By ELIZABETH SCHMIDT*
China's presence in Africa dates back to the middle of the last century, initially due to political sympathy, today more linked to economic perspectives
China's growing presence in Africa has drawn global attention. As its trade and investment deals have eclipsed those of the West, politicians in the US and the European Union have sounded the alarm: Beijing, they say, is exploiting the continent's resources, threatening its jobs and supporting its dictators; Furthermore, it is leaving aside political or environmental considerations.
African civil society organizations make many of the same criticisms, while pointing out that Western countries have long engaged in similar practices. In the English-speaking media, most assessments of China's prospects are clouded by New Cold War rhetoric, which frames Xi Jinping as aiming to dominate the world. The forces of civilization are therefore asked to stop him. Now, how could a more sober analysis be carried out? How should we understand Africa’s role in this hostile geopolitical matrix?
Chinese interests in Africa – as well as Western concerns about Beijing's influence – are nothing new. Understanding the current impasse requires that its history of imperialism in Africa be traced. In April 1955, representatives from 29 Asian and African nations and territories met for a historic conference in Bandung, Indonesia. They resolved to wrest their own autonomy from the capitalist core, promoting economic and cultural cooperation, as well as decolonization and national liberation, throughout the Global South.
In this sense, Chinese engagement with Africa was initially guided by this spirit of solidarity. From the early 1960s to the mid-1970s, China offered grants and low-interest loans for development projects in Algeria, Egypt, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Tanzania, and Zambia. It also sent tens of thousands of “barefoot doctors,” agricultural technicians, and worker solidarity brigades to African countries that had rejected neocolonialism and had therefore been rejected by the West.
In Southern Africa, where white minority rule persisted in certain colonies, Portugal resisted demands for independence, Beijing provided liberation movements in Mozambique and Rhodesia with military training, advisors, and weapons. When Western countries ignored Zambia's pleas to effectively isolate the renegade regimes, China created a railway company in Tanzania and Zambia, which built a railway that allowed Zambia to export its copper through Tanzania instead of Rhodesia and South Africa. South, governed by whites. Throughout this period, Chinese policies were determined primarily by political imperatives, as the country sought allies in a global situation shaped by the Cold War.
After the collapse of the USSR, however, his priorities changed. China responded to the advent of American unipolarity by embarking on a massive program of industrialization and liberalization, hoping to avoid the fate of other communist state projects. With this change, Africa was no longer seen as a field for ideological initiatives, but as a source of raw materials and a market for Chinese products, ranging from clothing to electronics. Political sympathy gave way to the perspective of economic utility. African nations were valued according to their material and strategic significance to the Chinese Communist Party's development plans.
In the first decade of the 21st century, China overtook the US as Africa's largest trading partner and recently became the continent's fourth-largest source of foreign direct investment. In exchange for guaranteed access to energy resources, agricultural land and materials for electronic devices and electric vehicles, China has spent billions of dollars on infrastructure on this continent: building and renovating roads, railways, dams, bridges, ports, pipelines and refineries, power plants energy, water systems and telecommunications networks.
Chinese companies have also built hospitals and schools and invested in the clothing and food processing industries, along with agriculture, fishing, commercial real estate, retail and tourism. The most recent investments have focused on communications technology and renewable energy.
Unlike Western powers and international financial institutions, Beijing has not made political and economic restructuring a condition of its loans, investments, aid or trade. They are also not subject to labor and environmental protections. While these policies are popular among African rulers, they are often challenged by civil society organizations, which note that Chinese companies have driven African-owned companies out of the market and employed Chinese workers instead of local workers.
When hiring African labor, Chinese companies often force them to work in dangerous conditions for meager wages. China's infrastructure projects have also resulted in massive debt that has deepened African dependence. However, African countries still owe much more to the West.
Most damagingly, Beijing has secured its unfettered access to markets and resources by supporting corrupt elites, strengthening regimes that steal their countries' wealth, repress political dissent, and wage wars against neighboring states. African rulers, in turn, have given China much-needed diplomatic support at the United Nations and other international organizations.
For decades, China has opposed political and military interference in the internal affairs of other nations. However, as Beijing's economic interests in Africa have grown, it has adopted a more interventionist approach, involving disaster relief, anti-piracy and counterterrorism operations.
In the early 2000s, China joined UN peacekeeping programs in countries and regions where it had economic interests. In 2006, China pressured Sudan, an important oil partner, to accept the presence of the African Union and the UN in Darfur. In 2013, he joined the UN peacekeeping mission in Mali, motivated by his interests in oil and uranium from neighboring countries. In 2015, he worked with Western powers and sub-regional organizations in East Africa to mediate peace talks in South Sudan.
During this period, China initially refrained from becoming militarily involved in conflict-ridden areas, preferring to contribute medical workers and engineers. But that didn't last long. There has been a notable Chinese military presence in UN peacekeeping missions in Burundi and the Central African Republic.
The UN mission in Mali marked the first time Chinese combat forces joined such an operation, alongside around 400 engineers, medical and police personnel. Beijing also sent an infantry battalion made up of 700 armed soldiers to South Sudan in 2015. By the following year, it was contributing more troops to UN peacekeeping operations than any other permanent member of the Security Council.
The trend of greater political and military involvement in Africa culminated in 2017, when China joined France, the USA, Italy and Japan in establishing a military installation in Djibouti: thus was born the first permanent Chinese military base outside the country's borders. Strategically located in the Gulf of Aden, near the mouth of the Red Sea, the facility overlooks one of the world's most lucrative shipping lanes.
This allowed Beijing to resupply Chinese vessels involved in UN anti-piracy operations and protect Chinese citizens living in the region. It also enabled the monitoring of commercial traffic along China's 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, which links countries from Oceania to the Mediterranean in a vast production and trade network. This will help China protect its oil supply, half of which originates in the Middle East and transits through the Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait to the Gulf of Aden. Most of China's exports to Europe follow the same route.
While Washington condemns what it calls Chinese imperialism, its own military footprint in Africa is much deeper and more painful, consisting of 29 bases in resource-rich areas. The US promises to ward off “evil empires” while boasting more than 750 bases in at least 80 countries, compared to China’s three. It has fought in at least 15 foreign wars since 1980 – China has joined just one – and the fiscal regimes it has imposed on African nations, based on privatization, deregulation and spending restrictions, have been ruinous.
O establishment US security forces now aim to contain China's rise by reinforcing military alliances, especially with regimes that have received Chinese investment. However, a growing number of African states, aware of this disastrous record, are refusing to take sides in the New Cold War and are instead trying to turn their combatants against each other.
The truth is, however, that as long as Africa is treated as a means for rival powers to expand their markets or influence, in collaboration with local elites, the people of the continent will not exercise true sovereignty. Today, Bandung's legacies are scarce.
*Elizabeth Schmidt is a professor of history at Loyola University Maryland.
Translation: Eleutério FS Prado.
Originally published on Sidecar's blog New Left Review.
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