During her recent visit to Africa, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, on arriving in Zambia, the first leg of her trip, warned against China’s continued expansion, saying: “We don’t want to see a new colonialism in Africa. We want, when people come to Africa and make investments, we want them to do well, but we also want them to do good. We don’t want them to undermine good governance.”
She also said: “The United States is investing in the people of Zambia, not just the elites.”
Clinton’s words clearly implied that the US and China are battling for domination in Africa. However, were her criticisms of China fair?
In terms of trade volume, during the first decade of the 21st century, trade between China and Africa grew more than tenfold. However, most African nations have a trade surplus with China rather than a deficit. For example, last year Africa as a whole had a trade surplus with China of US$120 billion. Africa also obtains many cheap Chinese products, which allow many Africans to own electronic appliances such as cellphones and TVs.
According to statistics from the Heritage Foundation, from 2005 to last year, China’s foreign investment was worth a total of US$316 billion. Of this, 13.8 percent was invested in sub-Saharan Africa, while 16.5 percent went to the Middle East and North Africa. On the whole, 70 percent of China’s foreign investment is concentrated in Asian, African and Latin American nations. In addition, China has already given more loans than the World Bank to developing countries, with a focus on Africa. Compared with the white colonizers of the 18th and 19th centuries, the Chinese not only invest in mineral resources and take away natural resources, they also invest in light industries such as textiles, which creates a lot of employment opportunities locally.
Based on these data, it would seem that China is still basing the assistance it offers its “brothers” in Asian, African and Latin American nations on the “five principles of peaceful coexistence.” Then-Chinese premier Zhou Enlai (周恩來) talked about similar things when he spoke about Chinese assistance to Zambia in constructing the TAZARA Railway between Zambia and Tanzania in the early 1970s, saying that help given by poor people to other poor people was genuine and without ulterior motives and that the recipient would never forget such help. Two years ago, during a visit to Africa, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) also cited the railway as an example of this, saying that China did not take a drop of oil or any minerals from Africa when it helped build the railway.
However, China is no longer poor and its international strategic plans are no longer what they were during the 1955 Asian–African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia. Currently, African oil imports account for more than 30 percent of China’s total oil imports. China’s foreign investment and financial aid is focused on stabilizing relations with surrounding nations and on securing natural resources. Without a stable source of raw materials, China will have nothing to base its future economic growth on. When building its aircraft carrier, the ability to expand its naval influence further afield to ensure oil import routes is of equal importance to its other strategic military considerations.
China’s assistance to Africa has been criticized for two reasons: first, because China ties financial aid to development of natural resources and, second, because the aid projects are always contracted out to Chinese contractors, so most of the aid money flow back to China.
In terms of the second point, there are many that also use this method, including Taiwan’s now-defunct Retired Servicemen Engineering Agency. However, China’s aid is based around state-owned enterprises and opaque financial dealings. This makes it difficult to know how much money is really spent on an aid project worth, say, US$100 million. There is no way for the nation receiving assistance to know for sure.
Clinton accused China of further corrupting African politics — was this an overstatement? In April, the British weekly magazine The Economist said the World Bank had prohibited certain Chinese businesses from bidding in bank projects because of bribery among Chinese businesspeople. To relieve the pressure from local African trade unions, Chinese businesspeople invited African trade union leaders to visit China on a “study trip.”
However, to be more objective, in the past when Western nations provided financial assistance, they demanded that the nation receiving aid carry out political reforms. China, however, has a principle of “not interfering with internal affairs.” Thanks to this, African leaders and Chinese businesspeople can take what they need from each other and get on like a house on fire. It seems Africa has become the perfect hotbed for China to duplicate its “Chinese development model.”
Ku Er-teh is a freelance writer.
TRANSLATED BY DREW CAMERON
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