Here's a rhetorical puzzle for you. Wendy West and her friends sometimes criticize Chuck Porcelain for conduct of his which they regard as dodgy. Finn Timms says that Wendy and co have no room to talk. They used to do the same sort of thing as Chuck. In fact, what Chuck is up to is OK, because it produces results. And anyway he's not the only one whose behaviour has been less than exemplary.
The puzzle is this. If what Chuck is doing is OK, then the comparable doings that Wendy and her friends once engaged in, and which Finn points to critically, were also OK, no? So why is Finn taxing them with behaviour he calls less than exemplary? On the other hand, if it was less than exemplary, then so surely is Chuck's behaviour now, rather than being just OK. Round and round we go.
These dizzying reflections arise from a piece by David Pilling in the Financial Times. He refers there to 'Western donors decry[ing] Beijing's supposedly scruples-free approach to investing in countries such as Sudan', and then goes on to speak of the positive results for Africa's economic development of 'China's pragmatism'; China, he says, may 'represent Africa's best hope of escaping poverty'. He writes further:
Much of the criticism of China's influence rings hollow. As Chinese... officials point out, the west's record is less than exemplary. European contact with Africa can best be summed up as decades of naked rapaciousness followed by a spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to make amends. During the cold war western governments supported dictators and kleptomaniacs across the continent, from President Mobutu Sese Seko of what was then Zaire to Uganda's murderous British-trained Idi Amin.
Later Pilling acknowledges that China has 'helped prop up unscrupulous regimes in Khartoum and Harare' but adds that it 'is hardly alone in dealing with thieves and villains'.
I'm not qualified to say anything about the effects of Chinese influence on development in Africa. But I am interested in whether we should see it as commendable pragmatism or as less than exemplary conduct in dealing with - and helping - thieves and villains. I'm also interested in knowing if it makes any difference to how one looks at things whether people or countries used to conduct their affairs in a certain, problematic, way or whether they do so now.