A look of satisfaction played on the trade official's face as he reeled off statistics recently from a ministry report about China's booming commerce with Africa.
"Forty African countries have trade agreements with China now," said the official, Li Xiaobing, deputy director of the West Asian and African Affairs division of the Trade Ministry. "We are doing a railway project in Nigeria, a Sheraton hotel in Algeria and a mobile telephone network in Tunisia. We are all over Africa now."
ILLUSTRATION MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
For any doubters, a glance at the statistics indicates that the official's exultation is, if anything, understated. Though starting from a modest base, China's trade with the African continent reached US$18.5 billion last year, an increase of 50 percent since 2000, and it is on track for another big increase this year.
China's push into Africa is all the more remarkable because it comes when that continent has become the virtual stepchild of the international trade system, a mere footnote -- or worse, simply unmentioned in discussions of global commerce.
Beijing's fast-rising involvement with Africa grows out of China's immense and growing need for natural resources, in particular for imported oil, of which 25 percent now comes from Africa.
Lacking the economic and political connections that Western Europe has with Africa as a legacy of colonialism, and the economic power that the US wields because of its wealth and influence in international financial institutions, China's new leadership under President Hu Jintao (
China's diplomatic machine has spared no effort, making sure that African leaders do not view its interest as a passing fancy. The prime minister and vice president have also visited the continent in the last year.
Experts in African affairs say that China's choices of partners and its diplomatic philosophy, which preaches noninterference in other countries' internal affairs, may have important consequences for Africa, especially at a time when Western countries seem largely preoccupied elsewhere.
At one time many African countries, whether colonies locked in liberation struggles or fledgling, often nonaligned states, viewed China as a progressive ally and counterweight to the West. But those days are gone, and increasingly, China's involvement in Africa is pure big business.
In visiting Gabon, for example, Hu was honoring the leadership of Omar Bongo, a man who has become immensely rich while ruling his country autocratically since 1967. With its tiny size and population, Gabon ranks high in China's sights for one obvious reason: It is a longstanding oil exporter open to new investments in its petroleum industry.
A diplomat from Benin expressed disappointment.
"We're a socialist-Marxist state, and we've had 30 years of ties with the People's Republic of China, and yet they bypassed us to go to Gabon," the diplomat was quoted as saying by The South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. "This tells me that China has no friends but rather only interests."
Although Benin was long a Marxist dictatorship, for the last decade it has been one of Africa's freest democracies.
Elsewhere on the continent, China has become a vitally important partner of Africa's largest country, Sudan, at a time when the government there, a perennial abuser of human rights, has been accused by international rights groups and the US Congress of organizing genocide.
"We started with Sudan from scratch," boasted Li. "When we started there, they were an oil importer, and now they are an oil exporter. We've built refineries, pipelines and production."
He dismissed a question about Sudan's human rights record, saying, "We import from every source we can get oil from."
China's deputy foreign minister, Zhou Wenzhong (
"Business is business," he said in a recent interview.
"We try to separate politics from business. Secondly, I think the internal situation in the Sudan is an internal affair, and we are not in a position to impose upon them," he said.
Zhou went on to blame the West for many of Africa's problems, saying: "You have tried to impose a market economy and multiparty democracy on these countries, which are not ready for it. We are also against embargos, which you have tried to use against us."
This "see no evil" approach has not been cost-free.
In a report about the role of Sudan's oil industry in supporting an oppressive government in that country, Human Rights Watch, a New York-based advocacy group, wrote about a financing venture by the state-owned China National Petroleum Corp.
"China's first foray into the world of high finance -- to open up its enormous government-owned corporations to foreign investment -- was a controversial offer to sell stock in CNPC to the public on the New York Stock Exchange," the report said. "Its offer, designed to raise a record US$10 billion, had to be withdrawn and refashioned because of the negative publicity suggesting that the proceeds would be used to commit further human rights abuses in Sudan, Tibet and elsewhere."
Some experts in African affairs caution that by taking a classic big-power approach to African relations, China may be compromising its long-term influence there.
"For most of the postcolonial period, France, Britain and the US also embraced some of the most unsavory regimes in Africa," said Gerald Bender, a professor of international relations at the University of Southern California.
"What China is perhaps not anticipating is how, when you embrace these terrible regimes, you eventually get tainted for it," he said.
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