Review by Kevin Baldeosingh
Anyone who wants to understand the world economy and the changing political order needs to find out about China.
This applies to the Caribbean no less than anywhere else, and economist Richard Bernal has produced the only book-length treatment on the region’s ongoing engagement with China. Unfortunately, Bernal is a UWI economist of the old school, which basically means he brings a lot of tendentious ideological baggage to his analysis.
His intellectual shortcomings are revealed by assertions such as “The very concepts being used to understand the rise of China and to foresee its future behaviour, goals and policies are essentially Western, and to varying degrees will not be adequate conceptual tools to interrogate the subject of China’s rise and dominance.”
Along this line he damns Western political models, economic policy, media and even, incredibly, something he thinks is Western science.
He misunderstands history, arguing that “In the absence of a dominant superpower, the first half of the 20th century was an era of instability that witnessed the two World Wars and the Great Depression.” He even suggests that it is still an open question as to whether Europeans or Chinese sailed to the Americas first.
Worst of all, Bernal misunderstands even his own area of expertise, writing that scholars will have to “relinquish antiquated ideas such as the notion of the inevitability that capitalism will prevail in China and that capitalism will lead to democracy.”
Of course, capitalism is already prevailing in China—that is why the country has taken off economically—although the latter claim is indeed disputable. He also describes China as a super-power, based on its demographic and military and economic size, seemingly unaware that China’s military is big but not as powerful as any of the advanced Western nations, nor that China’s economy may be the world’s largest but is still categorised as developing due to structural and innovative weaknesses.
With these caveats, there is still much useful information in Bernal’s book. He offers some interesting hypotheses as to why the world’s largest nation should have any interest at all in a black speck like the Caribbean. “As a superpower, China wants to have a presence in all regions of the globe and therefore the Caribbean, despite its small size and remoteness from China, has a place in China’s foreign policy,” he writes, and that “The increase in Chinese economic engagement with the Caribbean is directly related to the rivalry between China and Taiwan for diplomatic recognition from the governments of the Caribbean states.” He also has statistics that would be hard to find in one place, ranging from trade figures, grants and loans from China, and even the number of Chinese workers sent to various Caribbean countries.
Bernal also suggests ways that Caribbean governments can shape policies to take advantage of China’s goals, “Caribbean countries could be a production platform for exports to the United States, Canada and the European Union because of preferential trade agreements,” he writes, noting also that China might invest in agricultural development in Guyana, Belize and Surinam to feed its own people.
Apart from Bernal’s own ideological blinkers, his book suffers from two other defects: he is far less critical of China than he is of Western nations and has much repetition which makes the actual length less than 200 pages. Readers who want to contextualise his information in terms of a deeper understanding of China can try China’s Economy by Arthur Kroeber for a good historical and economic overview, and The China Model by Daniel A Bell for an interesting argument on alternative political models.
BOOK info
Dragon in the Caribbean
Richard L Bernal.
Ian Randle Publishers, 2014.
ASIN: B00K0SG9SY; 240 pages.