POLITICS: China and Africa in an Ever-Closer – Sometimes Thornier – Embrace

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

JOHANNESBURG, Dec 8 2004 (IPS) - Wang Ke gets agitated when asked about the arrival of the first Chinese visitors to Africa. As legend has it, the explorers were not overly impressed by what they discovered on the continent. After capturing a few giraffe, they boarded their ship and returned to China.

“That’s a misrepresentation of history,” said Wang, a counsellor at the Chinese embassy in South Africa’s capital, Pretoria, during a recent meeting with journalists at the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA).

“In fact, the Chinese took two giraffes which were offered as gifts,” she added, after turning to a colleague to make sure of her facts. SAIIA is based at the University of the Witwatersrand, in the financial centre of Johannesburg.

Wang said contact between the Chinese and Africans predated Europe’s “discovery” of Africa by over 100 years. Communication and indirect trade between China and Africa started over 3,000 years ago, she told reporters.

While this contact may not have resulted in substantial links between China and Africa along the lines of those developed between Europe and the continent, Beijing is making up for lost time.

Garth Le Pere, a researcher at the Johannesburg-based Institute for Global Studies, says Botswana’s citizens joke that no building goes up in the country “without some participation of the Chinese”.

China’s current engagement with Africa began taking shape 50 years ago after communists seized power on the Chinese mainland.

China assisted Africa’s liberation movements between the 1950s and 1970s. Since 1956 it has provided aid to over 800 projects in Africa, including initiatives in agriculture, fisheries, textiles, energy, infrastructure, water conservation and power generation.

At present, 35 Chinese medical teams composed of 880 doctors are working in 34 African countries.

Beijing has also offered 15,300 scholarships to students from 52 African countries, according to official statistics. In 2003, 1,793 Africans studied in China, accounting for a third of foreign students in the country.

Trade between China and Africa is also picking up. From a mere 12 million dollars in the early 1950s, it exceeded 10 billion dollars in 2000 and reached 18.55 billion dollars in 2003. Government figures show that 674 Chinese companies were operating in Africa by June this year, with a total investment of 1.509 billion dollars.

“I think China can be a very big ally to Africa. It is a developing country. But it also poses challenges to Africa because we are competitors. We have to find a way to work together,” says Garth Shelton, a professor of international relations at Witwatersrand University.

The potential for friction between China and Africa is particularly acute in the textile and footwear sectors, as a massive influx of cheap Chinese products has dealt a blow to Africa’s manufacturing sector.

“Ten years ago there were 320,000 workers in South Africa’s shoe factories. Now there are less than 50,000. Most of the shoes sold in South Africa come from China. The most expensive ones are imported from Italy,” Shelton says.

Last month, South African Finance Minister Trevor Manuel told manufacturers who had complained about the flood of Chinese textiles to become more competitive.

With a 20 percent share in the trade between China and Africa, South Africa is China’s largest trading partner on the continent. In turn, China is South Africa’s second-largest trading partner in Asia, as well as its eighth-largest export destination.

“China has the biggest market, with the biggest population of 1.3 billion people,” Shelton says. “If Africa can enter into joint ventures with China, that will be the key.”

But, Africa does more than provide a market for Chinese clothing. It is also an important source of the oil that is needed to keep China’s economy afloat, (the country is currently the world’s second-largest consumer of the fuel). “China needs 5.5 million barrels of oil a day to keep its economy running,” says Le Pere.

China currently buys 25 percent of its foreign oil from Africa, a share that it wants to increase to 30 percent.

One of Beijing’s biggest investments in the African fuel sector has been in Sudan. China has a 40 percent stake in a refinery that pumps more than 300,000 barrels a day in the East African country. It also has a stake in a 1,500-kilometre pipeline from the oil fields in southern Sudan to the Red Sea.

However, international concern about human rights abuse in Sudan’s western Darfur province has now prompted calls for oil sanctions that might oblige Khartoum to bring violence in the region to an end.

China has threatened to veto an American proposal for the United Nations to impose sanctions on Khartoum. “We believe that the issue of human rights should be left to individual national governments,” says Wang.

Beijing’s sale of arms to Sudan and other African governments accused of rights abuses has also raised eyebrows. “China is selling military equipment to Africa. Unfortunately China is not transparent in arms sales,” says Shelton.

Ironically, China is also playing a more active role in UN peacekeeping missions in Africa – deploying troops to Liberia, the Ivory Coast, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the border between Ethiopia and Eritrea.

“The peacekeeping mission in Liberia is the largest peacekeeping force ever sent by China at the request of the UN to participate in UN peacekeeping missions in Africa, consisting of three companies…with a total number of troops of 558,” said Wang.

“By the end of July 2004, China had sent about 1,401 peacekeeping troops to take part in nine UN missions in Africa. At present there are 840 Chinese peacekeepers participating in seven UN missions in Africa,” she added.