Last year president Jacob Zuma egged on the SA Communist Party to push for reform of those eager students of Marxism, the IMF and the World Bank. One wonders what we’ll get at the state of the nation address. Since he is the great unifier, will he despatch Executive Outcomes to Iraq? Winnie Madikizela-Mandela to start soccer teams for Haiti’s orphans?

Another of SA’s odd missions must be Minister of Trade and Industry Rob Davies punting SA’s role in getting red China and maroon Russia to push green. To be fair, he announced this role when the news broke that SA had succeeded in begging an invitation to join the Bric Forum. He may well have been doing a pre-emptive maneuvre to get green issues on the agenda before the double-speak diplomatic types overrule him.

The oddity of this approach, nevertheless, struck me upon reading accounts of Guardian journalist Jonathan Watts years-long journey through the wastelands of what passes for China’s environment.

There are two loud anomalies in Davies’ mission – SA does not have much of a foot to stand on, with a none-too-bright green history, and getting Russia and China to think green – which will have to happen if the bloc stands a chance to make an impression – will involve getting them to go pink, as in adopt much more liberal values of governance.

Apart from being among the worst carbon emitters on earth, the South African way of doing does not have much to commend it. Looking from the outside, India especially may be bemused by how prescription here differs from practice. They might see the model from SA like this: plunder the country’s resources, make lots of money for offshore accounts, poison the water, lunarise the landcape, and then sell off the culprits to Indian families. (As in Iscor).

But the real issue is China, now the world’s biggest emitter of carbon gases. As Johann Hari summed up the Watts’ book, When a million Chinese jump: “The Chinese state had embarked on a massive programme of ecological destruction. It has turned whole rivers poisonous to the touch, rendered entire areas cancer-ridden, transformed a fertile area almost twice the size of Britain into desert—and perhaps even triggered the worst earthquake in living memory.”

Watts has criss-crossed China for his book, but the most poignant moment is when he discovers that the world’s oldest dolphin species came from the Yantze River. And then that it had been extinguished, in part because of the building of the Three Gorges Dam (which also destroyed the Three Gorges).

“Man had wiped out its first dolphin,” writes Watts. “The end of a species after twenty million years felt terrifyingly momentous. This was not just a piece of news. It was even more than history. It was an event on a geological timescale.”

If SA wants to achieve something green internationally, that is where it should start as a member of Bric. Otherwise it will just make a fool of itself. But really, do you expect the Chinese to listen to SA, which is as large as one of its smaller, more forgotten provinces, in terms of economic size?

Part and parcel of the crisis is that China is unable to properly listen to its own people. Watts describes a visit to a dump for motherboards – yes, the innards of computers like the one you are reading this on – and how activists try to do something about the children working on it, and dying of all sorts of illnesses, including cancer.

He watches as they get carried away by police to be locked up for months.

How China relentlessly persecutes people who try simply to correctly record the devastation – let alone do something about it – is itself well recorded. So if SA wants to achieve a green mission here, it should start even before the beginning, by getting China to recognise the urgency of freeing its media and its activists.

Do you see us doing that? With our dismal human rights voting record at the United Nations? And with our ruling party’s own ham-fisted attempts to shackle the media?

Rather I think the relationship would work the other way: SA’s pseudo-revolutionaries have long been in Beijing’s thrall. SA’s institutions are beginning to reflect those of China. China’s ruling party has declared that it would rule forever, SA’s too.

Experts have questioned SA’s apparent abandonment of IBSA, the alliance between India, Brazil and SA, in favour of Bric. The IBSA countries are much more alike in their histories, and are all democracies. Brazil especially has been successful with various developmental initiatives – this alone would have delivered sufficient dividends for nurturing the relationship.

One explanation is that SA and its imperialist wannabes are attracted by China and Russia’s ostensible strongman actions, as they thumb their noses at the west. They want the same, to build their own empire in Africa, in which green matters will have to wait outside in the cold just as in China and Russia.

Tags: #bric, #carbon emitters, #china, #communist party, #davies, #imf, #watts, #yan