<B>By Nicholas RAINER</B>

There?s nothing like a bit of old China-bashing to get the blood coursing through the veins, is there? In Parliament last week, Rama Sithanen accused Paul Bérenger of indulging in just that when the latter demanded that the two Schedules binding the government to Tianli be made public. The minister of Finance was pleasantly expansive in his reply to the leader of the opposition?s Private Notice Question yet ultimately refused to accede to his request. Rama Sithanen declared that while he was personally in favour of making the Schedules public, the Chinese government was adverse to such a move.

One has to wonder about the reasons behind this secrecy and, more importantly still, whether it is reasonable to allow a foreign government to call all the shots. After all, the Tianli economic and trade cooperation zone is going to have a far greater impact on Mauritius than on the Middle Kingdom.

It?s vital that the Mauritian and Chinese governments respect the public?s right to know the terms that bind us to the project. For government to dismiss legitimate enquiries into the deal as "China-bashing" is both counter-productive and disingenuous. The American people learned all about the dangers of excessive political correctness the hard way in the wake of the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center. Indeed, the Bush Administration used the disaster to silence any critics of its policies by labeling them ?anti-patriotic?. This frightening kidnapping of the democratic space allowed the government to go invade Iraq despite the flimsiness of the WMD dossier.

In The Chinese Monitor of February 2007 entitled Evaluating President Hu Jintao?s tour of Africa, Martyn Davies, the director of the Centre for Chinese Studies lauded the economic giant?s involvement in Africa and put forward the case for embracing it. "It?s best we quickly begin to understand the drivers of this process. I do not believe that we as Africans have even begun to comprehend the long-term strategic implications of this new force. China has become the most confident and assertive commercial player in Africa. It appears that China will over time displace Western commercial interests and political influence on the continent. But China is not the new coloniser.

It is an expanding global power toward which Africa must pragmatically align itself."

In the same vein, Rama Sithanen was right to highlight the arguments in favour of the Tianli deal as they are indeed convincing. Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) amounting to billions of rupees and thousands of jobs created, to name but two. Yet secrecy has never served the cause of democracy. China?s leaders decided long ago that power by the people was not the appropriate mode of government for the society they wanted to build. That is their right.

In Mauritius, however, we are proud of our democratic credentials. "Single most important piece of FDI" or not, the government owes it to the country to make public the terms and conditions. If the Chinese government afforded Zambia this privilege then why won?t it do the same for Mauritius? More importantly, why did the Prime minister acquiesce to such opacity? These are legitimate concerns, not the siren calls of nationalism.