(This is a guest post by Occam’s Razr’s resident non-resident vagabond, Adam Daniel Mezei. Canadian by birth and Czech by genes, Adam has roots on multiple continents. After years in Prague, where he wrote and coached a young generation on tapping into a previously suppressed entrepreneurial spirit, he’s now focused on the emerging cultural and commercial ties with China. (Does he only live and work in nations that start with “C?” is Cameroon next?)

I share this because it highlights a theme that becomes increasingly important in communication – how to overcome cultural signposts. While analogy can be a most powerful tool in quickly bridging the gap between minds, those literal words lose context when translated into another language or culture. Often, they gain contexts the author never intended. And as Adam’s example shows us, finding the appropriate “parallel” analogy from a new culture can open up new meanings, and explain why other nations end up with insights that shape their perspective, direction and action.

Enjoy – and thanks ADM!)

Panda Huggers vs. Dragon Slayers

I’ll be manning Your Good Ship Occam today, so I thought I’d introduce myself and say hello. Sit back, unbuckle your belt, and sip your cognac or grape juice slowly. Let’s try to enjoy this wild ride at 30,000 feet, shall we? And if you’re teetotalling, that’s fine too, just don’t say we didn’t warn you…

Since I’m guest-ing on the bleeding edge of today’s “razr,” what would an Occam’s post be without a snappy Occamist-type title? I’ve settled on “Panda Huggers vs. Dragon Slayers” and I hope you like it.

Panda hugger? Dragon slayer? What in tarnation am I on about?

Well, it’s connected to one of my long-standing pet projects, a field I’ve been spending a considerable amount of time on these past few months: the Sino-US relationship. Through my humble efforts, this here crazy Canuck is trying to help the two sides see clear through to each other’s intentions in the lead up towards what’s shaping up to be this century’s new policy of detente.

Look, it’s no secret I get most of my good ideas during exercise. Mornings, preferably, and ideally on the stationary bike. Like any garden variety ISTP on the Myers-Briggs Type Index, I don’t waste too much free time faffing around doing idle stuff, so having said that my book du jour is Serge Michel & Michel Beuret‘s China Safari: On the Trail of Beijing’s Expansion in Africa, a tale of China’s expansionist policies on the majority Dark Continent. I’ve spoken about this book recently here, but the premise of China Safari is so mission-critical I felt it warranted an encore post.

Michel and Beuret make frequent references to the China “hawks” and “doves” in the US State Department. There are some leading Americans who feel a more robust global engagement with China is indeed unncessary, that softer methods are more appropriate in an effort to cajole the PRC into modes of behaviour which align more closely with US political interests in Africa (read: realpolitik). On the other hand, there are those hawks who claim that the People’s Republic is surreptitiously ekeing out key global territorities in a reprise of the sorts of proxy wars we and the Soviets used to trifle with back in the day.

Let’s deconstruct this, shall we?

Panda Huggers:

The name stems from China’s popular zoological export. Such an individual has the following characteristics:

• believes that China is a reasonable interlocutor and can be persuaded via “soft diplomacy” to cease encouraging or otherwise inducing chaos and bloodshed amongst Africa’s warring tribes and nations (egs. Ethiopia-Eritrea, Chad-Niger-Sudan, Darfur, the Congo, etc).
• believes that China retains a global competitive and sovereign right to prospect for oil and mineral resources around the world as part of its “peaceful rise” and that the developed nations have no right to interfere in this given their own abhorrent polluting pasts.
• accepts that China is not altogether forthright about its ultimate political aims in Africa but as it simultaneously improves its African client states’ overall infrastructures (egs. roads, airports, bridges, ports, and schools), China hardly mimics former European rapacious imperialism.
• dimisses the global scaremongering about China’s all-pervasive influence in African conflict zones, given that at only 4 to 5% of the total global trade in fatal small arms (compared to the US’ approximately 25%), the PRC is hardly the dastardly Grand Game player as the US’ hawks will readily claim.
• likes to cite the overall “win-win” relationship in China’s dealings with rogue states like Sudan, Chad, and Liberia, whereby the latter are raised up several societal notches through China’s fiscal generosity through interest-free loans and/or outright credits. The classical, “Yeah, but look what China’s done to improve…” excuse.

Versus…

Dragon Slayers:

This term finds its root in China’s fortune-bringing mighty fire-breathing talisman. Such an individual has the following characteristics:

• realizes that China has been aggressively hyperanalyzing European colonial history since the PRC’s Reform and Opening Up period, and, as such, is aware that China has rather employed a decidedly more magnanimous approach to the “rape” of the African continent which effectively obscures the rising juggernaut’s stated superpower aspirations.
• understands that the US, bogged down in its Iraqi and Afghanistan military odysseys, has been devoting scant resources to its African Command (presently based in Stuttgart, Germany!) and is essentially powerless to stop China’s African rollout.
• knows that China is the living embodiment of Sun Tzu’s classic dictum of “giving in order to bring your enemy closer…to make him unaware…only then can you strike.” Dragon slayers know that China has been spoiling the Sudanese, the Nigerians, the Angolans, the Zambians, the Ethiopians, the Sudanese, the Egyptians, the Algerians, and many of the forty-nine other African states which China maintains official diplomatic relations with rotten, in order to brazenly buy its way into exclusivity situations for oil, uranium, bauxite, and other precious resource deals. Slayers also know that China desperately needs Africa’s resources to ensure its resource security into the foreseeable future, given how the French, Italians, Dutch, British, and Americans have crowded the PRC out in their traditional Middle Eastern fiefdoms.
• laments the fact that the US is once again “sleeping at the wheel” in Africa. Meanwhile, China has staked out all of the best claims and is winning friends and influencing people all across Africa and, consequently, in the UN. In comparison, the US will eventually seem like a carpetbagger when it awakens to the ongoing realities and will be only too late to put a stop to things.

The Final Word:

As I fashion myself as something of an amateur Sinologist, I’m tending towards siding the Dragon Slayers who seem to have a firmer understanding of the entrenched realities and the hunt for untapped oil.

Given what recently transpired at #COP15 in Denmark during the Climate Conference, what with the groundbreaking all-encompassing document the G20 somehow knew would never be inked in Copenhagen and how it only reiforces the West’s seemingly incurable addiction to carbon-consuming technologies, China’s leaders seem to have their collective heads screwed on properly. With China’s annual market just for automobiles set to exceed 11 million units in 2011 and beyond and with a national market of over 100 million cars, China isn’t taking any prisoners (nor chances) with its petroleum destiny.

So which are you? Panda Hugger or Dragon Slayer?

Of course, please let us know in the comments below.

(and follow Adam Daniel Mezei on Twitter. – Ike)