China's Global Policy and Africa: A Few Implications for the Post-Crisis World

Abstract

This article evaluates China's role in Africa. Its objective is to determine the possible benefits and drawbacks for the continent of China's engagement, and to establish whether there might be wider global implications. The focus of inquiry in the African context falls on the specifics of the ways in which China does business on the continent. This is contrasted with the West, whose engagement with Africa has been vastly different both historically and in business practice. The aim is to assess which of the two approaches might hold more promise for Africa's development. In the wider context, of particular interest are the origins and the essence of the multilateral component of the current Chinese foreign policy, which holds the potential to effect a change in the global balance of power, especially in the context of the Great Recession. The discussion is set within a historical context.

Notes

A response to the terms of the Versailles Treaty was the epochal event known as the May Fourth Movement, which marked the onset of China's modern revolutionary era. The Movement started with student demonstrations in Peking on 4 May 1919 and then spread rapidly throughout China. It gave rise to mass consciousness and cultural change and culminated in the formation of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921 (Chen, 1970).

The principles are known as the ‘Fourteen Points’ and were formulated in a speech President Wilson delivered on 8 January 1918 to a joint session of Congress. They embodied the idea that the Great War was being fought for a good moral cause and would assure postwar peace. In the event the idealistic notions were never ratified by the US Senate, nor were they taken into account at the Treaty of Versailles of 1919.

Prof. Li expressed these views at a seminar entitled ‘Lessons from China's Economic Development’ given at Stellenbosch University on 13 June 2011.

Following the founding conference in 2000, the subsequent meetings were held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (2003), Beijing (2006) and Sharm El Sheik, Egypt (2009).

One example was the celebrated Tazara railway project linking land-locked Zambia to the Indian Ocean port of Dar-Es-Salam in Tanzania, which was built to eliminate Zambia's export dependence on apartheid South Africa but soon fell into disrepair.

In the late 1970s China leveraged its natural resources to attract a market-rate loan of $10 billion from Japan, and in exchange for new infrastructure and technology it shipped oil and coal to Japan. Since 2004 China has concluded similar deals worth nearly US$ 14 billion with several resource-rich countries in Africa: among others, war-ravaged Angola, where three oil-backed loans from Beijing saw Chinese companies built roads, railways, hospitals, schools and water systems; Nigeria, where the loan helped finance projects to generate electricity by gas; the Republic of Congo, where the Chinese are engaged in one hydropower project to be repaid in oil, and Ghana, to be repaid in cocoa beans (Brautigam, 2010).

A survey of 68 countries carried out by the World Bank found that Africa leads other regions in corruption (Spears, 2009).

In 2004 China secured a major stake in future oil production with a US$2 billion loan and aid package, including funds for Chinese companies to build railroads, schools, roads, hospitals and bridges, lay a fibre-optic network and train Angolan telecommunications workers (Hanson, 2008).

The formerly defunct Chambishi mine in Zambia is one example.

Between 1981 and 2004, the fraction of the population consuming less than a dollar a day fell from 65% to 10%, and more than half a billion people were lifted out of poverty (The Wall Street Journal, ‘Facts about poverty in China challenge conventional wisdom’, 13 April 2009).

In essence, this position holds that human rights are not universal but are culturally defined.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ursula J. Van Beek

Research Fellow, Centre for International and Comparative Politics, Stellenbosch University.