Aid and influence: China's great leap into the heart of Africa

In April of this year, a growing fraternity of think-tankers and policymakers fell upon a discussion paper issued by the Chinese government like a pack of hyenas. 

The document was the first to detail China's dispersal of aid in Africa, a realm of geopolitical beneficence that, to Western observers, is as dangerous as it is mysterious. What, so many wondered, is China's game in Africa?

This white paper, it was hoped, would address these concerns. As it happened, it posed more questions than it answered.

China in Africa has become an abiding obsession of the international community, especially for countries such as Canada who are committed to the IMF/World Bank principles of conditional aid distribution.

What that means is that Ottawa's munificence comes with strings attached; China's, by all accounts, doesn't.

By its own reckoning, China has dispersed $39.2 billion US worth of foreign aid to 76 countries since 1950, almost half of which has gone to Africa.

For the incidental observer, this all seems new and terrifying — a Chinese incursion into a continent with nothing to offer but natural resources and shoddy governance.

That view, however, ignores centuries of historical, economic and cultural intermingling.

Chinese authorities routinely conjure up the ghost of the Star Raft, a vast Chinese naval retinue that landed in East Africa in 1414, well before Columbus set sail.

Admiral Zheng He, Grand Eunuch of the Three Treasures, brought back a giraffe to imperial Peking, and it is still hailed as a symbol of Sino-African cooperation.

Modern times

That was then, of course. But since the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949, the powers in Beijing have time and again taken pains to link themselves ideologically with Africa.

By 1964, at the time of then foreign minister Zhou Enlai's much-touted African tour, China was providing the continent with 53 per cent of its loans, interest free, to be repaid over an extended period.

The condition was that the money was only valid for the purchase of Chinese technical expertise and equipment, which came to include armaments. Between 1967 and 1976, China transferred over $143 million worth of arms to 15 African states, in support of liberation movements.

It is a significant amount. But it pales beside the 1970s construction of the Tanzania-Zambia railway, which is still China's largest international infrastructure project, with a price tag of $405 million at the time.

The vast drain of the Cultural Revolution and a subsequent rapprochement with the U.S. following the Richard Nixon visit in 1972 slowed Beijing's involvement in Africa for a time.

But when Deng Xiaoping reset the nation's economic agenda toward economic growth in 1979, the continent once again blipped invitingly on the radar of the People's Republic.

No single event has defined those interests — and stoked international suspicion — more than the establishment of the Forum of China Africa Cooperation in 2000.

The forum's ostensible architect, Liu Guijin, an old Africa hand and China's current special envoy on African affairs, claims that FOCAC was engineered at the behest of the Madagascan ambassador. But it was more likely a Chinese initiative, a means of herding dozens of entities and interests into one multinational corral.

The first gathering in Beijing drew eight African head of states. In 2010, all 50 African leaders who have formal ties with China attended.

Roads for oil

Direct aid and low-cost loans, mostly for infrastructure — think roads for oil — are only one element of the story.

Between January and November 2010, while China became the world's second biggest economy by GDP, it also became Africa's largest trading partner.

At $115 billion, China outstripped the U.S. at $103 billion — a situation, when India is included in the mix, that provides African governments with a host of new trading options.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said that the U.S. does not see Chinese interest in Africa as "incompatible with our own."

But she added, in that schoolmarmish tone that has come to irk African governments, "we are concerned that China's foreign assistance and investment practices in Africa have not always been consistent with generally accepted international norms of transparency and good governance, and have not always utilized the talents of the African people in pursuing its business interests."

Which brings us to Zimbabwe. Perhaps the most loathed African leader who isn't currently being bombed by NATO, Robert Mugabe has infamously led his country to ruin.

But while the West has imposed sanctions, China has promised almost $700 million in loans and aid packages to the Mugabe regime.

Within Zimbabwe there are fears that much of this money will just disappear into Mugabe's political war chest and provide the means to attack his opponents with a sustained terror campaign.

But China's "maintaining independence" policy, outlined by then premier Li Peng in 1996, insists on an inviolable respect for the sovereignty of other countries.

As Liu Guijin put it in a recent interview, "We may suggest certain courses of action, but we do not impose our will. Africans must make decisions for Africans. China will not get involved in African governments' choices."

Quid pro quo

This hands-off approach is anathema to Canada's aid initiatives, particularly under the Harper government, which imposes strict controls on aid dispersal.

But as Rugare Gumbo, one of Mugabe's official spokesmen put it, "the Chinese are our old friends. They have been with us since before liberation [in 1980], and it is a strong relationship. It is nobody's business what we do with them."

Perhaps not. But across the continent, opportunities lie uneasily alongside exploitation.

According to Martyn Davies, CEO of the Johannesburg-based Frontier Advisory, a Sino-African relations specialist, Rwanda, Mauritius, Ethiopia and Angola have been especially canny in benefiting from the opportunities that the Chinese offer.

Observers point to China's engagement with the Dos Santos regime in Luanda, often referred to as the "Angola model." Here, China has offered low-cost loans and outright aid in exchange for commodities.

Some see this as a mortgaging of Angola's future for the instant, and at times unnecessary, expansion of its infrastructure. Others insist that the country's year-on-year GDP growth — 13.8 per cent in 2008; 1.6 per cent last year — is a welcome break from its terrible past.

As for South Africa, another of the main Chinese beneficiaries, it is now a member of the developing-nation powerhouse known as BRICS (for Brazil, Russia, India, China and now South Africa), thanks to Beijing's furious lobbying.

In what could be construed as quid pro quo, China often insists on favours from its African friends at the UN and in other international forums, especially in defense of its less salutary trading partners such as Iran.

Across the continent, Chinese firms backed by Beijing's largesse, along with small and medium-sized Chinese entrepreneurs who might not be able to find Beijing on a map, continue to remake Africa, influencing both policy and economies simply by dint of being there.

Six hundred years after the arrival of the Star Raft, Sino-African relations have hit a new high. Whether that's good or bad is still unclear.

But what the white paper on aid suggests is that China's footprint on the continent is growing while that of the West's in general — Canada's in particular — steadily disappears.