How a Chinese Engineer on the Ground Reveal About China-Africa Relation?

Dr. Cao Fengze, Tsinghua Graduate, on China-Africa Relations: Mutual Rescue in an Age of Illusory Excess

In recent years, more and more young Chinese workers have chosen to go to Africa for work. However, for China's top graduates, remaining in their home country or relocating to developed nations typically tops their list of career choices. Dr. Cao Fengze, though, took a road less traveled. A Tsinghua University alumnus, he was the candidate of Tsinghua's Persons of the Year in 2021, making his decision to work in Africa all the more intriguing. He’s also an online celebrity on Zhihu (知乎), the Chinese ver of Quora, answering questions about his observation of African society.

Having finally secured an opportunity to meet with Dr. Cao, I was impressed by his profound insights into Chinese infrastructure development and his astute observations of African society. That’s why I decided to translate his latest opinion piece after receiving his authorization. The article was published on Wenhua Zongheng(文化纵横), named “Mutual Rescue in an Age of Illusory Excess 假性过剩时代的双向拯救."

I met with Dr.Cao at an event held by WenhuaZongheng, where he shared his reason for going to Africa.

Mutual Rescue in an Age of Illusory Excess

The Era of Excess

These days, the topic of "overcapacity" is getting a lot of buzz. Indeed, if we only analyze developed economies and China, "overcapacity" seems to be a real issue. In developed countries, over the past half-century, with the agricultural technology revolution and widespread mechanization, each farm worker can now cultivate and manage thousands of acres of farmland with the help of machinery. Today, harvesters and agricultural drones have freed the vast majority of people from being tied to the land.

In developed economies, industrial manufacturing is gradually entering a stage similar to agriculture. First, manual laborers in industries are being gradually replaced by mechanized, automated robotic assembly lines. With the rapid rise of AI technology, even programmable white-collar workers are being quickly replaced by machines. In the past, workers could joke, "If all else fails, I can always find a factory to tighten screws," but this joke is no longer funny: soon, there won't be any factories for you to tighten screws in - they'll all be full of robotic arms. Just a few engineers can manage a huge "lights-out factory,"(关灯工厂) producing industrial products for millions of people. This scenario is gradually becoming a reality.

The current material production excess is different from the "paradoxical excess" of Marx's era. The "excess" of the 19th century was largely due to unfair distribution in the early stages of capitalism. Productivity couldn't really meet everyone's material needs; instead, the poverty of the vast majority led to a lack of effective demand. Back then, as old industries and jobs disappeared, new industries and jobs were constantly emerging, and the rates of the two were generally compatible.

However, today's situation is likely different from the 19th century. While various distribution inequalities still exist in today's world, the high level of productivity can no longer be simply summarized as "unfair distribution." Whether it's agricultural or industrial products, as long as they're necessities of human life and not custom-made luxuries or services, production efficiency has long reached a considerable height, more than enough to meet the needs of the world's population. Due to high automation, the total labor force needed to produce these products is far smaller than the suitable working population. At the same time, with the rapid development of artificial intelligence, old jobs are disappearing at an extremely fast rate - a rate that the creation of new jobs simply can't keep up with. In this sense, the ongoing excess in today's developed economies is an absolute excess, a "true excess."

Value Transmission of Excess

Changes at the material level gradually transmit to the social, cultural, and value levels over time. The impact of material excess on culture is that material producers are gradually less valued and respected. This isn't because material production is no longer important but because material is no longer scarce, and material producers are too easily replaceable. It's like how air is much more important to humans than gold, but gold is expensive while air is free. Because material production involves too few workers and is too easily replaceable, material producers naturally receive as little attention as air.

On the Chinese internet, a typical consequence of overcapacity is the rise of "study discouragement."（劝退学） Simply put, "study discouragement" is when people familiar with an industry reveal its poor job prospects to outsiders and students just entering the field, including low income, limited development opportunities, poor working environment, etc., and then advise newcomers not to enter the field or to switch careers as soon as possible. Its rise can be traced back to the first decade of the 21st century, starting with biology, then gradually expanding to chemistry, materials, environment, and other hard-to-employ science and engineering fields. Around 2015, it spread to civil engineering and mechanical engineering with tough working conditions and finally to all "traditional engineering"（传统工科） fields. In recent years, with the massive layoffs in the internet industry, even computer science, once a standout field, couldn't escape being discouraged. In 2024, the current hot option for job seekers is to take the civil service exam, so law and other related disciplines are still relatively popular for now. However, how many jobs can the civil service accommodate? The vast majority of participants are destined just to be running mates, which should be clear to everyone.

The discouragement of one or two disciplines might be a problem of individual industries, possibly a temporary resource mismatch caused by higher education reform lagging behind social employment needs. However, the discouragement of all disciplines probably means that today's entire job market has a problem. Or perhaps it's not that the job market has gone "wrong" but that society has objectively developed to this point.

In recent years, the Chinese internet often mocked people in developed Western countries as "white left"（Baizuo白左）, criticizing them for not caring about material production, indulging in "useless issues" like race, sexual minorities, and ideology conflicts, and joking that they're "a generation who thinks food grows on supermarket shelves." However, although we can denounce the foolishness of this social form, we have to admit that this social form is probably inevitable after material abundance. Due to highly advanced productivity, most people in developed economies can indeed go from cradle to grave without touching any aspect of essential goods production, only needing to enjoy these necessities. The United States can even distribute free food daily to homeless people on the streets who don't participate in labor. Although these foods are essentially leftovers from large-scale industrial production, with taste and appearance that people would rather avoid, they're clearly more than enough to sustain life. In such an environment, it's not surprising that people in the whole society take material supply for granted, despise or even ignore material producers, and instead focus their main energy on so-called "things that are of no benefit to material production."

With China's rapid economic development and rapid increase in industrialization, Chinese society is now also showing a trend toward this direction. Not just food, but other industrial products closely related to people's lives, including clothing, daily necessities, small home appliances, and even big items like cars - if you don't care about their brands and "face value" and only focus on their functionality and practicality, you'll find that their prices are not expensive at all. Meeting basic living needs is really a very low threshold. Against this background, it's inevitable that most people's energy is liberated from survival issues and turns to content beyond survival. These contents have different manifestations in different countries and cultures. In the United States, it's race and LGBT issues; in China, it's "being above others"（人上人） and "involution."（内卷） Their common point is that they won't be worn away by further economic development and continued progress in productivity. Racial differences will always exist, while "being above others" is simply a relative concept. In other words, this is a long game that can never be played enough.

This is also why concepts like "exam-takers"（做题家） and "involution" are resonating with more and more young people today. In today's era of material production excess, more and more people trained as material producers are gradually finding that they're no longer truly needed by society. Against this backdrop, if they still adhere to the traditional "work-save-get rich" values to guide their life choices, they will inevitably become redundant in society, becoming "objects that society needs to accommodate through work relief." In this era, what's scarce is no longer material value but emotional value. "trolling" online(整活儿), live streaming begging in the United States, stewing yourself in an iron pot - these activities bring more utility to others in society than working in a factory or doing repetitive scientific research. Correspondingly, society's monetary rewards for these providers of emotional value are naturally much greater than for the so-called "small-town exam-takers" who "desire to participate in material production but cannot." Internet clowns are needed by society and gain both fame and fortune, while workers who only know material production become redundant people. This is a social problem that developed economies in today's era must face.

Illusory Excess

However, can the "overcapacity" mentioned above truly represent our era? If we broaden our perspective, not just focusing on the developed economies before us, but looking at the entire human society, we will discover the deceptiveness behind the so-called "overcapacity."

While 3 billion people living in relatively developed economies are already deeply troubled by overcapacity, another 5 billion people are worried about the lack of resources for survival. In most parts of the world, people generally lack basic living facilities, including food, clothing, adequate electricity, clean drinking water, basic medical care, and education. During my three years of work and life in Africa, whenever I saw the concept of "overcapacity" on the internet, a profound sense of guilt would arise. I often feel that I haven't done enough to shoulder the responsibility for more than half of humanity who are troubled by scarcity.

From a technical perspective, there shouldn't be any obstacles to obtaining the above-mentioned resources. Africa has a large amount of land suitable for cultivation, and various agricultural machinery, fertilizers, and improved seed technologies have long been mature in developed countries. However, in reality, these lands are not being reasonably utilized, and hundreds of millions of Africans are still trapped in long-term hunger. In Africa, river valleys suitable for building hydroelectric power stations are widely available, and power stations and power and water supply systems can be easily built using 20th-century technology, hardly involving any "bottleneck" technologies. However, in reality, more than half of Africans have no access to electricity in their daily lives, while at the same time, electricity worth hundreds of millions of dollars is wasted every day in Africa, flowing into the sea. Many of the diseases that Africans suffer from are simple and easy-to-treat common illnesses that only require simple diagnosis and medication to cure. Apart from various complicated diseases, the marginal cost of producing most medicines for treating common diseases is not high. If these medicines could be distributed to people and taken regularly, they could solve the health problems of a considerable portion of Africans. But the reality is that most African patients are still mired in a lack of medical care and medicine, powerless in the face of their suffering.

When more than half of humanity still faces a shortage of survival resources, I think we are not qualified to talk about "overcapacity." The overcapacity in developed economies is indeed true excess within those economies, but when viewed on the scale of the entire human society, it is undoubtedly a false excess. From this perspective, Marx's theory of insufficient effective demand is not outdated even today, except that the subject of the theory has changed from people within developed economies to different sovereign entities in the world. The series of postmodern behaviors triggered by material overcapacity among the 3 billion people in developed economies might be understandable, but when contrasted with the absolute poverty of 5 billion people in the Third World, it becomes absurd and laughable.

Obstacles Beyond Technology

In today's world of highly developed productivity, how does widespread absolute poverty still exist in more than half of the world? I believe the problem doesn't lie in technology or productivity, but beyond technology, in the relations of production.

Firstly, in today's world, the possession of survival resources is separated from the need for them. A few developed countries possess the capacity to produce material wealth, and consequently, the power to distribute it. The vast Third World countries, represented by African nations, objectively have an urgent need for survival resources, but because they don't directly control the means of production, they can't determine social production and can't direct their own destinies. In most African countries, the elite class and ruling groups often heavily depend on Western developed countries, especially former colonial powers. They help these former colonial powers obtain resources like minerals from their own countries, with the former colonial powers gaining the primary benefits and they themselves gaining secondary benefits. The former colonial powers are responsible for providing protection and support to this elite class and ruling group. After their rule ends, they often choose to immigrate to these former colonial powers, transferring their wealth along with them. Although colonial relationships nominally no longer exist, they effectively continue through established patterns. Whether this wealth ends up in the hands of former colonial powers or the local ruling groups, it cannot be transformed into national wealth or contribute to the country's reproduction and naturally cannot be used to meet the survival and development needs of ordinary people in these countries.

So, do these former colonial powers, or broadly speaking, Western developed countries, provide aid to Third World countries represented by Africa? Objectively speaking, they do, and this is precisely another reason why Africa's development is trapped in a predicament. Every year, the international community invests considerable amounts in aid to African countries, including food, industrial products, and medicines, covering a wide range of categories. However, in reality, these aid items don't have much significance for Africa and sometimes even have the opposite effect. The reason is that Africa itself severely lacks material production capacity, and these aid materials are only end products of industry, unable to be transformed into means of production for reproduction. At the same time, African countries generally have high birth rates. Without employment and education as prerequisites, high birth rates are difficult to suppress, and these aid materials, in fact, only continuously push up Africa's population without any significance in promoting social progress. The more people, the more aid materials are needed; the more aid materials, the more population growth. Africa always lacks independent blood-making ability and can only continuously receive blood transfusions. With this vicious cycle continuing, the poor and backward lives of Africans cannot be fundamentally changed, and the fragile local industries that Africa has managed to establish will be destroyed by these foreign aid materials.

What Africa needs is not just these end-stage industrial finished products, but industrial production capacity closer to the front end, such as infrastructure, electricity, industrial facilities, and basic education. Only through these fundamental investments can Africans personally join the process of modern industrial cycles rather than simply receiving relief. Modern education and employment can cultivate people's modern consciousness, inspire their desire for modern life, and stimulate their subjective initiative to control their own lives rationally. These are the most urgently needed elements for African society to move towards modernization. In the long run, systematic industrial investment in Africa will bring investors returns far greater than simply selling industrial finished products.

Some argue that the large amount of end-product aid provided to Africa annually by the international community is itself a conspiracy by some Western multinational business oligarchs, intending to strangle Africa's emerging industries in their infancy and maintain their own industrial advantages. Others argue that deliberately strangling African industries is meaningless to these business oligarchs, and such conspiracy theories cannot stand. Regardless of the truth behind it, Africa's "aid-destroying economy" is a reality, and we who have the ability to help Africa out of this predicament undoubtedly should shoulder the responsibility to change the status quo. This aligns with both the long-term interests of all humanity and business rationality.

Another reason why Third World countries represented by Africa have long been trapped in poverty is the lack of modern organizational models. Taking Africa's lack of medical care and medicine as an example, the medicines for treating common diseases themselves are not expensive. If it's just about transporting these medicines from manufacturers to the capitals of various African countries, the cost is not high. But how can these medicines be distributed layer by layer and delivered to the people who need them? What organization should be responsible for this? How to deal with corruption issues in this layer-by-layer distribution process? The diagnosis of common diseases and the distribution of medicines may not require too many professional doctors, but at least a large number of health workers with basic medical knowledge are needed. Where do these personnel come from? What should be done when people in their primitive state don't trust modern medicine and conflict with medical staff? Even if these common diseases are temporarily cured, how can we teach these people to prevent diseases in the next step? These are all extremely realistic problems. All these problems combined are much more difficult than simply distributing medicines.

For another example, most African villages don't have wells, making it very difficult to fetch water. The most important work for women in the village every day is to carry water buckets to nearby rivers to fetch water, repeating this cycle over and over. Some villages are quite far from water sources, taking several hours for a round trip, but they still go back and forth repeatedly to fetch water, not feeling anything wrong with it. They have never thought of digging wells, even when objective conditions fully allow it. For instance, there was a village with relatively good economic conditions that was close to our project. The project not only gave them money, but many villagers also came to work as laborers and earned wages. They used this money to build some red brick houses but still didn't think of digging wells. I've even seen some villages where wells were dug with the help of external organizations, but they were not maintained or cleaned at all and were quickly abandoned. There was no "difficulty in going from luxury to frugality" that we Chinese are familiar with as if spending a lot of time every day going to the river to fetch water was a mission with theological significance. Some Chinese who came to Africa, seeing Africans not digging wells or not maintaining existing wells and letting them go to waste, attribute this to Africans being "lazy." But if it's really because of laziness, shouldn't they maintain the wells well to avoid having to go all the way to the river to fetch water every day? Ultimately, this so-called "laziness" is essentially a lack of awareness. They can't think of or understand why they should have wells, why wells need maintenance, and why they should save the time and energy spent on going to the river to fetch water. This lack of awareness is what truly deserves consideration and needs to be changed in African society.

To gradually make such people accept modern lifestyles requires education to promote and popularize step by step, which is destined to be an extremely long process and cannot be achieved overnight. If there are so many difficulties to overcome behind a well, what about a hydropower station? A railway? The resistance involved in their construction process is enough to make standard private capital flinch. In Africa, obstacles beyond technology are the most severe ones.

Compared to neighboring countries, Tanzania's modernization process has been relatively smooth. This is largely because, during President Nyerere's era, Tanzania established grassroots organizations with certain functions throughout the country. These grassroots organizations may not be perfect or comprehensive, and they encountered some problems in actual implementation, but they at least effectively brought most of Tanzania's population under the jurisdiction of the state. On this basis, the state's actions and will be transmitted to the peripheral grassroots organizations, and various problems in national governance can at least be addressed step by step rather than being at a loss.

Underdeveloped countries do not directly control the means of production; aid in the form of end products has destroyed the start-up of industry and commerce; the lack of modern organizational models hinders the transmission of modernization elements. The combination of these factors has jointly created the contradictory situation of material excess and material shortage in today's human society. On one side, extreme material abundance has caused people in developed economies to lose interest in material progress, turning instead to consuming excess energy and productivity on postmodern internal consumption issues such as race, gender, and social hierarchy. On the other side, extremely backward productivity has left people in backward economies in pre-modern predicaments, struggling to ensure basic survival. And what could connect the two - the spread of industry, the circulation of capital, and down-to-earth efforts in production and distribution - is always hindered for one reason or another.

Attempted Solutions

What should we do in the face of such an unfair situation? I think this is a long and arduous task. The formation of this extreme situation is not the responsibility of any individual, and its causes are rooted in the broader context of capitalist globalization. What we need to do first is to firmly resolve to coexist with and struggle against this situation for the long term without fantasizing about solving this injustice in one fell swoop.

At the national level, our country is persistently pushing forward with this work. As a participant in the "Belt and Road" initiative, I believe that the various measures and attempts of the "Belt and Road" are trying to bridge these two extremes. It does not attempt to completely eradicate poverty and backwardness worldwide in just a few years or within a generation, but rather to connect the two extremes as much as possible, using the existing production capacity of developed economies to help underdeveloped economies gradually overcome crises enter a virtuous economic cycle and build a bridge between excess and scarcity.

In the actual implementation of this work, we can easily find that even within the same region, the national conditions between different countries differ greatly. Some countries have relatively stable political situations, strong government administration, controllable social contradictions, and relatively benign population cycles that have made a good start on the path of industrialization and modernization in their own countries and are more friendly to foreign investors. On the other hand, some countries have relatively chaotic political situations, weak government control, intense social contradictions, populations trapped in vicious cycles, distant prospects for industrialization and modernization, and huge risks for foreign investors.

For China, facing African countries with different national conditions and risks, large-scale indiscriminate investment may not be the best choice. Perhaps a better approach is to select a few countries in each region that have relatively good investment conditions and are more friendly to China for focused "drip irrigation" investment.

From the perspective of industrial development efficiency, using the same funds for relatively concentrated investment in a few excellent countries will yield much more substantial and reliable returns than large-scale indiscriminate investment. The so-called "concentrated investment" refers to making relatively large-scale investments in the infrastructure, energy, and pillar industries of the target country within a relatively short period without violating economic laws, ensuring the smooth implementation of these projects, and providing support for a period of time to allow their industries to take initial shape from 0 to 1.

These countries themselves have better development prospects, and concentrated investment in them will result in higher efficiency of fund utilization, with less waste and damage caused by various reasons. For the target countries, this batch of high-intensity investments in a short time can help them cross the most difficult starting interval in the modernization process, allowing at least one industry to take shape and form a virtuous cycle. For investors, they can establish industrial advantages in that market, achieve higher returns on investment, and also eliminate some potential destructive forces.

For Africa, China is a distant foreign country with cultural differences. Our country is fundamentally different from those colonialist countries, and whatever work we carry out internationally must be based on full respect for the internal affairs of other countries. Therefore, even if our economic power is relatively strong, it is difficult to overstep our bounds and exert direct influence in Africa. If our country could help two or three countries in a region to become development models within that region, it could create a strong demonstration effect. These countries can serve as seeds of industrialization, providing scarce industrial foundations for countries in the region, helping them adapt to new economic models; at the same time, culturally, they can also guide neighboring countries to gradually abandon the quagmire of chaotic zero-sum struggles and move towards stability and development.

At the same time, "drip irrigation" also implies more scientific and rational industrial planning. Preparation prevents failure. While investment planning cannot be separated from market regulation, investments in a completely free market environment often carry some blindness and short-sightedness. Those energy and infrastructure projects with long investment return cycles and high risks often struggle to materialize due to lack of funding. Light industry projects have limited development prospects without the support of these projects. A large number of newly built power facilities can easily drive large-scale investment in electricity-using industries, and newly built wide streets can encourage residents to buy more cars, but these conclusions do not hold true in reverse. If there could be a higher-level coordinating force to plan and guide investments, making the investment proportions of various industries such as infrastructure, energy, general industry, and service industry tend to be balanced, then these investments could achieve twice the result with half the effort, which would be beneficial to both investors and the countries where the investments are made. Under reasonable industrial planning, situations of repetitive construction, excessive construction, and unreasonable construction can also be reduced, and valuable investments are less likely to be wasted. In the long term, this investment model of "priority concentration, gradual expansion" may achieve very good results.

Bidirectional Rescue

For young people, participating in the "Belt and Road" initiative is more like a bidirectional rescue. It's about saving others but also saving ourselves. For people living in backward economies, no one likes a life of hunger and disease. What we call "excess capacity" might be exactly the lifeline they desperately need but can't obtain. Due to cultural differences, our definition of a happy life may differ from that of Africans, and each of us may have different goals we want to achieve. But I think, at the very least, people should have the right to choose. One can choose to lie under a tree by the riverside all day, sunbathing, not pursuing more material enjoyment, but that should be a choice made out of personal will after having experienced various different lifestyles, rather than being forced to repeat the same life from birth in a state of confusion and bewilderment.

For ourselves, this is also a way to regain a sense of value. Perhaps you've had experiences similar to mine: the fatigue brought by work itself is easily eliminated through simple rest; the real difficulty lies in not seeing the value and meaning of our work, and consuming ourselves in endless postmodern issues day after day. In our work on the "Belt and Road", we can clearly see that for most people in this world, material production is not meaningless. On the contrary, material production is what they need most, and we, as material producers, are needed and can make a real contribution to this world.

However, to truly realize our value in this world, we need more than just production, more than simple input of work hours and mere technological progress. It requires us to innovate and improve production relations persistently, to have a deeper understanding and comprehension of international relations, and, more importantly, to face countless intricate and difficult problems with perseverance and flexibility.

In the long term, it's hard for us to answer whether there's an unbreakable ceiling for Africa's modernization progress or where this possible ceiling might be. For us now, discussing this issue might be too luxurious. What we can be sure of is that how far Africa's future can develop is inseparable from our efforts. If we can promote Africa's industrial development with higher efficiency and accelerate the formation of modern organizations, Africa will be able to stabilize faster and get on track with development. The poverty and unemployment problems brought by rapid population growth will be curbed more quickly, and there will be fewer tragedies caused by material scarcity. No matter where Africa's ceiling is, today's Africa is still miles away from this so-called ceiling. This is a continent where everything is beginning to sprout. Whatever path or career is chosen, as long as one can move forward firmly, it's an upward journey. Everything here is extraordinarily difficult but also extraordinarily full of hope.

In any case, we cannot attempt to build heaven on earth, nor can we fantasize about the end of history. Development is like human growth - we solve one problem with great difficulty, only to be immediately faced with hundreds or thousands of problems, leaving us overwhelmed. I believe that as Africa gradually develops, countless difficulties and obstacles will continue to emerge on this ancient continent in the future. Among these problems, some we have experienced in our own development, but more are likely to be ones we have never experienced. How should these problems be solved? We mortals naturally dare not jump to conclusions. But the only thing we can be sure of is that the wisdom of 8 billion people will certainly be stronger than the wisdom of 3 billion people. By then, for a society of "true excess" to break through barriers and forge a new path will certainly be much easier than for the current society of "Illusory Excess."