China's footprint in Africa builds news opportunities for 'Belt and Roaders'
 Whatever humanitarian concerns have prompted the Chinese to improve the fortunes of sub-Saharan Africa, self-interest has certainly played a role since China became the continent's main trading partner in 2009, surpassing the US.
Admittedly, Chinese activities have raised eyebrows if not alarms despite Beijing's stated policy of non-interference in the internal affairs in countries in which it has growing business interests.
Bejing's mega investment have not only spawned massive infrastructure growth, but have also won advantageous trade deals, facilitating Chinese diversification into manufacturing, telecommunications and agriculture - in ways that might well win the admiration of the East India Company that took over the Indian subcontinent for the British.
Writing in Foreign Affairs, the official publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, a public-private think tank, analyst Eleanor Albert writes that China’s expanding middle class has fueled the insatiable demand for energy and has driven China to exploit resource-rich Africa partly through its global Belt & Road infrastructure building initiative.
At the core of China’s drive is its galloping GDP, which rose 10 per cent annually for 30 years until 2010, and is still rising at 6.9 per cent through 2017. Such compound increases continues to require massive energy input to keep the ball on the hop to bring its still largely impoverished people into the mainstream of middle class life.
Given this, the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook projects that China will become the planet's biggest oil consumer by the early 2030s.
As it stands China is the second biggest source of crude imports after the Middle East. Next is Africa, from which China gets 1.4 million barrels per day, or 22 per cent. Angola was China’s third-largest oil supplier in 2016. Other African oil suppliers include the Republic of Congo and South Sudan.
Beijing offers mega trade assistance and investment deals, largely free of red tape of the World Bank and IMF that slows funding to impoverished and not so clean resource-rich countries, and is ready willing and able to provide low-cost financing and cheap labour, according to explains Michael Levi and Elizabeth Economy in their book, "By All Means Necessary". Conveniently, China’s non-interference policy and respect for sovereignty allows assistance with no strings attached, providing Sudan and Zimbabwe with much-needed financing, despite their questionable governance practices.
Today, China is a destination for 15 to 16 per cent of sub-Saharan exports and the source of 14 to 21 per cent of its imports, according to Thomson Reuters and the World Bank.
While most African exports to China are mineral fuels, lubricants, iron ore and metals, there is also as well as small amounts of food and agricultural products. China exports a range of machinery, transport, communications equipment, as well as manufactures.
China has also taken a multi-pronged approach in its economic relations with Africa, according to Deborah Brautigam who directs the China-Africa Research Initiative (SAIS-CARI) at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
China offers soft development loans to in beggars-can't-be-chosers places like Angola, where life expectancy is 42 years versus China's 78 years. It invests in agriculture and develops special trade and economic cooperation zones in Ethiopia (62 years), Nigeria (53 years) and Zambia (52 years).
“Chinese banks and companies are offering finance that allows them to secure a greater share of the business deals in Africa as part of their move to ‘go global’. This brings with it risks for African borrowers but also opportunities,” said Ms Brautigam.
Chinese financing comes often in the form of loans and credits provided by the People’s Bank of China, the China Development Bank, the Export-Import Bank of China, and the China-Africa Development Fund. Between 2000 and 2014, Chinese banks, contractors, and the government loaned more than US$86 billion to Africa. Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Ethiopia, Kenya and the Sudan were the top recipients.
But big loans raise questions about debt loads in African countries, showing indications of a potential debt crisis.
What's more, Beijing has steadily diversified its business interests, participating in energy, mining, and telecommunications as well as financing roads, railways, ports, airports, hospitals, schools, and stadiums. In Congo-Kinshasa, China has financed 70 per cent of new construction. Investment from a mixture of state and private funds has also established tobacco, rubber, sugar and sisal plantations. Domestic economic conditions drove Chinese firms to break into new markets for its consumer goods and excess industrial capacity as part of China’s “going out” or “going global” strategy.
All this dove tails into President Xi Jinping’s 2013 “Belt & Road” initiative, which joins a continental economic belt and a maritime road to promote cooperation and interconnectivity from Eurasia to Africa.
More good than bad has impressed itself on Africans themselves, according to opinion polls. Sixty-three per cent of Africans view China’s economic and political influence as somewhat or very positive, according to a 2016 poll conducted in 36 countries by Afrobarometer, a panafrican research network. African leaders have also praised Chinese investment. Said former Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade: “China, which has fought its own battles to modernise, has a much greater sense of the personal urgency of development in Africa than many western nations.”
Still, there are complaints, claiming poor Chinese compliance with safety and environmental standards to unfair business practices and violations of local laws. In 2011, Michael Sata won Zambia’s presidency in part by tapping into anti-Chinese sentiment after Chinese managers shot protesters at a large coal mine in southern Zambia. In 2013, Nigerian central bank governor Sanusi Lamido Sanusi said: “We must see China for what it is: a competitor. Africa must recognise that China - like the US, Russia, Britain, Brazil and the rest - is in Africa not for African interests but its own.”
African workers have also begun to fault Chinese companies for unfair labour practices, including disputes over wages and working conditions. Beijing has “less and less” ability to control these companies, says Ian Taylor, a professor at Scotland’s St Andrews University. Zambia has experienced uprisings by miners, causing deaths of Chinese mine managers.
But to Yun Sun, non-resident fellow of Brookings Institution, a think tank member organisation of the Council on Foreign Relations, there is less to Chinese involvement than is widely supposed, or as she put it: "A disproportionate level of international attention, publicity, and scrutiny is paid to China’s Africa engagement.
Non-interference has proven more elastic first envisaged. Beijing continues to talk up non-interference, but it appears to be abandoning it, a shift made plain in the Sudan, a major oil exporter to China, where conflict there and subsequently in South Sudan spurred changes in China’s policy. This change involves committing troops to UN and African Union missions and establishing a PLA base in Djibouti.
By March 2017, more than 2,500 Chinese troops had been dispatched to six UN missions in Africa, four of which are in Darfur, Congo-Kinshasa, Mali and Sudan as well as the Ivory Coast and Western Sahara. President Xi pledged $100 million in military aid to the African Union in 2015 and China supports African countries’ capacity building in areas like defense and counterterrorism.
The killing of Chinese peacekeepers in Mali and the Sudan, the kidnapping of Chinese workers in Cameroon, and the spread of the self-proclaimed Islamic State in Africa is one reason for the growing Chinese security force in Africa.
Also since 2008, China has supported counterpiracy operations in the Gulf of Aden, off the northeastern coast of Africa. Djibouti, already home to other foreign military bases, is the site of China’s first permanent naval installation overseas; Chinese troops set sail for Djibouti in July 2017 to set up the base, this matches a US naval base there with a matching number of troops, though the US extends military coverage down to Kenya and west into central Africa as far as Niger in what appears to be small units, assisting in counter insurgency operations.
There is no question that Chinese investment in Africa has brought economic growth. While sub-Saharan GDP was up five per cent in 2011, growth it fell its lowest level in 2016 at 1.4 per cent, according to the IMF, but much of that can be ascribed to a global downturn, that has only seen a modest but palpable recovery in 2017.
Of course, even in foreign aid there is no free lunch. Experts from Aid Data, a research lab at the Washington, DC's College of William & Mary, found a link between Chinese assistance and the alignment of recipient countries with Beijing’s UN voting and its One China principle.
Other experts suggest that while China’s economic footprint in Africa is growing, it represents only a fraction of China’s economic activity around the world, where the influence of its Belt & Road initiative is only beginning to be felt. |
