China returns to Africa: A Rising Power and a Continent Embrace

China’s increasing African involvement often appears to generate more journalism than scholarship, and its coverage all too often tells us more about Western fears and myths than about Chinese intentions and African needs and priorities.

African voices, and informed international scholarship are both heard too little. An initial step to remedying the first defect was Fahamu’s 2007 publication African perspectives on China in Africa edited by Firoze Manji and the present reviewer. This volume goes a long way to remedying the second - though the three editors and many of their contributors are both already known for their substantial individual contributions.

Nonetheless it is a real advance to have so much of the serious analysis already under way brought together between two covers. As well as taking the analysis beyond the usual simplifications, one theme to emerge from many of the contributions is the multifaceted and developing character of China’s involvement.

Another is the importance of locating China’s role in its wider context. As the authors put it in their introduction, ‘China’s rapid gains on the continent, far from being a sudden “scramble for Africa” could be more adequately described as pushing on an open door, one which in any case the West had left ajar...’, not least as a result of ‘the previous decades of neo-liberal restructuring of African economies, including the removal of barriers to investment and the privatization of state-owned assets’.

Despite the conventional reduction of China’s involvement to a scramble for raw materials, since the 2006 Beijing summit there has been a shift, as the editors also point out, from resource acquisition to fields such as financial services, and agriculture - with the contentious issue of Chinese farmers in Africa as well as the development of agricultural centres across the continent, and the proposed Economic Co-operation Zones. And the much-debated $5bn DRC package, as well as including infrastructure development and mines, also promises 31 hospitals and two universities.

Political economy is rightly the starting point of the collection. Andrea Goldstein Nicolas Pinaud and Helmut Reisen, building on work they have undertaken for OECD, look at the trade implications for Africa of China’s rise; not only through the bilateral China-African relation but also through China’s impact on the global demand for African commodities. They stress the importance of ensuring that the windfall proceeds of the commodity prices boom is used constructively for diversification and restructuring rather than siphoned off by rent-seeking elites.

But how can Chinese involvement assist industrialisation rather than simply accelerate the deindustrialisation which trade liberalisation brings in its wake? Deborah Brautigam looks at two differing but equally encouraging if exceptional case studies - Mauritius and Nigeria.

In Mauritius the local Chinese community played a key role, it seems, in persuading the government to establish an export processing zone. Travelling to Asia, they established joint ventures with partners in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Taiwan and later the mainland. ‘These investments exposed Mauritians [both Chinese and non-Chinese] to the intricacies of global production and export processes which led to dynamic export-oriented manufacturing growth’.

But there are untypical features. Chinese business networks were already established in Mauritius in the nineteenth century , and were establishing major local industries a century ago. Their regular contacts with relatives and associiates elsewhere in the Chinese diaspora are long-established and antedate and are independant of China’s ‘going out’ policy. And in multi-ethnic Mauritius, involvement of Mauritians of other ethnic backgrounds seems to have proceeded almost automatically.

And a local African entrepreneurial tradition was also clearly key, according to Brautigam’s account, in the ability of Nigerian traders around Nnewi to use their Chinese merchant contacts to locate suppliers in Taiwan who could supply them with automobile spare parts which they later manufactured locally, giving rise to a major Nigerian industrial cluster.

The oil industry is the major locus of the critique of China’s African role, with claims of Chinese support for repression in Sudan in defiance of international sanctions, and for corruption in Angola in defiance of Western attempts to foster good governance being the two most common items on the charge-sheet.

Ricardo Soares de Oliveira in his analysis of China’s oil investment in Africa, makes no attempt to whitewash the role of China’s oil majors. He concedes that China’s involvement will confirm existing negative trends. But he finds little in Western behaviour to justify any assumption of the moral high ground. ‘The West does have a moral dimension to its present day African policies but the oil sector...has always been, and remains, conspicuously absent from it’.

The Chinese IOCs - CNPC, Sinopec and CNOOC - do not disguise their technological weakness by comparison with the Western majors. But they compensate for this by their ability to offer generous comprehensive package deals. Yes, Soares concedes, this strengthens existing non-developmental and autocratic elites - but that is the way of the industry, western IOCs included.

Western IOCs are partners with all three Chinese IOCs and if necessary embarassing involvements such as in Sudan, can be seperated out from their Western-quoted subsidiaries.

In fact, he argues, Chinese policy is no different from that of etatiste western states before privatisation and to some extent even after, as with France and ElfAquitaine, Italy with ENI or Brazil with Petrobras.

An interesting Chinese perspective comes from Professor He Wenping, Director of African Studies at CASS, Beijing. She describes the development of Chinese engagement culminating in the FOCAC declaration, in terms of the ‘win-win’ principle. But she also describes a number of the problems which have arisen in the relationship, in a way which gives an interesting insight into the degree to which Chinese scholars and policy advisers are aware of African criticisms and fears.

In particular she points to the need for greater attention to environmental impacts and the impact on and benefit to local populations in resource extraction projects. She also suggests that the negative impact of Chinese textile imports on African employment should be offset by greater Chinese assistance to restructuring in African textile industries. And she draws attention to the need for greater Chinese awareness of the extent and speed of democratic political develeopment in Africa.

‘In government documents and the daily talk of the ordinary people, words like democracy and human rights are frequently heard. The development of NGOs and civil society is also quite fast, and Africans are very proud of this’ she stresses.

Perhaps her most interesting suggestion is that the Chinese government should consider drafting a Law on Overseas Investment requiring a proportion of profits to be set aside for social programmes.

Sudan is one country in which Chinese policy has continued to evolve in recent years - though less in response to any Western pressure than as a result of African considerations, as Daniel Large explains in his chapter ‘’From non-interference to constructive engagement? China’s evolving relations with Sudan’.

He traces the history of China’s engagement with Sudan since 1959, down to the role China played in persuading Sudan to accept the AU-UN peacekeeping mission in 2007. Having originally underestimated the importance of the Darfur issue, internal debate among Chinese policymakers included a critical current concerned with the reputational damage to China’s image in Africa, as well as its implications for regional stability - especially given the interface with the situation in Chad.

Another factor influencing a contnuing evolution of China’s policy is the need to foster relations with the South, especially given the possibility of independence after the 2011 referendum. Despite the openness of Southern leaders to China, they have not forgotten China’s role in consolidating the NIF regime.

Indeed Large points out that despite the evolution of China’s policy, there is a continuity of support for the NCP, and indeed an increased dependence on Khartoum for security in the face of attacks on Chinese personnel.

Garth Shelton contributes an analysis of China’s relations with South Africa, proposing that further develeopment of the relationship should include a merger of FOCAC with NEPAD; more Chinese investment in South Africa, and an increase in tourism; and bilateral partnership on a number of global issues including a greater role for Chinese peacekeepers, restructuring of the UN and the global trading system, and better South-South co-operation.

However there is no mention of what some see as a Chinese strategy of using investment in South African companies as a way to gain access to their existing networks elsewhere in Africa - most notably as in the 2007 acquisition of a 20% stake in Standard Bank.

The collection also includes a number of fascinating case studies, from a history of the TAZARA railway to an account of Chinese medicine in Tanzania. As well as Deborah Brautigam’s study, there are also contributions on the role of local Chinese entrepreneurs in Namibia and Cap Verde.

In the concluding section Chris Alden examines the accusation of ‘Chinese imperialism’ and its three charges; that China reinforces a traditional exploitative trade pattern; that the ‘non-interference’ policy means backing repressive regimes where this serves China’s interests; and the bogy of Chinese immigrants as a ‘fifth column’, in a modern version of the ‘yellow peril’ scare.

Against the ‘imperialist’ thesis he points to the lack of any ‘civilising mission’ doctrine or other justificatory imperial ideology; to the lack of any territorial ambitions, direct or indirect, and to trade relations which are not mercantilist - though on this last point one interpetation of China’s pursuit of ‘resource equity’ could be seen as an important qualification.

Christopher Clapham sees China’s African engagement converging over time with the traditional techniques employed by its predecessors. The basic constraints affect all outside powers engaging in Africa, he insists; in particular what he terms the ‘intractability of African governmentalities’ - the fact that Africa, given its demography and geography is ‘an extremely difficult space to organise and manage’.

Over time, he argues, African elites have developed skilful techiques for managing unequal relations with outside powers to the benefit of their own interests in a type of ‘rentier statehood’ and China will end up developing the traditional techniques employed by other powers to cope with these problems.

Daniel Large’s conclusion concentrates instead on the need to develop a distinctive scholarship on the topic, as traditionally, Western academic Africanists have known little or nothing of China, and academic Sinologists have been equally ignorant of Africa. Meanwhile both were equally ignorant of the work of Chinese Africanists.

But he does consider whether those distinctive features of China’s Africa policy which he terms ‘Chinese exceptionalism’ will survive, as the West attempts to socialise China as a ‘responsible’ power.

He concludes that ‘the incremental revision or even the abandonment of exceptionalism will signal the desire to converge with other foreign actors in Africa and, concurrently, the end of the last vestige of Mao’s ideological project’.

But how, other than chronologically, can the distinctive features of this ‘exceptionalism’ be attributed to a hangover from Maoism, rather than as a set of entirely rational policy options for an emerging power without the will or the ability to mount a direct challenge to the established powers?

And even more important is the question which has arisen since this collection went to press, of how the entire framework of these international economic and political relations might be undermined or transformed by the continuing global economic turmoil.

China returns to Africa: A Rising Power and a Continent Embrace
Chris Alden, Daniel Large and Ricardo Soares de Oliveira
Hurst and Company, London 2008
ISBN 978-1-85065-885-6 casebound and -3 paperback