A new Cold War in Africa
There has been a spectacular increase in China’s trade with Africa so that in the last three years it has overtaken Britain and is now the continent’s third largest trading partner after the United States and France.
In 2000, China’s trade with Africa stood at $10 billion; by 2005 it had leapt to $40 billion. And in the first six months of 2006 it rose again by 41 per cent. Today, some 700 Chinese state companies are doing business in Africa. China’s extensive involvement in Africa brings with it tough pressures on African countries.
Thus, when an opposition spokesman in Zambia, where China has made large investments in the copper industry, attacked the extent of China’s investment, Beijing threatened to break off diplomatic relations.
At the same time, China is developing into a significant aid donor with its volunteers teaching agriculture, computer skills, traditional medicine and Chinese. China is also offering exchange schemes and conducting seminars.
China’s primary objective is economic: Africa has many of the raw materials, including oil, which China urgently requires to fuel its industrial revolution. In addition, Beijing sees Africa as an important market for its exports. China has also become a source of loans to Africa, and these are all the more welcome because, unlike Western loans, conditions about “good governance” are not attached to them.
At this point it is worth considering a recent United Nations proposal that new aid funds for Africa should be channelled through a single body, a UN Fund for Africa.
A recent report by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) claims: “The sheer multiplicity of donors has created a landscape of aid that, at best, can only be described as chaotic.” The report criticises the politicisation of aid programmes and the high administrative costs of such programmes. It argues that increased aid, as a result of the Gleneagles summit when the G8 vowed to double aid with an extra $48 billion a year by 2010, should be delivered through a single multilateral agency. This proposal, predictably, was vetoed by Britain, which argued that improving existing mechanisms would be a better way to deliver increased aid.
In the 1960s there was a strong lobby, including Britain, which argued for channelling aid through the UN so as to take the politics out of it. Now, there are growing signs that aid is being overtly politicised so as to meet the Chinese “threat”. The US is expected to take the same line. The politicisation of aid became a necessary part of the Cold War. A return to Cold War tactics appears to be the Western response to China’s growing involvement in Africa – and no doubt elsewhere as well.
China’s political objectives are obvious enough.
It has now established diplomatic relations with 48 African countries and sees these as useful potential allies in preventing any recognition of Taiwan that it believes the US might attempt to push through at the UN. China, according to a British critic, is pursuing “naked mercantilism” in Africa, as though this is any different to what the Americans or Europeans have long done on the continent. It is accused of doing business with dubious regimes – providing soft loans to Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, for example, or opposing sanctions against Sudan. Such strictures come ill from the West whose reputation in this respect does not bear examination.
China’s impact at present is most obvious in Sudan, which has become a cockpit of conflicting strategic interests. China now owns 13 of the 15 top companies in Sudan and buys 50 per cent of the country’s oil. It has blocked UN attempts to exert meaningful pressures upon Khartoum over Darfur and has supplied hundreds of military vehicles to the Sudanese government while a large proportion of the arms used by the Janjaweed militias come from China. In this connection, however, it is pertinent to remember that the US has anti-terrorist “listening posts” in Sudan and probably sees these as being strategically more important than overt pressures in relation to Darfur.
From Africa’s point of view, this huge surge in Chinese investment and aid is providing a much more effective alternative to the West than ever the Communist powers achieved during the Cold War.
The continent is experiencing improved growth as a result of higher commodity prices because of China’s growing demands. At the same time, China is prepared to finance and build large infrastructure projects such as bridges, ports or railways that the West has become wary of tackling and, for example, has just made a loan of $1 billion to Nigeria to modernise its rail system. It has recently cancelled $1 billion of debts and became an early investor in post-conflict Sierra Leone. And the West is clearly less than happy with this Chinese invasion of what had been regarded as a Western sphere of interest and influence.
Speaking in New York this month, Britain’s Chancellor, Gordon Brown, suggested that aid to Africa was as much a strategic as a moral challenge – a line clearly designed to appeal to the US – as the continent fell under the influence of China as well as terror groups such as al-Qaida. Here Brown is reverting to blatant Cold War-speak and only the target has changed – China as a capitalist power and al-Qaida instead of the Communists.
Brown was addressing an anti-poverty conference organised by former US President Bill Clinton and he urged the delegates to embrace a “new deal” for Africa before it was too late. Britain, he claimed, had pledged $15 billion over 10 years to educate African children.
He went on: “My fear is that if we don’t wake up to the need for the new deal we will find that what we thought was a moral imperative has become very quickly a strategic imperative.” He emphasised how in the last year several things had changed in Africa: “We are seeing more al-Qaida bases than in any other part of the world, we are seeing more immigration from Africa into Europe and we are seeing China playing politics in Africa.”
Brown’s accusation that China is “playing politics in Africa” comes ill from the representative of Britain with its long history of playing politics in Africa. He made the final point that China’s lending to Africa was “almost negating the debt relief” efforts of industrialised countries and that the politics of development assistance would move “right to the centre of the agenda”.
In essence, Brown was declaring war on China in Africa on behalf of the old West.
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