Recently, I had the good fortune to listen to a former Chinese ambassador to several African countries, who is now a professor at a university in China.

He is an unassuming chap who is very skilled at expressing things simply. So he was asked about China and that matter of poaching and illegal trading in tusks that is finishing off the African elephant.

Well, he said, the problem was that probably the punishment for dealing in illegal tusks is not high enough. When a man says that you would think the tusk dealers get a light sentence of three months.

No, the few who are convicted get on average five years! China is a leading executioner of convicts in the world, so you one can understand why any sentence that is not death would be considered light.

But the really striking thing he said was that just one illegal tusk is enough to build one a nice house, so the incentives to kill elephants are huge. What is five years if you are leaving your family in a new nice house in the suburbs, surely?

The questions kept coming. A boisterous economist from Costa Rica who works on Africa had said the low-cost production model on which China has relied to become fabulously wealthy is running its course as wages rise and the country becomes rich.

The question, he said, is who will replace China? Africa, he said, has a good shot to take over from China as the world’s low-cost, low-wage mass producer. That, he argued, would finally make the continent rich, because that stuff we dig up from the ground — gold, coltan, copper — will not do it. But we are not alone. India could also be the next China.

He thought that was unlikely though because India has too many structural problems and is unlikely to make the reforms and changes needed to take advantage of China’s move upstairs.

Well, our professor ambassador was asked to comment on that. It was unlikely, he said, because it was based on a misunderstanding of how China works. The low-cost industries in China, he said, are based along its coastal regions, which are richer than the hinterland.

When the costs at the coast become too high, he said, the low-cost jobs will not come to Africa or India. They will go to the poorer Chinese hinterland. So China is not about to leave its seat at the table vacant. Clear, straightforward, and persuasive.

He was not done. He was asked how much China actually understands Africa, and whether he thinks Africa understands China.

“No, both sides still know very little about each other,” he said. He explained the Chinese side of this ignorance. The Chinese, he said, like to learn about peoples from stories they tell of themselves. They are always more revealing than stories about them told by others, he said.

There was a problem with Africa, he went on. There are very few books about Africa written by Africans that are available for translation into Chinese, he said in a matter of fact tone.

It was disheartening that the Chinese can rip off African kitenge and art, but can’t find decent African non-fiction to pirate. Surely, we can do better.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is editor of Mail & Guardian Africa (mgafrica.com). Twitter:@cobbo3