China must not repeat the West's mistakes in infrastructure lending, academic says

Joseph Hanlon says one of the biggest barriers to Africa's economic progress is that international regulations prevent it from following the Asian development model that delivered hundreds of millions from poverty.

The veteran development-studies academic says the free trade rules of the World Trade Organization and other international bodies stop African nations protecting nascent domestic industries.

Both China and South Korea, with its famous chaebol strategic industries, built their economies on such a platform.

"This approach is now seen as violating all free trade rules but what it means is that African countries can't develop companies that are large enough to compete internationally."

Hanlon, 72, was speaking in the living room of his spacious top floor apartment in Bloomsbury in central London, which he shares with his partner and erstwhile co-author Teresa Smart.

The main indication of his long association with Africa is a vast wall of some of the continent's tropical plants that curtain off a corner of the room as his office.

"When we bought this flat we had these discussions of how we were going to divide up the house. Teresa took the big bedroom as her office and I ended up behind this plant divider here, which is weird," he says with his trademark reedy laugh.

Hanlon, who is known by everyone as Joe and was born in New Jersey, has built up a considerable reputation as a development expert and has a significant interest in China's new role in Africa, particularly Mozambique, where he spent five years as a journalist for The Guardian, The Observer and the BBC in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

He is a visiting fellow at no fewer than three UK academic institutions: the Open University, the London School of Economics and Manchester University.

The academic is particularly interested in African debt issues and was a policy adviser to the Jubilee 2000 Coalition, which called for the cancellation of Third World debt.

He hopes China can steer clear of the West's mistake in the 1970s of plunging Africa into debt by lending money for infrastructure projects.

"What you saw in the 1970s that a lot of the aid from the World Bank and others was building essential infrastructure but it wasn't developing extra capacity. This led to the huge debt issues. What China is doing now is to some extent fine but it must avoid this," he says.

Hanlon says the supposed medicine to the debt crisis - the post-1989 Washington Consensus - was arguably worse for African nations.

This was Washington institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF imposing free-market solutions on the continent with often ill thought-out attempts for countries to develop their own private sectors.

"The structural adjustment, neo-liberal model was a failure for Africa and for Europe, for that matter. So the Chinese are to some extent going back to this pre-liberal period and doing things that African countries find very useful such as building infrastructure."

Hanlon believes a more ideal way for Africa to develop would be in countries developing an infrastructure-building capacity themselves and also nurturing their own expertise in exploiting resources.

"Mozambique, for example, has found new reserves of gas and coal. The pressure on the government there is to move as fast as possible to exploit these resources. No one is saying, 'Wait a minute slow down. Let us train our own mining engineers. Let us train our own gas people'," he says.

"Ultimately, however, that might be in the best interests of the people and developing the country if all this was done at Mozambique's own pace. This is to some extent what China did itself. "

Hanlon did his first degree in mathematics at MIT and then a master's at Tulane University in New Orleans.

Like some high-profile academics who have taken an interest in China-Africa affairs such as Deborah Brautigam (author of The Dragon's Gift) and Chris Alden at the London School of Economics, he went to Tufts University in Massachusetts.

"The difference is that my doctorate was in physics," he chortles.

Hanlon actually believes there is a good fit between science and studying development.

"One thing I find interesting is the number of scientists that have ended up working in development studies. I suspect it is because we are a bit analytical and like to take things apart and see how they work," he says.

Hanlon came to the UK in 1971 and worked for New Scientist magazine as technology policy editor before his spell as a journalist in Mozambique.

"Working for New Scientist I did a lot of traveling but never felt I had been in a place long enough to know what was going on so I decided to base myself in Mozambique stringing for the BBC and others with a whole bunch of other people," he says.

On his return to the UK, he has combined an academic career with being an author, holding a formal position as a lecturer with the Open University until 2010.

He was at the center of controversy last year with the publication of Zimbabwe Takes Back its Land, which he wrote with Smart and Jeanette Manjengwa.

He was accused of being an apologist for President Robert Mugabe in defending the transfer of land from white to black farmers.

"I think the only thing Mugabe and the British government would agree upon is the myth he (Mugabe) was responsible for land reform," he says.

He says the impetus came from war veterans challenging the leadership and only got the backing from Mugabe's Zanu PF when they realized the 150,000 new black commercial farmers were a source of potential votes.

Hanlon also insists the new black farms have proved a success.

"People say they are not producing anything but you have only got to look at Google Earth to see this is not true.

"In fact only a third of the land (owned by whites) was ever used. The new farmers in the face of sanctions are proving a success. You have only got to look at the statistics."

Despite being in his eighth decade, some of Hanlon's views on development are now coming into vogue.

In his 2010 book, Just Give Money to the Poor, he argued (with co-authors David Hulme and Armando Barrientos) that if you focused aid on just redistributing money to the poorest in developing countries they would then use their new money constructively.

This now chimes with the economics book that is now all the rage, Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which challenges the free market orthodoxy and argues for redistribution through the tax system.

"Yes, the thinking has changed since we wrote the book. If you give people money they actually manage it quite responsibly and not fritter it away as some people might think. It is good that this is becoming more and more the accepted wisdom," he says.

andrewmoody@chinadaily.com.cn