African Perspectives on China–Africa: Modelling Popular Perceptions and their Economic and Political Determinants

Abstract

China's recent political and economic inroads into Africa have generated much interest in the current literature, with scholars and policymakers endeavouring to assess the merits and risks implicit in this renewed engagement. Absent from the literature, however, are systematic analyses of African perceptions of these rapidly growing China–Africa links, and what determines these perceptions. This article fills this void by examining not only African attitudes towards China's African presence, but also investigating the considerations that inform these views. Using multi-level modelling techniques, this article estimates the effects of Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI), Sino-African trade and notions of democracy and human rights on African attitudes towards “China-in-Africa”. The results suggest that Africans' views of China are nearly equivalent to those that they hold vis-à-vis Western countries. The perceived impact of imports from China has a negative effect. However, this effect is counter-balanced by perceptions of China's impact on poverty alleviation—in line with its greater focus on economic, social and cultural, as opposed to civic and political human rights—in particular through FDI. Among those who value civic and political human rights, in contrast, attitudes towards China are less favourable. This finding is echoed with respect to democratic governance, though the effect is less stable. The results are derived from Afrobarometer data covering 20 African countries.

Notes

This article was written when the author was a lecturer at the National University of Lesotho and a visiting scholar at Oxford. An earlier version, co-authored with Aleksandra Gadzala, is available as Afrobarometer Working Paper No. 117. The author would like to thank the Afrobarometer for making their data available. He is indebted to Michael Bratton and two anonymous referees for invaluable comments.

¹ See http://english.mofcom.gov.cn/aarticle/newsrelease/press/201102/20110207414989.html (accessed 15 September 2011).

² Botswana, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Sudan, Zambia.

³ Throughout this article, the term “Africans” is used with reference to individuals from the 20 countries surveyed in this study: Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

⁴ Citizens of Lesotho are referred to as Mosotho in the singular form and Basotho in the plural.

⁵ See http://www.mcc.gov/pages/press/release/mcc-finalizes-350-million-compact-with-malawi (accessed 15 September 2011).

⁶ See http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90002/92169/92187/6283140.html (accessed 15 September 2011).

⁷ China is also rated − 7 on the Polity IV index. The index classified countries rated below − 6 as autocracies and countries rated above+6 as democracies.

⁸ China did not have official relations with Burkina Faso and Malawi in 2008. We do not exclude these countries from our analysis to guard against selection bias.

⁹ We also use the term “supports China” in this context. It should be borne in mind, however, that the perceptions of how much China helps respondents' countries lies at the root of this support.

¹⁰ This coding implies that in the statistical analysis, a negative coefficient indicates support for the Chinese and a positive coefficient indicates support for the comparator country.

¹¹ Excluding a significant number of respondents who fail to discriminate between the Chinese and other external actors (i.e. our dependent variable) raises the possibility of selection bias; we thus use Heckman selection models to investigate this potentiality. As the inverse Mill's ratios for our models are consistently insignificant, however, selection bias is unlikely to be a problem.

¹² We experimented with the growth in FDI stocks variable. Data are available from 2003 to 2008, allowing us to construct average FDI growth measures including up to five annual growth rates. The results, however, are not sensitive to these different measures. We thus only report results for FDI growth between 2007 and 2008.

¹³ Based on respondents' answer to the following set of questions (Q15A–C): A. In this country, how free are you: To say what you think?; B. In this country, how free are you: To join any political organisation you want?; C. In this country, how free are you: To choose who to vote for without feeling pressured?

¹⁴ Based on respondents' answer to the question (Q19): “Which of the following statements is closest to your view? Choose Statement 1 or Statement 2. Statement 1: Government should be able to ban any organisation that goes against its policies; Statement 2: We should be able to join any organisation, whether or not the government approves of it”.

¹⁵ Based on respondents' answer to the question (Q20): “Which of the following statements is closest to your view? Choose Statement 1 or Statement 2. Statement 1: Government should be able to close newspapers that print stories it does not like; Statement 2: The news media should be free to publish any story that they see fit without fear of being shut down”.

¹⁶ Based on respondents' answer to the question (Q21): “Which of the following statements is closest to your view? Choose Statement 1 or Statement 2. Statement 1: Government should not allow the expression of political views that are fundamentally different from the views of the majority; Statement 2: People should be able to speak their minds about politics free of government influence, no matter how unpopular their views may be”.

¹⁷ United Nations General Assembly, ‘The Universal Declaration of Human Rights’, 10 December 1948.

¹⁸ Based on respondents' answers to the question (Q30): “Which of these three statements is closest to your own opinion? Statement 1: Democracy is preferable to any other kind of government; Statement 2: In some circumstances, a non-democratic government can be preferable; Statement 3: For someone like me, it doesn't matter what kind of government we have”.

¹⁹ Based on respondents' answers to the question (Q31): “Which of the following statements is closest to your view? Choose Statement 1 or Statement 2. Statement 1: We should choose our leaders in this country through regular, open and honest elections; Statement 2: Since elections sometimes produce bad results, we should adopt other methods for choosing this country's leaders”.

²⁰ We notice that support for the Chinese is correlated with support for other countries, probably because many respondents just think of Chinese as foreigners, generally. By controlling for donors (i.e. countries that give) and investors (i.e. individuals), we can weaken this link and isolate support for the Chinese specifically.

²¹ Descriptive statistics for all variables incorporated in this study are found in Table A1 in the Appendix; in addition, Table A2 in the Appendix lists the frequency distributions for the dependent variable (attitudes toward China); Table A3 details how the questions from the Afrobarometer were coded.

²² The variable is measured on a four-point ordinal scale. Assuming that increments on that scale are qualitatively similar, the variable can be treated as interval (continuous).