China: World's New Aba Market

  

By Yami Bamgboye 

Aba-made was an ‘unpleasant’ or ‘derogatory’ name many Nigerians gave to locally produced wares like shoes, bags, belts, clothes, etc. in Igbo land that closely looked like the real deal back in the days to mock the craftsmanship of our Igbo brothers. But despite the mockery, these people were not deterred in any way. They remained resolute, grew with time and today, many of those brands have become international like the ones they imitated in the beginning. It may not be out of place to say that the civil war brought about this ingenuity and self-sufficient mentality that facilitated the economic revival of Igbo land thereby birthing commerce on a larger scale. Or you want to argue that they never had it in them, hun?

China today is perceived as the world’s Aba market where all sorts of ‘Aba’ (inferior) materials are made. As funny as this sounds, it may not be entirely true. You feel me? Now let’s look at it like this: change is common to every human except those who deliberately resist it anyway. Henry David Thoreau says ‘Things do not change, we change’. This singular fact explains why producers improve on their products from time to time. Back in early 2000s, phones made in China popularly called Chinese phones flooded Nigerian and maybe other African markets too. They were very cheap, relatively cheaper than the ones that had dominated the phone market like Nokia, Samsung, Sagem, Trium, Motorola, Siemens, etc.. At first, they were scorned and only ended up in the pockets of those willing to pay little to have just as much as a device that could at least send messages, make and receive calls. After few years, android phones surfaced and these Chinese producers really tried to match up except that they bombarded theirs with more features that were just so unnecessary. It was the period a single phone could have AC, fan, TV, etc. Loool. After another short time, they got better and started standardizing their productions. The most prominent, which I still remember, was Tecno. Look around today and you will know that their (Chinese companies) tentacles have spread to other industries including construction where their impact is felt.

In all of these, one thing they have done well and maintained like our Aba brothers, is to make cheap their products and services. A strategy they have used to ‘invade’ even the American market. According to https://www.gao.gov/u.s.-china-relations, ‘China’s harmful and unfair economic practices, including trade in illicit goods [to mean substandard too], use of forced labor [including cheap labour too], and theft of sensitive technologies pose risks to the U.S. economic and security interests…’ Although the Cold War between America and China has escalated and de-escalated at different times since the 40s no doubt, the continual improvement of China’s military capabilities and copycat inventions of Western technologies haven’t stopped threatening America’s economic dominance and national security.

Few weeks ago, we got informed that China produced a cheaper version of the latest Range Rover 2024 edition which costs about $4,000.What a mockery you would say! Truth is it really looked like the original version that costs about $400,000. It shares the same interior and functionality features but visibly looks smaller. As if that is not enough to break the camel’s back, DeepSeek RI joins the conversation and now, it’s yam pepper scatter scatter. Like arms race in many parts of the world, there’s also tech race. It’s like the new battle ground right now. So AI technology became a big deal lately after many companies and investors invested billions of dollars to put on the market the likes of OpenAI, ChatGPT, GPT-4, Liama and Gemini. No one ever thought some Chinese startup that has only been for one year would develop a powerful technology that would give the big boys a run for their money with just a fraction ($5.6 million) of what they invested. Why this has made so much noise is because of the policy of the American government that restricts the supply of high power AI chips to China because of security concerns but China surprised the world by relying on its low-cost model of under-powered AI chips and how much it closely matches their capabilities (according to CNN).

You see what I’m saying? Now back to our own peculiarity. We don’t have to be America to do what we have to do to thrive and even compete with the big boys. We just need to take a cue from these happenings, look within and churn out something of good quality with what we have.