China in Africa, and the Persistent Orientalism of the West

Sino-African relations’ roots and evolutions

Sino-African relations in contemporary history can be traced back at the Bandung conference (1955), during which Beijing joined the efforts of some great leaders of independent developing countries for opposing a multipolar paradigma of the international relations concerning both economic and political issues. This new paradigma constituted the strategy promoted by those countries in their struggle against Western imperialism, and the bipolar system characterising the Cold War era.

In 1956 China established its first formal diplomatic ties with an African country, namely Egypt. That was China’s first step in promoting a constant alignement with all those African coutries that shared with it “comprhensive consensus on major international issues, common interests and willingnes to deepen their cooperation” (Zhang Chun, 2013). Sino-Africa relationships were made possible by Chinese identification with Third World nations, emerging from colonialism after the Second World War. The political implications of the Third World rethoric clearly emerged in 1954, when the Preamble of the Sino-Indian treaty on Tibet enunciated, for the first time, the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, that still characterize China’s credo in any establishment of diplomatic relations:

1. Mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty.

2. Mutual non-aggression.

3. Mutual non-interference in each other’s internal affairs.

4. Equality and mutual benefit.

5. Peaceful coexistence.

In the late 70’s, these principles affected also the external implications of Deng Xiaoping’s second revolution. The latter introduced the idea of a new economic pragmatism aimed at ensuring China the maximum economic growth (He Wenping, 2007). Since then, as a result of China’s reform policy, the statist economy of the Popular Republic of China (PRC) has opened up to the international market engendering, amongst the other things, an avarage growth in Sino-African trade of 3.6 per cent per year (Zhang Chun, 2013). The end of the Cold War gave Sino-African relations the opportunity of progressing in a less tense international framework so that, nowadays, fifty-one of the fifty-four African coutries have established diplomatic as well as economic ties with the PRC.

In 2003, Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao, speaking at an American Bankers Association’s meeting held in New York, outlined China’s five principles for fair trade and a bilateral economic partnership. Amongst those five principles, three are crucial to Sino-African economic cooperation:

1. Principle of Mutual Benefit, expressed by the so-called “win-win” cooperation model. It recalls the fourth principle of China’s Principle of Peaceful Coexsitence, and ensures Chinese companies important new markets abroad, while offering concrete opportunities for trade partners to share in China’s growth. PRC uses this strategy to ally concerns about China’s galloping rise among Partner countries;

2. Principle of Development First, through which China wants to increase its trade surplus with its partners by intervening with new imports and buying missions in case they have to face political and economic troubles;

3. The consultive mechanisms through which PRC’s government strongly promotes senior-level government-to-government dialogues;

4. The equal consultation with its economic partners. This principle allows China to create consensus with its partners regarding the benefits of the mutual overall relationship (e.g. diplomatic advantages), in order to limit trade tensions;

5. The intention of avoiding commercial disputes’ spillovers into the political arena. (Karen M. Sutter, 2006) Thanks to these strategies and its growing capital availability, China has become by far Africa’s biggest trading partner. In 2010 Sino-African trade topped about $106 billion, becoming worth $160 billion of goods a year in 2014. Some of the major Chinese investment projects in Africa are summarized in the following image.

(Image downloaded from http://www.thebeijingaxis.com/tca/editions/the-china-analyst-aug-2010/27-regional-focus-china-africa)

Furthermore, more than one million Chinese, mainly labourers and traders, have moved to the continent during the last decade (The Economist, 2015). Chinese companies expanding across Africa, invest in natural resources, infrastructure and increasingly in the manufacturing sector. Hence, China is playing a pivotal role in stimulating Africa’s economic growth rates as well as the rising of a young urban middle class, which will help fuelling long-term growth. In fact, China is Africa’s biggest external source of investment, even more important than the World Bank. This has increasingly marginalized Western firms, sparking Western democracies’ concerns over the growing role China plays in African economies: its possible hidden objectives in terms of political, rather than just economic, influence, as well as the Chinese model’s pitfalls.

Critiques to the Chinese cooperation model

Among the most serious criticism, claims emerged that China “puts human rights and transparency totally to one side, while ritually uttering” the “win-win” policy according to which Africans and Chinese benefit equally (The Economist, 2014). Furthermore, Chinese economic intervention into the African market has been described as an onslaught. According to some Western scholars the latter manifests the alleged Beijing’s will of promoting an imperialist venture for exporting not just Chinese capitals, but the “Chinese values” as well, in order to dominate the continent as Europeans did between the XIX and XX century (Howard W. French, 2014).

Especially in the last ten years, Chinese capitalism has internationalized China’s bilateral and state-centric approach to its African partners. In fact, RPC is unfamiliar with the notion of development that emerged during the ‘50s among Western Nations that, until now, consider it as an independent policy field. For this reason China has come to be considered as a treat to the international aid industry (Power Marcus and Mohan Giles, 2010). Notwithstanding these negative considerations, in Africa there are more positive attitudes. People, as well as policy makers, believe that China will bring the benefits of increased trade and investment. These expectations have been already partially fulfilled thanks to China’s tangible project building in Africa, but also due the alternative PRC offers to the aid-focused approach of the West (chinainafrica.co.uk).

The most common attitudes among the majority of Western print, and some scholars as well, can be synthetized as fallows: "Chinese companies are there [in Africa] for the natural resources"; "China wants to secure African oil"; "the Chinese bring over their own workers, and treat the African workers they do have like slaves" (In Idem).

However, these perspectives worryingly show a double and persistent orientalist bias. The first aspect of this bias regards the Westerners’ tendency to bring all those social, political, and economic phenomena emerging beyond its borders, to their own historical experiences, and interpretative categories. Thus, China becomes Africa’s neo-colonizer. Where neo-colonialism is intended as the process through which a country strengthens its international relations with other countries in order to indirectly exploit their economies. Or, recalling Kwame Nkrumah’s definition, neo-colonialism is “just all of the colonialism only except for political control by force” (Jian Junbo and Donata Frasheri, 2014).

On the other hand, by considering Africa as a helpless victim of the alleged and feared new economic world leader, or a neo-imperialist aggressor, the Westerners reproduce the old colonial stereotype of the naive, irrational Africans, therefore incapable of making their own interests.

Contesting orientalist bias

For a more accurate analysis of Sino-African relations we need to consider at least the State actors involved (on the one hand the PRC and, on the other hand, the 51 African States that have recognized it) on an equal footing. In fact, China’s success in doing business with the African continent is not a one-way dynamic. The Chinese alternative model of economic development and cooperation proved successful among African States’ leaders because it contemplates “non-interference in State sovereignty, freedom from ‘western hegemony’”, and unconditioned aid” (Piet Konings, 2007). Beyond these ideological peculiarities, Chinese cooperation model was also successful because governing and business elites within Africa consider China a growing market for African products, as well as a partner capable of fostering their investment opportunities. In addition, also thanks to China’s capitals, African governments have been able to use economic growth for bolstering political stability.

Contrasting the image of a new-colonizer, at this stage of it relationships with Africa, China has shown few political ambitions in the continent. RPC co-operates with democracies as much as with authoritarian regimes. Its aid budget is not comparable with those made available by Western countries and, except for the cases of Ethiopia and Rwanda, Chinese corporatist economy is not attractive for African countries. Those of Western oriented free-market, are still the mainstream ideas. Even when China tried to intervene in South Sudan for stopping the civil war which was prejudicing its oil supplies, it achieved embarrassingly little (The Economist, 2015).

Furthermore, Africans do not just passively accept Chinese policies on their national territory. Some of them are contesting Chinese firms, worrying about unfair deals and environmental damage. African countries have their own thriving civil society, that is able to fuel protests for demanding more transparency and an accounting for human rights. For example, last year in Senegal residents’ organizations blocked a deal for handing a prime section of property in the center of Dakar, to Chinese developers (Romain Dittnger, 2010). Tanzania’s trade unions opposed the government for letting in Chinese petty traders (Giles Mohan and May Tan-Mullins, 2009). These events posed unexpected challenges for authoritarian China, whose foreign policy is heavily based on state-to-state relations and does not accept popular activism or protests within its borders.

Conclusion Despite being the primary source of external investment in the African continent, China has not yet taken a hegemonic attitude in Africa, and it is a completely arbitrary conclusion that it wants to do so in the future. Indeed, the African boom, which China helped to stoke in recent years, has had the result of attracting many other, especially non-Western, investors. India-African trade is supposed to reach $100 billion in 2015, growing even at a faster rate than the Chinese one. On the other hand, also Brazil and Turkey are superseding many European countries (The Economist, 2015). These considerations add up to the arguments so far, explaining why talking about Chinese neo-colonialism, as well as describing Africa as “China’s Second continent” (Howard W. French, 2014), is not just an orientalist flaw, but also an erroneous exaggeration.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• CHUN, Zhang, The Sino-Africa Relationship: Toward a New Strategic Partnership, PDF available at http://www.lse.ac.uk/IDEAS/publications/reports/pdf/SR016/SR-016-Chun.pdf;
• DITTGEN, Romain, From Isolation ti Integration? A Study of Chinese Retailers in Dakar, Occasional Paper N. 57 of the China in Africa Project, South African Institute of International Affairs, March 2010;

ECONOMIST (The), China in Africa. One among many, January, 17th, 2015, http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21639554-china-has-become-big-africa-now-backlash-one-among-many;

• ----, China in Africa. Empire of the Sums, August, 23rd, 2014, http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21613162-mass-immigration-chinese-people-africa-almost-entirely-driven-money;
• FRENCH, Howard W., China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa, Howard W. French, 2014, United States of America;
• JUNBO, Jan and Frasheri, Donata, Neo-colonialism or De-colonialism? China’s economic engagement in Africa and the implications for world order, in “African Journal of Political Sciences and International Relations”, Vol. 8(7), pp. 185-201, October 2014;
• MOHAN, Giles and Tan-Mullins, May, Chinese Migrants in Africa as New Agents of Development? An Analytical Framework, in “European Journal of Development Research”, N. 21, pp. 588–605, 2009;
• POWER, Marcus and Mohan, Giles, Towards a critical geopolitics of China’s engagement with African development, in “Geopolitics”, 15(3), pp. 462–495, 2010;
• SUTTER, Karen M., China’s “Win-Win” Trade Policy, in “China Business Review”, September-October 2008, accessed at http://www.hrs3.net/nfatc/readings/SutterKarenCommentary.pdf
• WENPING, He, The Balancing Act of China’s Africa Policy, in “China Security”, Vol. 3(3), pp. 23-40, Summer 2007;

SITOGRAPHY

• www.chinainafrica.co.uk
• www.chinabusinessreview.com
• www.economist.com
• www.thebeijingaxis.com