By Barry Sautman and Yan Hairong
International media have reported up a storm on the recent surge in China-Africa links. They invoke a theme familiar from the past two centuries of colonialism and Cold War: Africa is beset by poverty and ignorance, caused by ruthless and corrupt rulers. Westerners are trying to bring them to book and instill order on the continent, but other forces, in this case Chinese interlopers, are making that difficult.
The facts on the ground show China's engagement in Africa has been more positive than this discourse claims.
The Chinese are getting bad press in the West because they are from a country that is neither liberal democratic nor white, yet are effectively competing with those who are C to the point that some Africans see Chinese development activities as providing a model.
The Chinese, it is said, are in Africa only for natural resources, to feed China's industry and huge population. To exploit the continent, they provide loans and aid to rogue regimes. They worsen the plight of Africans by dumping cheap, shoddy prod-ucts in their markets and ruin local industry. Chinese investors pay Africans a pittance, in contrast to more ethical Western firms. Given all that, China can only be an obstacle to Africa's development.
It's exciting but the media have gotten it all wrong. It's not China that impairs Africa's de-velopment, but a world system of neo-liberal capitalism, based on privatization, trade liberalization and reduced social spending, into which China is partly integrated.
China-Africa trade was US$3 billion in 1995, but $107 billion in 2008. That's still only 4 percent of China's world trade. Yet, it makes China Africa's second largest trading partner and trade is balanced in Africa's favor. On imports from Africa, the China-in-Africa media discourse focuses overwhelmingly on oil.
Most of what China buys from Africa is indeed oil (62 percent) and ores and metals (17 percent), but in 2008 oil was 88 percent of US imports from Africa and minerals made up most of the rest. China's investment in oil production in Africa equals only 8 percent of that of Western multinationals and 3 percent of all investment in African oil. China received 9 percent of Africa's oil exports, but Europe and the US each took 33 percent.
China also couples oil acquisition with low interest loans to build the infrastructure Africa needs, at a much lower cost than the West is willing to do. For 2006-2013, China lent or will lend $28 billion to Africa for infrastructure and as trade credit. There is also less scope for corruption with China's loans for infrastructure projects C often built by Chinese firms paid directly by the government C than with the all-purpose aid Western sources provide African governments, such as the money for primary education in Uganda in the 1990s, four-fifths of which never reached the designated schools.
The focus of the China-in- Africa discourse on China's exports is almost wholly on basic consumer items and their alleged negative consequences. When Chinese goods first came in mass around 2000, Africa's textile and clothing was already decimated by the international financial institutions' forced trade liberalization of the 1980s and 1990s, which opened the market to second-hand and new clothing from developed countries. The fact is that Chinese goods are much cheaper than imports from other countries, as well as locally-made goods that are made costly by poor infrastructure, pricy utilities, and corruption. A British government study found that Chinese exports to Africa mainly displace developed country exports.
China's stock of investments in Africa rose from $49 million in 1990 to $7.8 billion in 2008. The total stock of foreign direct investment in Africa in 2007 was $36 billion, with most of it from the EU, US and South Africa.
A comparison of Chinese and Western firms in Africa would find that many on both sides have oppressive conditions, but Western firms garner much higher profits.
In contrast to Western investments, many Chinese enterprises are equity joint ventures, sharing profits with Africans. Most produce for the local market and focus more on infrastructure and manufacturing than do Western companies.
China is presented in the discourse as "indifferent to Africa's authoritarian despots, as it courts the continent for energy and minerals," as a leading British journalist put it. But the US and France support most despots in Africa, providing them with military assistance and legitimacy.
The West is also implicated in the trade in money and trade in people. Some 40 percent of Africa's private wealth has been sent overseas, much of it to banks that trade interest and secrecy for these funds. London and Zurich, not Beijing, receive these fruits of capital flight and tax evasion.
The China-in-Africa discourse lacks a comparative approach and reflects Western elites' perception of their national interests and moral superiority. Its proponents fail to question Western government rhetoric about "aiding African development" and "promoting African democracy." At the same time, they seize on any example of supposed exploitation by Chinese in Africa.
Many Africans C and some Westerners C question the binary view of a new Western "civilizing mission" versus the actions of "amoral" Chinese who don't fully practice neo-liberalism by conditioning loans to African states on reduced spending on social services.
They are increasingly rejecting a discourse that draws attention away from Africa's problems of exploitation and human rights and toward blaming Chinese, not for what they actually do in Africa, but for being the newly-perceived strategic competitor of the West.
Excerpted from Yale Global Online. Barry Sautman is a political scientist and lawyer at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology. Yan Hairong is an anthropologist at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
[Source: Global Times]
