The “Made in China” label is everywhere in Zimbabwe.

On almost all our clothing and household items. Thanks to Mugabe’s Look East policy, “zhing zhongs”, a nickname for cheap Chinese products, are flooding the markets, forcing many local industries to close down.

Look East
“A dollar for ten exercise books!”; “A dollar for ten teaspoons!”; “A dollar for three shirts”. Such sales gimmickry would have been completely unbelievable three years ago when the country faced a serious economic decline before the introduction of hard currencies to replace the worthless Zim dollar. Thousands of unemployed people are now ordering Chinese goods for resale outside shopping malls, in flea markets and along major roads. However, the number of buyers are declining fast due to unemployment.

The Look-East policy was initiated in 2003 following Zimbabwe’s controversial land distribution programme and imposition of sanctions by the West on the political leadership due to gross violation of human rights. Besides, China has been a close ally of President Robert Mugabe and his ZANU (PF) party dating back to the liberation struggle when the country supplied weapons and other material to the former guerrilla movement.

“It’s good that even the lowly paid can at least afford to buy new clothes. But in the process they are losing their jobs because these very same cheap Chinese goods have rendered our own industries unviable.“ says economic analyst Rejoice Sitshela.

Listen below to an excerpt of the interview with Rejoice Sitshela:

Rural folk short-changed
Sadly for the hardworking rural folk, who because of the negative impact of short money supply, are getting more exploited and poorer. Unscrupulous traders are exchanging cheap Chinese clothes, genetically modified foods and household utensils for their large quantities of farm products for resale in cities, thus leaving the peasants without any disposable money for their daily needs like groceries, school fees and transport. At times they can’t even afford mealie-meal produced from the maize they would have sold to briefcase sales people in the first instance.

Progress Chitagu, a stationery vendor thinks he has a suggestion to counterbalance this Chinese takeover. “Let’s also export items that are in short supply in China. They obviously need our scrap metal but let’s stop vandalising our infrastructures in order to sell copper wire and railways tracks to them. They need tobacco, so let’s grow it big time, but bypass the cheating merchants. Without forgetting our recently certified diamonds, let’s also remember the Chinese delicacy- dog meat- meaning that we should breed many dogs and sell their meat to our supportive Eastern friends.”

Introduce Mandarin?
With a five decade-old relationship between the two countries which is only getting stronger, maybe it is time to introduce Mandarin as a foreign language at school. Better business deals could be reached without language barriers. Especially when Beijing has big plans for Zimbabwe – now they even want to invest in hydro, thermal, gas and solar power projects among others.