Western countries have been critical of China’s extraordinary trade-led diplomacy in Africa. Beijing has ignored the wider political considerations and happily worked with any African government, including sanction-surrounded Zimbabwe. It stands accused of exploiting African countries for their natural resources, not least their oil, of which Africa now supplies fully a third of China’s requirements. The Chinese reject such censure, most recently when Premier Wen Jiabao addressed African Development Bank members in Shanghai this week. The bank was holding its first annual general meeting in Asia and according to Wen, China is sincere in it desire to help African states speed up their economic and social development. He continued by calling on rich Western nations and Japan to do more to assist Africa in the areas of aid, trade and debt relief.
The truth is that China has stolen a march on the West by ignoring the finger wagging of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank about corruption and economic mismanagement. Beijing is simply not interested in whether or not an African state has stuck to the regime of economic reforms prescribed by Washington-based IMF economists. It is working on the wider capitalist principle that all trade is good. Its own loans to Africa may very well be risky — as Western pundits warn but even if every debt is a bad one, that would have no impact whatsoever on China’s own financial position. Beijing has already forgiven former debts and produced fresh aid of over $8 billion. The issue is surely that, even if some of this money disappears into the maw of local corruption, most of it will still represent an injection of fresh capital into a still woefully impoverished continent.
When Western countries have forgiven debt and granted fresh aid, there has been the inescapable suggestion that this has been an act of charity. This applies even to the British, who have led the campaign to give Africa a financial break. By contrast, the Chinese by contrast are openly in Africa for the money. Their hard-nosed view is that if they profit, so will the countries with whom they traded to the tune of $55 billion last year (quadruple the figure for 2000) and in whom they invest.
Western accusations that China is exploiting Africa are astonishing in the light of two centuries of extensive and well-organized plunder of Africa’s natural resources by European colonial powers. Europe’s African possessions were won by violence and their wealth was extracted and harvested without recompense to the locals. Even if African nations were getting a bad deal from China, which they are not, at least the Chinese are paying for what they take.
Breaking ranks with Western aid and lending institutions to Africa carries the small risk of souring relations between Beijing and the West. Forty years of postcolonial economics have, on the other hand, kept much of the African economy pauperized. The Chinese trade-dominated approach does offer something radically different and is therefore well worth trying.
