Photo: iStock
Mátyás Kohán
21/06/2023 06:00
Either way, the pattern is clear: to the West and Western media, Africa is the godforsaken hellhole where unspeakable massacres happen, children starve, and warlords hire mercenaries to perform ethnic cleansing in dilapidated Toyota trucks. It’s a rather boring and depressing burden.
Not to China. To China, Africa is the land of opportunity along the lines of what America used to be to Europe: a place where they can fetch resources, export goods and surplus workforce, get a local economy up to speed while supersizing their own, and then leave it up to the co-opted local elites to make of it what they will.
The possible outcomes are the same old ones, too: in Rwanda and pre-war Ethiopia, with average GDP growth rates of 5.23 per cent and 9.1 per cent respectively, Chinese investment has fuelled the take-off phase of the same capitalist miracle that made Canada and the US great. And in other, more resource-rich African countries, where corrupt local governments are handing over their countries’ treasures to China for a pittance to the budget and fat bribes for themselves, it’s hard not to see the parallels with some less lucky polities in Latin America that are strangled by their dependent capitalism.
We are often too quick to write off China’s African adventures as “neocolonialism” or “debt-trap diplomacy”. But that’s a fallacy, and so is the example most used to back it up: the case of recently-defaulted Sri Lanka. Despite having struck gargantuan infrastructure deals with China, Chinese creditors only held around 20 per cent of Sri Lanka’s public debt when it defaulted last spring. Chinese lending was hardly to blame for the woes of a state that had been mismanaged for so long at that point.
Instead, the quality of governance is the key determiner. The immense opportunity offered by China’s appetite for business can be wasted on selling off countries’ natural resources for a dime, of course, like Tanzania did with its copper industry. China is happy to help with unproductive prestige projects as well – everybody likes a well-renovated ministry. But in more successful countries, China-Africa cooperation is broad, accessible and multifaceted. China might serve as an ever-hungry export market for premium foodstuffs. Just look at Rwandan coffee bean producers who provide convenient large-scale supply for Chinese customers and decent prices for themselves by spinning up cross-border e-commerce services. Or it can offer a production base for tech creators in countries with little manufacturing infrastructure, much like it has to everyone and their dog in Europe and the USA in the last decades. This is exactly what’s happening between Ethiopia’s Sheba Valley tech hub and China’s Shenzhen manufacturing powerhouse – “designed in Ethiopia” meets “made in China”, and their wedlock begets a range of IT solutions that finally tackle the challenges particular to Africa.
No one can save a corrupt system from itself – it is in the DNA of any superpower to exploit small-state cronyism for their own ends. And there are strings attached to all kinds of cooperation with a great power: the West exports ideology, and China seems to export atrociously low labour standards, as Howard W. French writes in China’s Second Continent, his classic on the matter. But when one sees Africa’s trade with China expanding at twice the speed of the continent’s trade with anyone else; when Rwanda’s Ambassador to the PRC, James Kimonyo, writes that “our development model shares similarities with that of China”, because “China understands and supports Rwanda's vision and transformation, by offering support in key areas to reach one of our central goals — economic self-reliance and graduating from foreign aid”; it stands to reason that all is not for show. China has actually offered to this long-ignored continent, cynically abused by its own colonial masters as testing grounds for the Cold War development industry, a path towards substantial change. It’s far from perfect, of course: it’s lined with the interests of an overpopulated superpower that’s vying for hydrocarbons, rare earths and arable land. But it’s a viable offer. And for many African countries, it’s the only one on the table at this time. No one keeps other powers from sketching up a better one.
The author is a foreign policy journalist