For the first time since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Africa has a counterweight, and the United States a rival: China. Similar to the Soviet Union, China approaches rulers of resource-rich countries through the ethos of brothers-in-arms rather than client states. The Chinese have a word for this: ‘Guanxi’, encompassing everything from pull to networking, indicating a great commitment to friendship rather than business.

Certainly, China does not appear to subscribe to the United States' gunboat democracy, recently noted in the 53-country military presence of the United States African Command (AFRICOM), an engagement strategy which aims to securitise the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea using the moral vocabulary of peacekeeping. Better yet, there is none of the stigma associated with former colonial landlords such as France, facilitating the entrance of an emerging superpower free of any colonial shadows. Instead, Beijing, currently Africa's most crucial source of trade and investment, valued at over US$100 billion, is lauded as Africa's saviour despite Western nations crying foul play.

But how different from perceived Western predation is guanxi really? To what extent is the Beijing Consensus distinct from the Washington Consensus? For starters, both worldviews discern Africa through the prism of resources. In 2009, for instance, 88 per cent of the United States' total imports from Africa were petroleum products, constituting 24 per cent of US oil imports, ahead of the Middle East, while 86 per cent of China's Africa imports are composed of oil, gas and minerals.

China's primary points of traction – Angola and Sudan – are characterised by state brutality, thanks to misused resource revenues generated from oil. As China's deputy foreign minister stated, ‘Business is business.’ That geostrategic control of oil resources largely drives foreign policy in the East and West is not surprising: 80 per cent of the world's oil reserves are controlled by states and there is a 92 per cent correlation between rising arms sales and oil. Predictably, underdeveloped and often militarised states dependent on oil rents, such as Gabon (78 per cent), Congo (85 per cent) and Angola (95 per cent), are politically and economically independent of, and disconnected from citizens. Over 30 per cent of China's oil imports come from Africa.

China perpetuates this resource curse composed of enclave industries, by indirectly facilitating the immunisation of states from accountability and citizen-generated taxes, the source of more than 35 per cent of state budgets in OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries. While developed countries rely on skilled citizens' taxes for a significant portion of state finance, African citizens are unnecessary impediments to the life of regimes.

China's take averages 10 per cent of Africa's total oil exports, in contrast to the United States and EU's take of 30 per cent. But unlike the latter, Beijing's expansion allows authoritarian states to gain distance from informed Western citizens' solidarity groups, willing and able to access vast stores of information and generate campaigns to mobilise dissent around crucial issues such as the gross socio-ecological degradation of the Niger Delta, Nigeria's chief source of oil.

The deliberate information isolation of China's own citizenry recently captured headlines across the world in the Google-versus-Beijing battle. Yet pundits appeared to have misdiagnosed Beijing's intention, not so much to block bad news out, but to intensively incubate general lack of interest in the outside world through the lack of relevant information.

Thus, despite Beijing permanently affecting African nations, Africa barely makes a dent in China, save for distant, positive and superficial glimpses, catalysing xenophobia and racism at both sites. Yet politically this domestic policy is externally complemented by the fact that as a one billion strong developing nation with a GDP per head of US$6,500, Beijing, estimated to overtake Japan as the world's second-largest economy in 2010, mimics the language of the world's working poor, as heard in Copenhagen when Beijing demanded more carbon emissions for the sake of the right to development (at the expense of small islands and Africa, the continent on the frontline of climate change).

The argument may ring false. After all, China's brutal suppression of political and civil rights undermines the crowning contribution and glory of Western civilisation: Political and civil first-generation rights, designed to protect individuals and minorities. (For China's religious minorities such as the Muslim Huis, ethnic Tibetans and the oppressed of neighbouring oil-rich Burma, China's West-bashing reminds us of the slogan ‘Talk left, walk right’.)

But while Chinese citizens remain unable to effect political change, Beijing's disregard of individualised rights was tacitly exchanged for collective material rights – that is, the right to social and economic development and realising human needs such as access to housing, education, electricity and waste sanitation as human rights.

The dramatic increase in living standards since 1981 is largely due to China experiencing the world's greatest known poverty reduction, contributing 166 per cent to global poverty reduction through lifting over 600 million Chinese out of poverty.

This success related to material-based rights resonates deeply with former colonies, exploited and marginalised not as minorities, but as majorities. Fifty years after liberation, it resonates in Africa, where many believe that immaterial rights – such as freedom of speech – are derisory if not accompanied by capacities supplying the water needed to sustain life.

Beijing's Stalin-red capitalist centrally administered economic policy complements the structure of African regimes – specifically dictatorships, perceived by China as stable investment climates, that is, beyond the reach of citizens.

Peddling this policy both domestically and abroad, Beijing emerges in Africa as: A rising superpower that has closed the door on individual rights-based market democracies, focusing instead on collective rights-based development; a resource-seeking state willing to sustain short-term losses for long-term gain; and finally, a global creditor actively disengaging from Washington's structural adjustment discipline noted for imposing export-oriented economies designed to finance debt contracted by African regimes.

Beijing's preferred method of accessing resources is the barter system, which cleverly identifies systems desired by African elites, extractive and construction Chinese agendas alike: Infrastructure geared to selectively develop resource-rich nations. Infrastructure, on the receiving end of 79 per cent of investments, averaged just four per cent in contracted funds five years prior to China's entry.

This system, trading resource-targeted development (such as ports, railways, mining facilities and mega-dams) for access to resources is two-pronged: First, it allows for Beijing, through policy banks such as China Export-Import Bank (extending over US$24 billion on easy terms) to ensure that Africa's resources and China's finances are returned to sender through the almost exclusive development by China's state-owned firms. Additionally exported to Africa are materials, skilled and unskilled labour, and guaranteed contracts utilising loans.

This enables Beijing to secure business and set price-tags in exchange for low-interest loans, exact massive fiscal and para-fiscal subsidies, as well as circumvent the Africa risk, the assumed default tendency of African regimes to engage in corruption, thus limiting the flow of funds back into regimes. By engaging a policy of non-interference, another throwback to the Soviets, Beijing superficially reconfigures perceived power differentials.

For Africa, fast becoming one of the world's most important oil drums, China's expanding footprint has delivered infrastructural developments, including much needed roads, railways and ports, in addition to hospitals and schools. But this comes at great socio-ecological cost, as China Exim, for instance, requires only that Sino-entities comply with the ecological standards of host countries (badly regulated, under-resourced and staffed, subject to corruption and characterised by enforcement). China's own development reveals a nation hosting 16 of the world's 20 most polluted cities, with 70 per cent of rivers heavily contaminated.

Amid the simmering conflict related to logging, pollution, riots against China's dumped textiles and electronics, harsh working conditions and residential apartheid (via Chinese enclaves), there are noted exceptions, including China Exim's suspensions of loans earmarked for Gabon, for violating socio-ecological standards. But these are few and far between. Beijing's perceived willingness to listen is negated by the financing of despots like Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, lethal economic policies and forced peace.

That China's counterweight to the West is invaluable for African rulers there is no question. But the benefits of the Beijing Consensus are empty of justice and real development when held against the backdrop of an Africa that is militarised, limited in agency and to a large degree externally sustained as the resource colony of yet another foreign empire.

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* Khadija Sharife is a journalist and a visiting scholar at the Centre for Civil Society (CCS) based in South Africa
* This article first appeared in The Economist.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.