Unravelling the myth of China’s engagements in Africa
China’s overtures in the continent are not just about exports or imports but something that combines the strong features of its private companies with those of multilateral development banks
It was 1982 and I had been seconded by the Financial Times to Beijing to train the greenhorn journalists in China Daily. Back then, the only outside news agency clacketing in the office was Xinhua. And story after story was about visiting leaders from Africa.
I complained and complained – not about the fact that so many African presidents were passing through Beijing, but that the stories were always focused on just one thing – what the leaders ate, dish by dish, with Deng or other senior Chinese officials in either the Great Hall of the People or the Zhongnanhai. The China Daily editors never seemed to catch the irony when I noted that Chinese food was very good, but surely not so good that it justified visits by so many African leaders.
No matter how long the visit, nor how large the delegation, all we learned from the Xinhua reports was the intricate detail of what they ate.
Today, three and a half decades later, it is obvious that much was discretely being done away from Beijing’s grand banquet halls. China has become Africa’s largest trading partner, with annual two-way trade passing US$200 billion. Chinese investment in the continent has jumped almost four-fold since 2008, to more than US$26 billion a year. Old colonial powers like the UK can still boast a larger long term stock of foreign investment in the dark continent, but that lead is fast being eroded.
Significant and fast-growing as this economic relationship is, many myths confuse understanding of China’s economic relationship. Of course the first myth is that China and Chinese companies are “Johnny-come-latelies” in Africa. As my own China Daily memories confirm, China’s interest in building close economic ties with Africa was being forcefully pursued four decades ago. Not for nothing was a towering Mao Zedong so often depicted in paintings and ceramic tributes as a father to the world’s peoples, with men and women of all races clustered around him holding aloft Mao’s “Little Red Book”.
A second myth is that China’s charge into Africa is being led by state owned enterprises clutching onto Chinese leaders’ coat-tails. This may have been true three decades ago, but it is not so true today. The high-profile projects focused on oil and gas, on minerals, and on big infrastructure projects right back to the TanZam Railway are of course being led by state-owned companies, with strong financial backing from the Beijing government. But China’s investment is much more pervasive and “democratic” than that, with an estimated 1million Chinese working long-term inside Africa, running restaurants, running hotels, and import-export trading.