African scholar: Socialism key to China's enormous transformation

An African scholar is hailing the socialism path that China is on, saying it has played a significant role in China's enormous transformation over the past 70 years.

"I am Fay Chung and I joined the liberation struggle in 1973. After independence I spent 14 years in government and that was all more or less in education and we were able to improve education for Africans," says Chung.

Fay Chung takes an interview with China Radio International on August 27, 2019. [Photo: China Plus/Gao Junya]

78 year-old Fay Chung is the third generation of a Chinese immigrant family in Zimbabwe. She joined Zimbabwe's liberation struggle in the 1970s and served in various positions in the government of Robert Mugabe after independence.

She is so far been the only person of Chinese descent to have worked as a cabinet minister in the Zimbabwe government.

Chung says she first visited China in 1973, when things seemed not that developed.

"At that time industrialization was very, very simple. They had to do what they were capable of doing. So it was very primitive industrialization. I saw under the communes you had to do some factories right on your farm. So I saw them do shoe factories, clothing factories, and paper factories. And the technology was very simple. And at that time I thought, oh, China's technology is backward. It is even lower than Rhodesia and Zambia at that time," says Chung.

Fay Chung's book "Zimbabwe Looking East." [Photo: China Plus/Gao Junya]

Fay Chung says the huge transformation in China over the years is quite impressive.

"So we find China from 1973, 1980s, 1990s moving from very primitive technologies, lower than Africa, to a middle level and then they moved to advanced technology. So I think this is a lesson that we have from China. Instead of looking just five years, we see China looking at 46 years, looking at 100 years and saying we have to change all the time," says Chung.

She attributes China's rapid development to socialist ideology.

"I think china should be congratulated that over 70 years, they have managed to maintain one ideology. That is socialism. And at the same time, it has managed to adapt it for every decade. I think that is the big achievement," says Chung.

Fay Chung visits her hometown in Guangdong Province. [Photo: Courtesy of Fay Chung]

Chung is the author of the bestseller Zimbabwe Looking East, and is urging Zimbabwe to learn from China's development model.

"We cannot just copy. We have to take what is good in the Chinese experience and adapt it to the Zimbabwean situation. So I think the important thing is we need to do policies which are related to the challenges we have. And I think that's a good thing. China does not say we know the answers, because in fact China had admitted that the answers change every generation because they have been changing and what they are doing now is different from 1950, 1960. So they understand that development is dynamic," says Chung.