19 October 2017
New Chinese Capital For A New Egyptian Capital
A Chinese president, a plutocratic philosopher, an ancient British king & a heretic pharoah.
by Neil Tidmarsh
The nineteenth Chinese Communist Party Congress taking place this week will be an austere affair, unlike previous congresses. This time there will be no free facials, haircuts, tailored suits or other perks for the delegates gathering in Beijing from all over China. There will be no welcome banners, bunches of bright balloons or bouquets of vivid hothouse blooms to greet them, no dishes of exotic fruit in their hotel rooms, no alcohol or delicacies such as prawns and sea cucumbers when they sit down to eat. Just simple, traditional, home-style dishes served in canteens and buffets.
President Xi wisely began to promote thrift and simplicity within the party hierarchy almost as soon as he became leader at the last congress five years ago. He realised that waste and opulence not only invite inefficiency, but also alienate the Chinese public. Ostentation among party officials breeds a dangerous resentment among the rank and file.
The ancient Roman philosopher Seneca would have approved. He preached simplicity, austerity and poverty as morally beneficial, good for both the body and the spirit. He was a follower of the Greek Stoics, and like them he promoted the virtues of self-denial and self-control. The early Christians considered him to be more or less a secular saint.
But Seneca was also one of the richest and most powerful men in Imperial Rome. Yes, you may well say, it’s easy to preach the virtues of a life of poverty if you don’t have to live it yourself. He inherited huge wealth and was tutor to the young Nero; he increased both influence and riches by lending money the length and breadth of the empire.
He might even have been responsible for the revolt of Boudicca and the Iceni of East Anglia. A credit crunch in Rome about AD61 resulted in him calling in loans from across the empire; his debtors would almost certainly have included generals and officials in the new province of Britannia, who themselves would have lent huge sums to the native kings (“You want a villa like our emperor’s, with statues and mosaics in all the latest styles? You want a regular supply of wine? You want Roman togas and Greek tunics and circuses and amphitheatres and gladiators and chariot races? We can get them for you. You can’t afford them? Sure you can, you’re a great king with vast fertile lands stuffed with wheat and livestock. Tell you what, we’ll lend you the money ourselves. You can pay us back, at a very generous rate of interest. What’s interest, you say? Well, don’t worry about that, we’ll explain it later…” And sure enough those vast fertile lands would soon be as good as theirs; such was the way of the Romans, even more so than the march of the legions.) Perhaps their sudden and savage seizure of the land and property of the recently deceased Prasutagus, king of the Iceni and a client of Rome, was a way of recouping the native king’s debts to them so that they could pay off their own debts to the frighteningly powerful Seneca, sitting in Rome like a big scary spider at the centre of his vast web of international finance. When Prasutagus’s queen Boudicca objected, Roman soldiers seized and whipped her. Her daughters were raped – a horrifying and all-too-literal metaphor for a superstate taking advantage of a developing nation.
Of course China, like Seneca, isn’t advocating austerity out of necessity. China, like the Roman philosopher, has unimaginable amounts of capital invested all around the world. And as it happens, a report (five years in the making) on Chinese aid to developing countries was published this week by AidData, of the College of William and Mary, a university in Virginia. It claimed that while China dispensed over $362 billion in foreign aid between 2000 and 2014, 80% of that money wasn’t aid as commonly understood, but money loaned as investments in projects such as infrastructure or energy which created markets for Chinese goods and services and secured natural resources cheaply, but – lo and behold – actually left the recipient countries worse off because of costly repayments.
What kind of infrastructure projects? Well, not villas and circuses and amphitheatres, of course. But earlier this week President Sisi of Egypt signed a $3 billion deal with the China State Construction Engineering Corporation to build a new capital city to replace Cairo. This new city is to be constructed in the desert about 30 miles from Cairo within three years. It is to house 6.5 million people, contain all government buildings, and have its own airport, parks, canals, industrial zones and rail links to the rest of the country. With Egypt’s population approaching 100 million (and the 6000 year old Cairo bursting at the seams with a population of almost 10 million), it’s hoped that this project will provide what the country desperately needs – jobs and housing.
But the project is not completely secure. It was floated over two years ago and some Emirati funders have already pulled out. And other sources of funding from China aren’t guaranteed – some have also pulled out, and $20 billion from the China Foreign Land Development Company has still not been confirmed. This project is more exciting than its current dull name – the New Administrative Capital – would suggest, and no doubt the world wishes it well. But even if all the required finance from China is forthcoming, success is not guaranteed; that report from AidData also pointed out that Beijing wrote off $213 million between 2010 and 2012 because of loan defaults in nine countries (including, recently, $14 million loaned to Angola for oil projects). And it’s easy to forget that China is a borrower as well as a lender; some economists fear that its sovereign debt is a huge bubble about to burst.
It isn’t the first time that a brand new capital city for Egypt has been built from scratch. In the fourteenth century BC, the ‘Heretic Pharaoh’ Akhenaten moved his court away from fertile Thebes on the Nile and built a new capital at Amarna, in the middle of the desert. Within a generation it had been abandoned, and the capital returned to Thebes. Today Amarna is once again no more than empty desert.
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