China conquest of Africa will have worldwide economic implications.
China’s Wide Reach in Africa
By HARRY HURT III
Published: July 18, 2009
siliconinvestor.com
AMONG Westerners, the economic partnership between China and Africa is often overlooked. But in “China Safari: On the Trail of Beijing’s Expansion in Africa” (Nation Books, $27.50), Serge Michel and Michel Beuret examine the roots of this relationship — and argue that China is engaged in a conquest of Africa that will have worldwide economic implications.
As French journalists, Mr. Michel and Mr. Beuret bring an acute awareness of their own country’s colonial history to the China-Africa story. Mr. Michel, a former West Africa correspondent for Le Monde, has also reported from Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr. Beuret, the foreign editor of the Swiss magazine L’Hebdo, has written extensively on human trafficking in China and Europe.
“China Safari” is a fascinating, provocative work of firsthand reporting that illuminates an important global economic story. The book also features a 16-page insert of color photographs shot by Paolo Woods, who puts human faces on the book’s sprawling story and highlights some of the stark juxtapositions of African laborers and their Chinese bosses.
In 1976, under Mao Zedong, China completed the Tan-Zam railway, linking Zambia to the port of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. But, as the authors note, Chinese inroads into Africa really got a kick-start in 1995, when President Jiang Zemin made a speech urging Chinese business leaders to “Go abroad! Become world players!”
Chinese business interests in Africa have grown dramatically in recent years. The authors say that bilateral trade between the regions quintupled, to $55 billion, from 2000 to 2006, and that the figure is expected to reach $100 billion by 2010. Chinese business interests in Africa range from oil, lumber, refining, agriculture, mining, textiles and banking to the construction of dams, railroads, highways, bridges, airports and housing.
The authors contend that China’s ambitions in Africa are grandly geopolitical as well as economic. As Jacob Wood, a Shanghai-born housing developer based in Africa for more than 30 years, tells them: “I’m going to be honest with you, China is using Africa to get where the United States is now, and surpass it.”
According to one report cited by the authors, there are now about 750,000 Chinese living and working in Africa, in countries including South Africa, Nigeria, Zambia, Sudan, Algeria, Congo, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola, Gabon, Guinea, Ethiopia, Cameroon, Egypt and Chad.
So far, China’s ventures in Africa have produced decidedly bittersweet results.
On the one hand, the Chinese invest heavily in infrastructure projects and create hundreds of thousands of jobs in return for being granted oil, mining and other concessions by African nations. According to the authors, Chinese “discretion and humility” are a breath of fresh air against a backdrop of “colonial arrogance” by France, Britain and other nations. In addition, the authors say, “Africa welcomes any competition that shakes up the Western, Lebanese and Indian business monopolies.”
Many African leaders are enamored of the Chinese mix of authoritarianism and capitalism in business affairs, an emphasis on efficiency and a lack of preaching about human rights, the authors say. Moreover, when the Chinese talk, they back up their words with concrete actions.
“The Chinese build things, the Europeans don’t,” declares Claude Alphonse N’Silou, the minister of construction and housing of the Congo Republic.
But there are increasing signs of trouble in the Sino-African economic paradise. The book says the Chinese have been criticized for selling arms to Sudan and Zimbabwe in the past, and for showing support for the Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe. The authors also cite a United Nations report that says that thousands of machetes used in the Rwandan genocide were imported from China.
And the everyday workplace is riven with accusations of mistreatment of African laborers by Chinese bosses, and accusations of virulent racism that seems to contradict the Chinese image of discretion and humility.
An opposition leader in Zambia, meanwhile, complains that his country is allowing Zambia to become “a province — make that a district — of China,” adding, “There’s nothing any minister can do when confronted by China’s amoral scheming.” The authors also cite instances of Chinese companies recently abandoning infrastructure projects without public explanation.
Since “China Safari” went to press, there have been reports that China may be backing out of deals in Guinea and Congo.
“CHINA SAFARI” is hobbled by the fact that Mr. Michel and Mr. Beuret were often denied access to important business people and projects. As a result, the authors occasionally resort to rambling anecdotal narratives like one in which they trace the manufacture of plastic souvenir pyramids sold at Egyptian archeological sites to — where else? — China.
Despite the recitations of socioeconomic and cultural disruptions and workplace abuses, the authors reach what may be an overly sanguine conclusion. They contend that “China’s arrival has been a boon for a continent adrift,” adding that the Chinese have “given Africa a real sense of worth, as much in the eyes of Africans themselves as in the eyes of foreigners.”
Still, it is not hard to join the authors in predicting that this joining of Chinese and African interests will likely succeed to the chagrin of the rest of the business world. |
