The new African-Chinese economic and diplomatic partnership, manifested in the pact signed by China and 48 African countries in Beijing this month, is unsettling European leaders and analysts, who continue to see Africa as Europe’s backyard.
French analysts and politicians have been calling attention to China’s growing presence in Africa for many months. In January, Jean-Pierre Tuquoi, diplomatic correspondent for the French daily newspaper Le Monde, said the Chinese expansion in Africa is “indisputable”.
According to figures by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, African-Chinese trade has grown five-fold since the year 2000, and will reach the record sum of $50-billion in 2006. Similarly, about 800 Chinese enterprises invested more than $5,5-billion in 43 African countries, making the People’s Republic of China Africa’s third largest economic partner, only behind the United States and France.
Tuquoi pointed out that Chinese construction workers can now be seen all over Africa, from Angola, Gabon, Mauritania, and Nigeria in the west, through Sudan to Kenya, Rwanda, Mozambique and Tanzania, in the east. “They are working in all sectors, from public construction works to agriculture, oil, and telecommunications,” Tuquoi said.
Although the “amounts of money involved are still modest”, he said, “Chinese trade and investment has never registered such growth in any other region of the world”.
These economic actions are likely to increase, leading to a growing Chinese political influence in Africa, as the African-Chinese summit of Beijing documented, says Tuquoi. The summit, which closed with the announcement of a new Chinese economic cooperation package worth $5-billion over the next three years, has increased the European concerns vis-Ã -vis China’s expansion in Africa.
‘Take a stand in Africa’
“We Europeans should not leave the commitment to Africa to the People’s Republic of China,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a conference on urban development, which took place in Berlin on November 11, less than a week after the Beijing African-Chinese Summit.
“We must take a stand in Africa,” Merkel added, underlining that one of the subjects Europe has to consider in its policy towards Africa is “a fair dealing with [African] natural resources”. She added that Europe’s cooperation policy towards Africa will be a “substantial subject” of the German European Union presidency in the first semester of 2007.
For Maritta Tkalec, a commentator with the German daily newspaper Berliner Zeitung, Europe’s access to African natural resources and economic interests should be at the heart of any policy toward the continent. “So far, Europe has ignored what its African neighbour offers in large amounts: natural resources, millions of consumption-eager people and cooperation,” Tkalec wrote.
A point Merkel made in her speech was that European policy towards Africa should not be conceived based on “charity arguments, as it has been in the past, but on our stalwart interests”.
But, instead of “charity arguments”, Merkel could have spoken of “paternalistic”, or “neo-colonialist” European behaviour towards Africa.
French leaders and analysts continue to describe Africa as “notre pré carré [our backyard]”, more than 40 years after the last French colony in Africa achieved political independence.
Summits
France organises a French-African summit every two years, in which heads of state and government from practically all African countries participate, and which address development, the fight against poverty and strengthening democracy in Africa. So far, these summits’ success has been modest at best.
In addition, European and North American leaders in general, and French politicians in particular, tend to give their African counterparts lessons on democracy, respect for human rights and governmental transparency — even if such lessons are also exercises in Western hypocrisy.
France, for instance, maintains privileged relations with the corrupt regimes of oil-rich Gabon, ruled since 1968 by Omar Bongo, and of the Congo. And the US has been wooing African dictators such as Teodoro Obiang and Eduardo dos Santos, who rule oil-rich, poverty-ridden Equatorial Guinea and Angola, respectively, both since 1979.
Chinese leaders prefer to circumvent such sensitive subjects, and focus instead on business, access to natural resources and international political cooperation, says Pierre Haski, a diplomatic analyst at the French daily newspaper Libération.
“China has been knotting firm ties with some of the most controversial regimes in Africa, like Sudan and Zimbabwe,” Haski noted in a commentary on the Beijing African-Chinese Summit.
Attractive alternative
For Denis Tull, an expert on African politics at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, “China, by offering Africa aid without preconditions, has presented an attractive alternative to conditional Western aid, and gained valuable diplomatic support to defend its international interests”.
The African votes in international bodies such as the United Nations could be decisive in designing a new multipolar balance of power. “China sees opportunity where Western leaders see only terror, corruption, refugees and decay of state institutions,” Tull wrote in a paper on Chinese-African relations published last September.
“African leaders are happy that their Chinese counterparts are not repeating the Western sermons on human rights, good governance, and transparency,” he pointed out.
However, he added, this “generally asymmetrical relationship, differing little from previous African-Western patterns, alongside the support of authoritarian governments at the expense of human rights, make the economic consequences of increased Chinese involvement in Africa mixed at best, while the political consequences are bound to prove deleterious”.
But African observers see China as an example. Says Adama Gaye, an author from Togo: “So far, African democratic experience has been reduced to changing one corrupt regime for another, be it by electoral means or by civil war. The question now is: Would not it be better if an autocratic regime would lead our countries on the development path for a while?” — IPS