David: I was at KFC yesterday and you should have seen how tiny the chicken portions on sale were. I’ve never eaten such overpriced chicken in my life. I was going to complain to the manager until I realised that this was the famous patriotic border closure chicken we have heard so much about. It’s utterly disgraceful and blatantly counter-intuitive to force Nigerians to pay more for smaller portions of lower quality food as part of some badly-conceived plan to “boost local production.” Who comes up with these hare-brained ideas?
Dafiidi: Don’t talk like that. Are you saying that Nigeria should just keep on importing forever? How can we build an economy for 200 million people by just importing? Listen let me tell you, China took the pain and hard decision to close its borders and develop its internal capacity before it opened up to the world. We can’t avoid it, we must also take that temporary pain to build up our own local capacity.
David: Er, that is fake news. That never happened. China did no such thing.
Dafiidi: But Chairman Mao-
David: Yes, Chairman Mao launched a disastrous ‘Cultural Revolution,’ which included a partial border closure in addition to genocide, famine and a hare-brained idea to drive steel production and industrialisation by forcing people to donate everything they had that was made of iron including jewellery. It was a woeful disaster all round. Anything from 10 to 30 million people are estimated to have died, and it was to the everlasting credit of Deng Xiaoping when he took over, that he reversed the crazy policy and opened China up to trade and competition.
There was never a “border closure” between China and Hong Kong, FYI. As long as that trade link existed, it’s fair to say that the Chinese never actually closed their borders
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Dafiidi: But they couldn’t have developed the capacity to produce and export if they had not previously closed their borders. They learned self-sufficiency, whether you say 30 million people died or not.
David: Again, wrong. Actually, if you read Deng’s own words, he is most famous for saying “It doesn’t matter what colour the cat is. What matters is that it catches mice.” Deng was not a protectionist – he was a pragmatist. His policy opened China up when the country was at one of its lowest points, and marketed China to the rest of the world as a production hub with reasonably well-skilled and relatively cheap labour. Mao’s China and China from Deng to the present are actually very, very different countries.
Dafiidi: But they sha still closed their borders and it helped them.
David: Actually the whole “they closed their border” thing is fake news too. It was never anything more than a partial closure, and in any case, China always had access to Hong Kong, which was under British rule and had free trade. At a point, Hong Kong’s economy was about 25 percent of China’s total economy, and the trade between the island and mainland never stopped. There was never a “border closure” between China and Hong Kong, FYI. As long as that trade link existed, it’s fair to say that the Chinese never actually closed their borders. Stop repeating stuff just because other people said it.
Dafiidi: So you’re saying that my entire argument in favour of border closure is based on fake news?
David: Yes imaginary alter ego, that is exactly what I am saying.
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