weeks, this one has continued now for months. In February, Japan claimed that a Chinese frigate had locked weapons-targeting radar on a Japanese destroyer and helicopter. Almost every few days, Japanese media report on Chinese ships especially China Marine Surveillance survey ships sailing without permission inside Japan’s territorial waters around the islands. (At least twenty-eight such violations have been reported since the issue heated up last autumn.) Last year, these tensions helped prepare the way for the election of a nationalistic Japanese prime minister.

It would be easy to blame China’s current leaders for all these problems, but their origins predate the People’s Republic of China and unite many ethnic Chinese from around the world. Although historical records are sketchy, many Chinese are convinced that old maps and mentions of the islands in imperial records imply historical Chinese control. In 1895, China and Japan fought a war and Japan annexed the islands, having declared them uninhabited and belonging to no one. Part of the Ryukyu chain, the islands were administered by the United States after World War II. In 1972, Washington returned the Ryukyus to Tokyo, including the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands.

It was this act that angered many Chinese people, who thought Washington should have returned the islands to a Chinese government. Taiwanese Chinese were especially angry; back then the island saw itself as China’s legal government in exile, and the islands lie quite close by. Also possibly a factor was a 1969 UN survey that suggested vast petroleum reserves under the islands. In the 1970s, Taiwanese civilians made several forays to the islands. Later, Hong Kong residents with no ties to Beijing followed suit.

The most recent wave of activism began in 2006, when private citizens in Hong Kong grew impatient and sent ships to the islands. Over the past year or two, however, the Chinese government seems to have more actively joined in the competition to control the islands, sending government-controlled fishing boats into the islands waters. They have now been joined by the survey ships and, outside the territorial waters, the Chinese navy. Many commentators in the Chinese blogosphere note that China’s economy has now surpassed that of Japan and that Japan needs China’s market more than China needs Japan’s products or technology. Whether this sense of superiority has a part in the recent maneuvers is unclear; but the two countries are somewhat suddenly locked in their most sustained and bitter dispute since the war, one that doesn’t have an easy way out for either side.

How all this has come to pass is drawn out in several important new books. They come at the Chinese puzzle from very different perspectives and at times are in sharp disagreement. But at heart they share a common idea: China is burdened with historical baggage that makes its rise less linear than many imagine. By extension the authors imply that the current troubles aren’t inevitable and may be more manageable than some would believe.

Many writers have made the case that China’s rise is imminent and unstoppable. The most famous is probably the columnist Martin Jacques’s When China Rules the World (2009), which has spawned a mini-industry of writing by those who agree or disagree with his op-ed-style take on China’s industrialization and its consequences. The most recent to join the debate is Arvind Subramanian of the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics. In Subramanian’s book Eclipse, China is all but unstoppable even if its growth slows from the 10 percent it has averaged over the past three decades to, say, a more reasonable 6 percent.

Subramanian argues persuasively that China will eclipse the United States even if Washington pulls off an increasingly improbable 1990s-style turnaround balancing the budget and getting growth back on track. Thus the common view in Washington is wrong the game isn’t America’s to lose; barring some sort of catastrophic meltdown, China will win. Within the foreseeable future it will surpass the United States as the world’s biggest economy and, if Washington continues the economic policies that the fiscally conservative author considers suicidal, China will be in a position to dominate it politically as well. The best Washington can do is prepare for relative decline.

This economic point serves a broader foreign-policy argument. To make this, he begins and ends the book with a startling analogy to the 1956 Suez Crisis. Britain had previously won control of the canal at the apogee of its power when it was able to force a debtor state Egypt to hand over control. But not too many decades later, in the mid-twentieth century, Britain lost control when it became a debtor country and the rising power, the United States, told it to pull out its troops or face bankruptcy.

Could China do the same? Right now that might seem far-fetched, but Subramanian points out that the United States regularly uses its economic muscle to achieve foreign policy goals. Since World War II, he says, the United States has accounted for 70 percent of economic sanctions imposed around the world; it’s not unimaginable for China to do the same within a few decades. And if the United States remains in huge debt to China, what can Americans do? Could the Senkaku/Diaoyu dispute be determined this way? Or China’s claims over Taiwan?

Fortunately, we have some non-economists in the room who make more soothing cases based on the rules of other games. Subramanian argues essentially that economic growth will lead to political dominance. The others concede China’s economic advances but say that supremacy is less likely. They do this from two radically different viewpoints.

The most entertaining and provocative is Edward Luttwak’s The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy, a bold book that flatly predicts that China won’t successfully rise as a superpower, indeed that it cannot in its current incarnation. This isn’t due to growth rates or debt ratios Luttwak concedes the force of both with a wave of the hand but because of what he sees as the iron law of strategy, which he says applies in perfect equality to every culture in every age.

Luttwak says observers like Subramanian look at China’s economic growth and the rate of military spending and, even allowing for recessions or depressions, project into the future the day that China rules the waves. Yet that must be the least likely of outcomes, because it would collide with the very logic of strategy in a world of diverse states, each jealous of its autonomy.

Luttwak argues that China’s growth will cause countries to band together and stymie its rise. Just as nineteenth-century Germany’s economic and military growth caused one-time enemies like France and England to ally with each other (and England to swallow its disgust over tsarist Russia’s primitive repression of human rights and make friends with it), China’s beeline to the top is already causing a reaction, as we see with Japan and the Philippines, not to mention the new welcome being shown to the United States in the region.

Why doesn’t China change course? Here is one of Luttwak’s most interesting ideas, which he calls great-state autism the failure of powers to break free of ways of acting and behaving. Just as Wilhelminian Germany should surely have seen that building a blue-water navy would cause Britain to form alliances against it, so too should China understand that demanding control over islands far from its shores but close to its neighbors would cause a backlash. (Here one thinks not so much of the Senkaku/Diaoyus but of the shoals, reefs, and islets in the South China Sea.) Even the battle for the Senkaku/Diaoyus seems to have no satisfactory endgame for China except a permanent state of tension with its most important neighbor.

China’s blundered approach to international affairs leads Luttwak to a humorous discussion of many Chinese people’s conviction that they are heirs to a tactically clever and sophisticated civilization. The Chinese, Luttwak notes, often assume that foreigners are stupid or naïve certainly not up to the wiles of the people who begat The Art of War. In 2011, Luttwak writes, Wang Qishan, a Chinese official who is a head of the Strategic and Economic Dialogue with the United States (and currently a member of the powerful seven-man Standing Committee of the Politburo), said of Americans and Chinese: It is not easy to really know China because China is an ancient civilization[whereas] the American people, they’re very simple.

And yet Luttwak points out that these assumptions haven’t served China well historically or today. Two of China’s last three dynasties were controlled by tiny nomadic groups who outmaneuvered the Chinese, while today the country’s tactics have left it surrounded by suspicious and increasingly hostile countries; indeed, it’s probably no exaggeration to say that China has no real allies. The reason is that Chinese thinking about diplomacy originated in an era when relations were between Chinese states the Qin, Chu, Lu, Qi, and the others that populated Sun Tzu’s classic work. Almost all were essentially Chinese, facilitating practices like espionage, subversion, and quickly changing sides to cut a quick deal. Chinese foreign policy evidently presumes that foreign states can be just as practical and opportunistic in their dealings with China.

And yet this repeatedly fails, as Luttwak demonstrates, because other countries emphasize other practices. In 2007, for example, India was to send 107 young elite civil servants to China as part of a goodwill tour. But China refused to grant a visa to one, saying that because he was from a part of India claimed by China, he didn’t need a visa. Luttwak sees this as part of China’s strategy of manufacturing crises in hopes of obtaining a favorable solution.

Likewise in 2010, China responded to the arrest of a Chinese fishing captain who had violated Japanese territorial waters by issuing inflammatory statements, arresting Japanese businessmen, and effectively suspending rare earth shipments to Japan. Then it did an about-face and sought to make a deal with Japan. But the Japanese were shocked and frightened by China’s actions and this led directly to the 2012 crisis, with an emboldened nationalist governor of Tokyo threatening to buy the lands claimed by China and assert Japanese sovereignty, which forced the national government to step in to buy the land. This purchase was then the basis for Beijing permitting yet more protests against Japan last autumn that lasted the requisite week before being shut down.

This sounds like bad leadership but Luttwak says that even Bismarck couldn’t fix China’s problem. All rising powers cause a reaction, he says, and rarely gain hegemony unless they create or take advantage of a historic turning point, such as a war. The United States used Japan’s defeat and the decline of Britain and France after World War II to move decisively into the Pacific. Even so, the United States didn’t enter the region making loud demands for territory but as a donor of economic aid. This helped soften America’s rise in the Pacific, even though it was still accompanied by much bitterness consider how it lost its air and sea bases in the Philippines. By contrast, China is already seen as a predator and has achieved almost nothing.

If accurate, Luttwak’s theory means Americans don’t have to worry too much. China will essentially self-destruct, at least diplomatically. And the list of problems facing China make it seem that this could well be happening right now.

Odd Arne Westad isn’t quite as sure. The Norwegian historian at the London School of Economics believes that China’s history is a burden but it also shows an underestimated ability to adapt and change. A Sinologist who has written widely and lucidly on the cold war, Westad’s Restless Empire is a rich history of the past 250 years of Chinese foreign policy. Like Luttwak, Westad has a revisionist streak in him but this leads him to more optimistic conclusions.

Westad shows how the current crises are in part due to idealism a belief that the international system has some sort of justice that China can appeal to. In China’s mind, it was humiliated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and some of its territory, including the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands, was stolen. It doesn’t demand that all this land be returned no one in Beijing wants control of Mongolia, now an independent country that used to be part of the empire but it has linked some of its maritime claims to this narrative of humiliation and justice. This isn’t the view of a rogue power but one that has a self-interested and one-sided view of justice and history, which is probably how most countries view the world and their past.

Westad is also convinced that the Chinese have been very willing to adapt. One popular view of China is that it didn’t embrace change fast enough, but Westad shows that this really isn’t true. It raced to build railroads, shipyards, and factories in the nineteenth century as early as in his native Norway, he writes and the Qing dynasty might have succeeded if it hadn’t been afflicted by a particularly bad run of luck: famines and uprisings, not to mention being invaded and carved up by foreign powers. He also makes a good case for the adaptive abilities of Chiang Kai-shek’s much-maligned Republic of China. Were it not for Japan’s invasion in 1937, the republic probably would have survived.1

Chinese who embraced the new when given a chance to do so always far outnumbered those who did not, Westad writes, making another important point: the current era of opening up isn’t new but the norm. Instead, it was Mao’s thirty years of being cut off that were the anomaly. The reason for this interlude, he says, was World War II. It fatally weakened the republican government and here he gives a good corrective to the view that the Nationalists didn’t fight, showing how Chiang threw his best troops into battle while the Communists killed more Chinese during the war with their purges and backstabbing than they did Japanese. In addition, foreign powers failed to support China during the war, with the United States giving just 1 percent of its aid to China until 1945. This made people willing to hear Mao’s message that it didn’t need the outside world, leading to the tragedy of his rule. Had history played out otherwise, Mao would have remained a guerrilla and China’s modernization would have continued after the war.

Likewise, Westad gives an important corrective to the facile view that Mao’s destruction opened the way for its capitalistic revival:

China in the 1970s could have gone in many different directions from genocidal terrorism of the Cambodian kind to democratic development such as on Taiwan. The potential for market developments was there, not because of the destructiveness of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), but despite it, since China had experimented with integrated markets for a long time before the Communists attempted to destroy them. 

Like Luttwak, Westad paints a bleak picture of the Communists foreign policy. In the 1960s, China had gained some prestige in the developing world for having shunned the United States and, eventually, also spurning the Soviet Union. But it lost this goodwill through Mao’s erratic policies. By blocking aid for Vietnam during its struggle with the United States, Mao ruined the once-close ties between the two and set up China’s humiliatingly inept invasion of Vietnam in 1979. China also had won points for aiding African countries but then frittered this away by supporting Maoist insurgencies, for example in Ghana. One wonders if China’s current forays into Africa aren’t similarly narcissistic; many Africans are amazed at China’s economic successes and investment muscle, but also realize that China operates without even the minimal altruism offered by Western countries.

Relations with the United States likewise haven’t gone how Chinese leaders envisioned. Mao was so out of touch that he believed that Nixon faced an imminent revolution at home and thus had come from a position of weakness to meet the Great Helmsman after all, in the Chinese Weltbild, what leader comes to the Chinese capital unless to pay tribute? Later, Deng allied China with the United States against the Soviet Union but was essentially just helping the stronger superpower defeat the weaker one, helping set up the past quarter-century of US global hegemony. It’s hard to know what China should have done differently, but Westad is right to poke fun at Westerners infatuation with Chinese leader’s foreign policy savvy.

The Chinese leaders  gnomic statements on international strategy were taken as ultimate examples of the realist wisdom of an ancient civilization, instead of the ignorance about the world that they really represented. 

And yet for all its missteps, China remains the biggest challenge facing not only its neighbors but the United States as well. One of the deans of US-China studies, David Shambaugh, writes of this in the introductory essay to Tangled Titans, an edited volume he put together to try to explain how relations between the two countries had become so bad. Mutual distrust is pervasive in both governments, and one now finds few bureaucratic actors in either government with a strong mission to cooperate.2 Shambaugh’s book doesn’t answer exactly how things got this bad but he makes an implicit case that both countries are suffering from Luttwak’s great-power autism set in their ways and unable to change the dynamics.

The dilemma facing American policy makers is well summarized in the forthcoming book by Vali Nasr, a former State Department adviser on Afghanistan and Pakistan. Although his interest is the Muslim world and not so much the territories of East Asia, Nasr describes China and its foreign interventions as at the center of US concerns even in those parts of the world.3 China’s thirst for oil and willingness to pay big for exploration rights is one reason; so is its desire to bring that oil home, either through shipping routes which necessitate its naval buildup or pipelines that run through the fragile states of Central Asia.

How optimistic should one be about a changed China being less of a strategic threat? Toward the end of his book, Westad basically assumes that China will rise. As China emerges as the master player of international capitalism, it is also obvious that the rules of the game are being remade in China, he writes: a statement that seems to reflect the post-crash period when the West seemed doomed and China’s rise assured. He also writes somewhat implausibly that the Communist Party has taken over many of the management methods of foreign enterprise perhaps, but surely only the worst. Still, his optimism is supported by China’s ability to adapt over the past centuries. Luttwak doesn’t rule out China’s ability to change but puts it another way: only by changing in a way that it has so far resisted, can China rise:

Only a fully democratic China could advance unimpeded to global hegemony, but then the governments of a full democratic China would undoubtedly seek to pursue quite other aims. 

One annoying exception to Westad’s exemplary fairness toward the republican era is his decision to use the mainland pinyin form of rendering Chinese characters for places and groups in Taiwan. Thus the island’s capital is written in the non-standard form Taibei instead of Taipei and the Kuomintang is written Guomindang and abbreviated as GMD instead of KMT. Self-determination should apply to spelling too, and outsiders should not choose sides by imposing Communist orthography.
2Tangled Titans: The United States and China, edited by David Shambaugh (Rowman and Littlefield, 2013), p. 5.
3Vali Nasr, The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat (to be published by Doubleday this month).