by ELIZABETH SCHMIDT
Ethiopia’s Chinese built Addis Ababa–Djibouti trainline VIDEO/Youtube
China’s growing presence in Africa has captured global attention. As its trade deals and investments have eclipsed those of the West, politicians from the US and EU have raised the alarm: Beijing, they say, is exploiting the continent’s resources, threatening its jobs and buttressing its dictators, while casting political or environmental considerations to the side. African civil society organizations level many of the same criticisms, while also pointing out that Western countries have long engaged in similar practices. In the Anglophone media, most assessments of China’s outlook are clouded by the rhetoric of the New Cold War, which frames Xi Jinping as bent on world domination and calls on the forces of civilization to stop him. What would a more sober analysis look like? How should we understand Africa’s role in this hostile geopolitical matrix?
Chinese interests in Africa – and Western concerns about Beijing’s influence – are nothing new. Understanding the current standoff requires us to trace its history. In April 1955, representatives of 29 Asian and African nations and territories gathered for a landmark conference in Bandung, Indonesia. They resolved to wrest autonomy from the capitalist core by promoting economic and cultural cooperation, as well as decolonization and national liberation, throughout the Global South. Thereafter, Chinese engagement with Africa was guided by this spirit of solidarity. From the early 1960s to the mid-70s, China offered grants and low interest loans for development projects in Algeria, Egypt, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Tanzania and Zambia. It also sent tens of thousands of ‘barefoot doctors’, agricultural technicians and workers’ solidarity brigades to African countries that had rejected neocolonialism and been rebuffed by the West.
In Southern Africa, where white minority rule persisted in settler colonies and Portugal resisted demands for independence, Beijing provided the liberation movements in Mozambique and Rhodesia with military training, advisers and weapons. When Western countries ignored Zambian pleas to effectively isolate the renegade regimes, China established the Tanzania Zambia Railway Authority, which built a railroad that permitted Zambia to export its copper through Tanzania rather than white-ruled Rhodesia and South Africa. Throughout this period, Chinese policies were determined primarily by political imperatives, as the country sought allies in a global conjuncture shaped by the Cold War.
After the collapse of the USSR, though, its priorities changed. China responded to the advent of American unipolarity by embarking on a massive programme of industrialization and liberalization, hoping to avoid the fate of other Communist state projects. With this shift, Africa was no longer viewed as an ideological proving ground but as a source of raw materials and a market for Chinese goods, ranging from clothing to electronics. Political sympathy gave way to economic utility. African nations were valued according to their material and strategic significance for the CCP’s development plans.
By the first decade of the twenty-first century, China had surpassed the US as Africa’s largest trading partner, and it has recently become the continent’s fourth largest source of foreign direct investment. In exchange for guaranteed access to energy resources, agricultural land and materials for electronic devices and electric vehicles, China has spent billions of dollars on African infrastructure: building and renovating roads, railroads, dams, bridges, ports, oil pipelines and refineries, power plants, water systems and telecommunications networks. Chinese enterprises have also constructed hospitals and schools, and invested in clothing and food processing industries, along with agriculture, fisheries, commercial real estate, retail and tourism. The latest investments have focused on communications technology and renewable energy.
Unlike Western powers and the international financial institutions they dominate, Beijing has not made political and economic restructuring a condition for its loans, investments, aid or trade. Nor are they conditional upon labour and environmental protections. While these policies are popular with African rulers, they are often challenged by civil society organizations, which note that Chinese firms have driven African-owned enterprises out of business and employed Chinese workers rather than local ones. When they do hire African labour, Chinese companies often force them to work in dangerous conditions for poverty wages. China’s infrastructure projects have also resulted in massive debts that have deepened African dependency, although African countries still owe far more to the West. Most damagingly, Beijing has secured its unfettered access to markets and resources by backing corrupt elites, strengthening regimes that have pilfered their countries’ wealth, repressed political dissent and waged wars against neighbouring states. African rulers have, in turn, given China much-needed diplomatic support in the United Nations and other international organizations.
For decades, China opposed political and military interference in the internal affairs of other nations. Yet as Beijing’s economic interests in Africa have grown, it has adopted a more interventionist approach, involving disaster relief, anti-piracy and counterterrorism operations. In the early 2000s, China joined UN peacekeeping programmes in countries and regions where it had economic interests. In 2006 China pressured Sudan, an important oil partner, to accept an African Union–UN presence in Darfur; in 2013 it joined the UN peacekeeping mission in Mali, motivated by its interests in the oil and uranium of neighbouring countries; and in 2015 it worked with Western powers and East African subregional organizations to mediate peace talks in South Sudan.
During this period, China initially refrained from military involvement in strife-ridden areas, preferring to contribute medical workers and engineers. But this did not last long. There was a notable Chinese military presence in the UN peacekeeping missions to Burundi and the Central African Republic. The UN Mali mission marked the first time Chinese combat forces had joined such an operation, alongside some 400 engineers, medical personnel and police. Beijing also sent an infantry battalion composed of 700 armed peacekeepers to South Sudan in 2015. By the following year, it was contributing more military personnel to UN peacekeeping operations than any other permanent member of the Security Council.
The trend toward heightened political and military engagement in Africa culminated in 2017, when China joined France, the US, Italy and Japan in establishing a military facility in Djibouti: the first permanent Chinese military base outside the country’s borders. Strategically located on the Gulf of Aden near the mouth of the Red Sea, the facility overlooks one of the world’s most lucrative shipping lanes. It has allowed Beijing to resupply Chinese vessels involved in UN anti-piracy operations and protect Chinese nationals living in the region. It has also enabled the monitoring of commercial traffic along China’s 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, which links countries from Oceania to the Mediterranean in a vast production and trading network. This will help China safeguard its supply of oil, half of which originates in the Middle East and transits through the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb Strait to the Gulf of Aden. Most of China’s exports to Europe follow the same route.
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