[DEBATE] : (Fwd) China in Africa (US right's view)

[Patrick Bond]

(Nothing new here, merely a summation of Chinese activities meant to 
whip up worries in Washingon.)

Africa's New Hegemon
By James Kirchick
The Weekly Standard

5 March 2007
Volume 12 Issue 24

Hu Jintao, president of China, has just completed an eight-nation tour 
of Africa--a visit that comes on the heels of a meeting in Beijing 
attended by some 40 African heads of state. Both the recent visit and 
the Beijing summit on China-Africa cooperation in November reflect 
China's determination to establish itself as the benevolent, non-Western 
continental hegemon, concerned about the plight of historically 
impoverished and exploited African lands. Through patient diplomatic, 
military, and especially economic overtures, a resource-hungry China 
with an eye on Africa's oil has been extending its reach across the 
continent.

Thus, wherever he went, Hu doled out gifts: $100 million in grants and 
"soft loans" to Cameroon, a sports stadium for Zambia, a military 
hospital for Guinea-Bissau. Many of the grants come with no obvious 
strings attached. The day before Hu left for Africa, the Chinese 
Commerce Ministry announced it would write off 33 African countries' 
debts to China.

Trade is booming. Last year, China's trade with Africa increased 40 
percent, having already quadrupled since 2001. It reached $45 billion in 
the first ten months of 2006. China recently surpassed Britain as the 
continent's third-largest trading partner, after the United States and 
France. China--unburdened at home by opposition parties, human rights 
watchdogs, or a free press--asks no questions about its trading 
partners' domestic repression. Instead, its "mutual noninterference 
policy" makes it the ideal partner for despotic African states.

With all of the money China throws at Africa for infrastructure and 
general economic aid, its more modest military backing for African 
dictators is the least-noticed aspect of its involvement in the 
continent. Yet it is also the most unsettling, considering where this 
assistance has been directed.

China was an early supporter of Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwean African 
National Union (ZANU) during the struggle against white rule in what was 
still Rhodesia in the 1970s. Indeed, China helped fuel something of an 
intra-revolutionary proxy war between ZANU and the Russian-backed 
Zimbabwean African People's Union (ZAPU). Since Mugabe took control of 
the country in 1980, China--along with, to its shame, democratic South 
Africa--has been his leading military supplier.

In December, the Chinese ambassador to Zimbabwe paid a visit to the 
annual meeting of Mugabe's party, the thuggish organization through 
which he has ruled the country uninterrupted for 27 years. In 2004, the 
Zimbabwean government bought $240 million worth of military equipment 
from China. In May of last year, the Chinese donated $1.5 million worth 
of machinery to Zimbabwe's military. And last August, Zimbabwe purchased 
six fighter jets from China. The Chinese have also sent the Zimbabweans 
riot control gear and have trained senior military officers, both of 
which must have helped Mugabe last week as he violently suppressed 
opposition protests outside Harare.

Similarly, the Chinese have exacerbated at every turn what is now the 
gravest military and humanitarian crisis in Africa, the four-year 
slaughter in Darfur. At the Beijing summit, Sudanese president Omar 
Hassan al-Bashir thanked the Chinese government for blocking a 
U.S.-sponsored resolution in the United Nations Security Council that 
called for an international peacekeeping force to be deployed in Darfur, 
where Khartoum has abetted a genocide that has taken hundreds of 
thousands of lives. And that's not all al-Bashir has to be grateful for: 
His country's economy is expected to grow by a whopping 13 percent this 
year thanks in no small part to Chinese trade and infrastructure 
assistance. "Unless the international community--in particular China, 
host of the 2008 Olympics--finds the will to confront Khartoum over its 
intransigence, a savage genocide by attrition will continue 
indefinitely," Eric Reeves, an American Darfur expert, recently told 
Reuters.

China also supplies arms to Khartoum in violation of the letter of a 
U.N. arms embargo and the spirit of countless U.N. resolutions calling 
on international actors to refrain from inflaming the crisis. The 
Chinese are unapologetic: In January the Chinese assistant foreign 
minister said, "With Sudan, we have cooperation in many aspects, 
including military cooperation. In this, we have nothing to hide."

When Hu visited al-Bashir in Khartoum, all he had to offer the genocidal 
leader on the subject of Darfur was a polite request that the Sudanese 
president play a more "constructive role in realizing peace." Just days 
earlier, a Sudanese government official had accused the United States of 
"dismantling the Sudanese government from within" and trying to spur 
"international pressure on Khartoum through human rights institutions 
and by bringing into the country elements opposed to the government." As 
long as the Sudanese keep their oil spigots open, they will continue to 
reap Chinese rewards: During his visit, Hu bestowed on al-Bashir a $13 
million interest-free loan to construct a new presidential palace and 
cancelled $70 million in debt. In return, China receives 60 percent of 
Sudan's oil output and is the country's largest foreign investor.

In addition to its military support for the odious regimes in Khartoum 
and Harare, China sold arms to both Ethiopia and Eritrea during those 
countries' civil wars and has generally flooded the continent with 
weaponry, sometimes selling guns both to governments and to the rebel 
groups who fight them.

According to Herman Cohen, a 38-year State Department veteran who served 
as ambassador to Senegal and Gambia and, in the first Bush 
administration, as assistant secretary of state for Africa, China's 
interest in the continent is nothing new. Since the 1960s, he says, 
China has been intimately involved in African affairs. It sought to 
exert influence as a Cold War power by cultivating relations with 
like-minded Marxist regimes; then in the past decade or so, as it 
emerged as a potential world power with a ravenous need for raw 
materials, China came to see Africa more as a land of natural resources 
to be exploited than as a place to win hearts and minds. Oil, simply 
put, drives Chinese policy in Africa.

Next to the United States and the nations of the former Soviet Union, 
China has the most oil-intensive economy in the world. Africa is the 
source of only about 10 percent of China's oil imports (with Sudan 
representing 1.7 percent of the total), but that's enough, in absolute 
terms, to make African suppliers giddy. Domestic oil production is 
declining faster in China than in the United States, and consumption is 
increasing at an even higher rate, making the Chinese quest for fossil 
fuels all the more desperate. China's share of world oil consumption is 
expected to increase dramatically, from 7 percent to 12 percent, between 
2002 and 2025, while the U.S. share is expected to drop from 47 percent 
to 35 percent over the same period. In just over a decade, China went 
from being a net exporter of oil to being the world's second largest 
importer, behind the United States. Indeed, increasing Chinese demand is 
one of the primary factors driving the price of oil so high.

To meet its energy needs, China has depended on a rogues' gallery of 
international oil producers. Defying American entreaties to isolate 
Iran, for example, China in 2004 signed a $70 million oil and gas 
contract with Tehran. It also buys oil from Sudan and, prior to the 
coalition invasion of Iraq in 2003, was one of the most vociferous 
opponents of the U.N. sanctions regime that reduced Saddam Hussein's 
ability to sell oil on the international market. With the United States 
now occupying Iraq, China has been forced to look elsewhere for oil, and 
African states have been all too happy to oblige, waiting in the wings 
to overtake the volatile Middle East as China's chief supplier. Already 
Angola is China's third largest oil trading partner, following Iran and 
Saudi Arabia. (Total Chinese trade with the Saudis grew 30 percent 
between 2005 and 2006.)

In the United States, domestic pressure has long influenced foreign 
policy; student protests over Sudanese human rights abuses, for example, 
played a role in getting the U.S. government to prevent American 
companies from doing business in Sudan and in forcing American 
universities to divest themselves of holdings in companies doing 
business there. By contrast, China, an authoritarian state, suffers no 
such meddling influences. Indeed, the only condition the Chinese impose 
on African states in exchange for aid seems to be nonrecognition of Taiwan.

"The Western approach of imposing its values and political system on 
other countries is not acceptable to China," Wang Hongyi of the China 
Institute of International Studies told the New York Times last year. 
While the United States and Western lending organizations like the World 
Bank and IMF tend to make democratization and respect for private 
property and human rights a factor in their international dealings, 
China demands no such assurances from its partners. In 2005, an adviser 
to the Chinese government was blunt in explaining his country's oil 
trading policies to the Washington Post: "No matter if it's rogue's oil 
or a friend's oil, we don't care. Human rights? We don't care. We care 
about oil. Whether Iran would have nuclear weapons or not is not our 
business. America cares, but Iran is not our neighbor. Anyone who helps 
China with energy is a friend." Should Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez 
ever decide to cut off all oil sales to the United States (a potentially 
devastating occurrence, considering that Venezuela is America's fourth 
largest supplier), his Chinese buyers, he has proudly noted, will help 
him afford the move.

While the United States sits on its hands, there are positive signs that 
Africans are beginning to realize the consequences of sucking so hard at 
the Chinese teat. In Zambia, once a Cold War ally, mine workers have 
protested the hazardous working environment and low pay at the 
Chinese-owned Chambishi copper mine. Two years ago, 51 workers died at 
the mine, leading to increased skepticism among Zambians regarding their 
country's ties to the Asian behemoth. A report released by the British 
human rights group Christian Aid found that the idea persists in the 
Zambian popular imagination that "Chinese bosses were uniquely brutal 
and exploitative, and that the Zambian state's relationship to them was 
too close."

Chinese influence in Zambia played a major role in that country's 
September presidential election, when the opposition party made the 
government's close ties to China a campaign issue, nearly unseating the 
president. "They are out to colonize Africa economically," the 
opposition party's general secretary told the Daily Telegraph. Late last 
year, the first Chinese-owned casino opened in the Zambian capital, 
Lusaka, and the Chinese are currently building a five-star hotel in 
Livingstone, another major city.

Meanwhile, the Chinese are flooding Africa with cheap goods and cheap 
labor, to the detriment of African economic development. Cohen says that 
the Chinese often staff their mines with unpaid prison labor brought 
from China. Small businessmen across the continent regularly complain 
about the difficulty they have competing with Chinese who open shops in 
town centers stocked with cheap Chinese goods. These practices contrast 
with those of American businesses, which usually send junior executives, 
not unskilled laborers or shopowners, to Africa to train local people in 
competitive enterprise and management.

Cohen says that in Kano, a major city in Nigeria's north, a 
Chinese-owned textile factory has forced all of the city's other textile 
companies to close, and that the factory's raw materials are purchased 
in China, not Africa. "They tend to be like old fashioned imperialists," 
Cohen says. For their part, African leaders "get snookered into thinking 
they're in solidarity with the third world" by tying their fates so 
closely to the Chinese. To that extent, China's charm offensive in 
Africa appears to be working.

James Kirchick is assistant to the editor-in-chief of the New Republic. 
He reported last year from southern Africa for THE WEEKLY STANDARD.