China's commodity acquisition campaign is designed to lock in
countries all over the world in a similar symbiosis. Just as China was
incentivized to take Japan's money in the mid-1970s to fuel its own
economic success through infrastructure investment, so resource-rich
nations now need China's financial investments, just as China
needs to maintain the flow of those countries' natural resources.
Such dependency is strongly reinforced by the threat of financial
catastrophe; Breaking out of the cycle requires a country's willingness
to severely damage its own economy. In the Chimerica relationship, the United States could default on its debt to China, but
that would drive up its cost of borrowing substantially. America
could also impose tariffs on cheap Chinese goods, an option that
opens the door for similar trade barriers on American products (to
the detriment of the US economy). Likewise, resource-rich economies
caught up in commodity trading could restrict China's access
to their assets through, say, nationalization of resources, but that
course of action, even if other buyers could be found, would mean
the hosts would turn their back on what is basically a guaranteed
Chinese cash flow to fund projects they desperately need.
Whether the asset being traded is access to the world's largest
consumer market or African nickel mines, the outcome and the
essence of the trade is the same -- long-term dependency in which
governments get locked in indefinitely, or at least until one of the
parties involved stops getting what it wants. Escape is futile, and
everyone is left in hock to China. China, of course, would equally be
left locked in with whatever nation controlled the asset it was pursuing
if these were single-source resources, but asset sources tend
to be plural, whereas China's wealth and range are, for the time being,
singular.
This is not to say that countries don't try to avoid being sucked
into cycles of dependency. By now this sort of trade dependency is
well known, and many resource-rich nations have been grappling
with the balance between guaranteeing their sovereignty and allowing
the necessary investment capital to flow into their country. Among others, the Brazilian government has been struggling
with this very delicate issue, specifically with regard to granting foreign
countries land access. In Brazil's case, it is likely that some nationalist
legal protections will come into effect before too long.
Although these new regulations governing land access and tenure
may take a while to percolate through the web of special interests
and competing agendas, the rules will almost certainly include more
aggressive caps on foreign ownership and access to land, some limits
on the uses of the land -- say, between mining, cattle ranching, industry,
or farming and food production -- and restrictions on the
allowable tenure of foreign land access and control. The increasingly
strong Brazilian industrial sector has also shown rising resistance
to Chinese imports as local producers have ceded market
share to Chinese products. As China continues to pull out its wallet
and buy up resources, thus enriching its symbiotic partners, such
acts of resistance can be expected to become increasingly commonplace.