smalllook up Meituan’s Chinese food delivery app for ejiaoand all sorts of goodies emerge. Ejiao it was once a luxury consumed in the emperor’s court, valued as a traditional medicine taken to strengthen the blood, improve sleep and slow aging. Today, ejiao it’s for the masses. People drink it in a tonic that costs about $2 for 10 vials. Eat it in small cakes made with rock sugar, rice wine, walnuts and black sesame at $7 for a tin of 30. or snack ejiao-Coated dates just under a dollar a pack.
There’s just one problem: The collagen substance is extracted from donkey skin. China’s domestic donkey population has plummeted, and now the nation’s mass taste is depriving African farms of one of their most essential and valuable assets. In countries as far away as Nigeria, Ethiopia and Botswana, the animals that form the basis of many small farms – where donkeys are used for plowing, transporting crops to market and many other purposes – are slaughtered for cash value . their skins.
Drainage has become so damaging to Africa’s agricultural economy that in February the 55-member African Union approved a continent-wide ban on the slaughter of donkeys for their hides at the summit of heads of state. Whether African governments can implement such a ban remains to be seen. If they do, they could seriously sting the Chinese ejiao industry.
China’s rulers have done nothing to address the issue. On the surface, their inactivity is confusing. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has spent huge amounts of political and economic capital to woo the countries of the developing world, especially in Africa. Given this context, intervention to regulate it ejiao Trade and conservation assistance for the African donkey would seem an easy, low-cost way to demonstrate China’s willingness to be a constructive partner.
“Leadership comes with responsibility,” Oscar Meywa Otele, a political scientist at the University of Nairobi, told me. African countries would like to see China play “a more substantial and acceptable role,” but the donkey issue is a big enough problem that “it can undermine [China’s] ambitions to be the leader of the Global South”.
Xi’s grand goals may conflict with China’s short-term economic and political interests. When this happens, it opens a window into Beijing’s true attitude toward its supposed partners and raises doubts about China’s readiness to assume that leadership. This matters in Washington. As the developing world becomes a battleground between the United States and China, with both eager to win adherents to their competing visions of a reformed world order, the contradictions in Xi’s approach could hurt his efforts to portray Beijing as more sympathetic to the interests and needs of poor countries. The humble donkey has thus acquired geopolitical significance.
doconsumption of hina of ejiao has increased with the wealth of the country. Back in 1990, ejiao Manufacturers in China needed about 200,000 donkey hides per year. Now them believed to consume about 4 to 6 million skins a year. This equates to about 10 percent of the world’s estimated population of 53 million donkeys—a rate of attrition that is clearly unsustainable. The demand from ejiao Producers outstripped domestic supplies years ago and led to buoyant import activity.
Exactly how much hide comes from Africa is unclear, but the continent is home to two-thirds of the world’s donkeys, so it’s safe to assume that African exports account for a large share. Because donkeys reproduce slowly — a genet typically produces a foal only every second year — the drain is quickly depleting Africa’s herd. A study suggests that South Africa’s donkey population has declined from 210,000 animals in 1996 to 146,000 in 2019. On current trends, the donkey it can disappear completely from the continent over the next two decades. In addition, the rising value of hides has encouraged illegal donkey slaughter, the circumvention of regulatory controls, and the widespread theft of donkeys by poor farmers.
Beijing could do a lot to mitigate the problem. Better regulation of the donkey skin trade could help African governments monitor and control exports, as well as ensure a more sustainable supply to China ejiao producers. Why Beijing didn’t bother to react is anyone’s guess. One factor could be that the government likes to promote traditional medicine, at home and abroad, as a way to highlight China’s ancient science and culture. From this point of view, it may regard any restriction of the sector as contrary to the national interest. Or the welfare of donkeys and the plight of African farmers may simply be below Beijing’s attention threshold, compared to its more pressing geopolitical concerns.
China’s abusive donkey trade is part of a wider plan to exploit the resources of the global South by China. Chinese fleets have long been accused of aggressive overfishing, from the coast of West Africa to the South Pacific. In the South China Sea, most of which Beijing claims as its territorial waters, Chinese vessels fisherman’s block from neighboring countries from traditional fishing grounds, which is a major point of contention among governments in the region.
docommercial of hina interests they are also at odds with Beijing’s bid to cast itself as a champion of the world’s poorest nations. A borrowing by state banks, most of it to support Xi’s global infrastructure-building plan, the Belt and Road Initiative, has been touted as a sustainable development program and proof of China’s superiority as an economic partner. But those loans, which have made China the world’s biggest official creditor to the developing world, have contributed to a debt crisis in the global South, with some low-income countries overburdened and unable to make repayments.
But Beijing has shown little sympathy for its debtors, and state banks are squeezing poor countries hard. They have resisted writing off part of the loan principal – a common practice in debt restructurings aimed at speeding a return to solvency – and usually insist on cutting deals by stealth to beat out other creditors for what’s left in the debtor countries’ depleted coffers. When, for example, Angola had to restructure a $15 billion loan from China in 2020, the state-owned China Development Bank for the first time began paying itself interest from a escrow account. Then, anticipating the depletion of this source, the bank demanded that the cash-poor government replenish it.
Developing countries “know China in a different role,” Bradley Parks, the executive director of the AidData research lab at William & Mary, told me. Less about his greatness and more “as the world’s greatest debt collector”. He added: “Debt collectors don’t win many popularity contests.”
At the same time, new lending from Beijing has almost dried up over the past five years. As a result, the flow of capital that once flowed from China to the global South has been reversed. A 2023 study of China’s lending program published by the American Economic Association revealed that developing countries they pay now more to Chinese banks to service their debts than take out new loans.
doIndian leaders getting closer The developing world’s debt “is in direct tension with their desire to have influence over the general public and government elites in the developing world,” Parks said. Throughout this push for influence, Chinese leaders have struggled to present themselves as selfless partners, concerned with the global good, unlike the West. “In promoting its own development process, China always insists on mutual support with countries in the South, complementing each other’s strengths and jointly building a modernized Global South,” Liu Jianchao, head of the international department, recently reiterated of the Communist Party. in a leading ideological magazine.
However, the reality is that China’s rise presents as many risks as it does benefits for emerging economies. Xi still seems to believe he can lead the rising voices of the global South in a fight against their former colonial masters in the West. But China’s actual policies toward the developing world are beginning to echo this old colonialism: the exploitation of resources for the benefit of the center, the metropolis’s self-perception that its superior civilization grants it special rights, the use of capital to extract more wealth from the less fortunate.
“African governments need to be much more proactive. You cannot afford to let China dictate to you,” Sanusha Naidu, a senior fellow at the Institute for Global Dialogue, a South Africa-based think tank, told me. “That was the big challenge, the difficulty, in that relationship.”
The African Union’s donkey ban is a sign that the continent’s leaders are deciding to act in this more proactive way. Implicit in the ban is a strong message that China cannot have everything it wants, on its own terms, from the global South. If the African Union succeeds in ending the donkey skin trade to China, Beijing will no longer be able to pretend that its actions do not have negative effects on African countries or its reputation on the continent. The ejiao The industry is already hurting China-Africa relations, Lauren Johnston, a China expert at the University of Sydney, told me. “It makes people hate China.”