Beware China’s Africa invasion
Published: December 8, 2008
As America combats a recession’s widening effects, China sinks teeth deeper into the flesh of Africa, a place where hope flickers and horrors persist. For decades, what Webster’s defines as “desire accompanied by expectation” – what realists in Africa’s case might simply call delusion – has subsisted amid exploitation and idealism, or a facsimile of the latter rendered crude by the former.
Those forces providing no palpable benefit, Africa these days has fallen sway to a new suitor in China, which follows the form of dashing gallant calling on a widow possessing hidden wealth. The republic offers investments of billions of dollars while espying lucrative supplies of oil and minerals. Africa, if it is yet unaware, soon will discover what it knows well: hope costs.
While China mines the continent for coal and copper and drills into blood-red clay for oil, foreign workers take skilled jobs Afrikaners covet. Union officials say African subordinates who displease receive from Chinese superiors treatment familiar to those living under Beijing rule, the discipline of boots, clubs and fists.
Inhumanity and corruption pulse in Africa, and Europe and the West have fed this through the ages. But China’s presence hovers like a looming storm. While the West seeks to use the allure of money – and the restraint of it — to halt or slow genocide in Sudan and Darfur, Beijing hands overlords bundles of cash. China, according to a recent Cox News report, is “Sudan’s biggest buyer of oil and sell[s] weapons to its government. Last year Beijing gave Sudan a $13 million interest-free loan to build a presidential palace.”
In times of plenty, Americans living outside that foreign country called Hollywood are inclined to issue dismissive sniffs to places beyond U.S. shores – how many could find Nigeria on a map? This spirit is doubtlessly compounded by the recession’s squeeze. What does Africa matter here?
Plenty, or so said Eric Edeleman, undersecretary of defense, talking to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee earlier this year: “China’s full-court press to establish influence and connections in Africa and Latin America may be seismic in its future implications to the United States.”
Implications of the bottom-line variety, always important in the U.S., are included. China has accelerated its pace in seeking to secure what it perceives to be a shrinking energy supply, including oil. Beijing’s policy of non-interference in the affairs of African governments – looking the other way as guns blaze – increasingly is giving China the edge in acquiring contracts for oil and mineral fields, to the exclusion, specifically, of U.S. companies.
“Right now,” Chris Alden, a director at the South African Institute of International Affairs, told Cox, “the best natural resources are still in Western hands, but that can change, and maybe we’re seeing the beginning of that change.”
By year’s end, trade between China and Africa will exceed $100 billion, topping trade between the United States and Africa for the first time, according to Cox. As America’s foreign attention is directed to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, China is quietly advancing on the Dark Continent. Surely America’s enemies – including the terrorists who aligned with Somali warlords more than a decade ago – have noticed.
Third-world despots and the planet’s last great Communist power are forming bonds. These are trends which ought to disturb; to the extent they are ignored, the risks for America increase.
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Reader Reactions
I can’t imagine how you could possible mistake Africans for Afrikaners. To say “we should have used ‘Africans’”, is not enough for such a gaffe. A reader could only conclude that you are more concerned with a few white guys known for giving us the word “apartheid” than the millions of Africans who die of Aids, malaria, war and starvation every year.
I’ll pass on the archaic “dark continent”. But why would you call a country with how many Walmarts?? Communist, unless you were simply trying to demonize them.
The West does not have a great history in Africa. I don’t approve of all that China is doing but they have done a heck of a lot less harm than the West did.
And what exactly are you suggesting that we do about it.
I’d like to suggest keeping to more local matters in your future editorials.
I do not know why you call the Chinese investment an invasion. The last invasion that Africa had was in 1885 after the Berlin conference that made Africans literally to be colonial slaves of the Europeans, an action that put America and Europe to an unfair advantage in Africa up to this day.
The other comment I have is that I do think that you used the word Afrikaans intentionally to point the finger to the fledging South African democracy that the Afrikaans you are alluding to subjugate for a century with the help of America and Europe.
The Chinese are welcome in Africa more so because they are not the oppressor, they are the oppressed.
Americans can go and trade with Indians and the Europeans because they all share the imperial ambitions.
There is nothing Obama will do for Africa because He should do more for the Blacks in US than others outside his border.
If He want to do something however, he should deal with the IMF, the world bank, the WTO, these imperial organizations are the one bringing the economies of the third world countries including African and South American down.
The aids pandemic and Malaria infections have become the American foreign policies towards Africa. If there are successes in those fronts well and good, but those have never been the daily concerns of ordinary Africans. The daily concerns are jobs, land and better way of living and those are being offered partly by the direct foreign investments, not only from china but also from other middle income countries including the Arabic and North African countries.
The advice I would give Americans is that stop being too simplistic with the world view, because others also are reading and having a take and an opinion in their life and what concerns them.
Greg,
You are correct on the incorrect use of Afrikaners, which applies to whites in South Africa of European descent who speak Afrikaans. We should have said Africans. Thanks for pointing out the error.
As far as the reference to Africa as the “Dark Continent,“ there are many who think it still applies despite its archaic roots.
Though Africa is mapped, as you say, much of the continent still lacks electricity rendering it literally ‘dark’ at night and, I would argue, that because of the present conditions there, some of which you cite, there’s a metaphoric darkness that remains even as national boundaries have been defined. There are no “journalistic jollies” for us any rate.
Our point here is that China is continuing the history of exploitation that forever has shaped Africa. The West has played an enormous part in this, but also has engaged in some humanitarian efforts and has opposed—admittedly, primarily with words rather than real action—the horrific abuses of the African people.
China, meanwhile, has actively engaged in a policy of looking the other way while feeding corrupt governments the money to sustain their bloody rule.
None of this takes away from the valid points you make. As China is investing in Africa coveting natural resources, American corporations are investing in China coveting cheap labor. In the process, we are steadily losing our capacity to produce while helping a mortal enemy build wealth.
Undoubtedly, our failures have helped drive Africa’s willingness to welcome China. America and the West’s “positive support” is indeed badly tainted.
We share your hope that Obama will help ‘America win the hearts of African nations.‘ Whether that will or can translate to real action—his attention is likely to be elsewhere—is another question.
It is always a matter of concern when we have competition for natural resources that we need. This particular situation is largely self-inflicted. As our short-sighted CEO’s ship American jobs, American manufacturing technology and American dollars to the Chinese, they are also arming a potentially dominating enemy. The acquisition of natural resources is a logical first step for them to become a power that may replace the United States in short order.
I must say that the editorial’s comment about foreign workers taking jobs that AFRIKANERS covet indicates to me that you don’t know who the afrikaners are.
While anachronistic terms like “the Dark Continent” may give you journalistic jollies, it has lost its meaning since Africa has been fully mapped for so many years.
In addition to our funding of China, our failure to maintain the moral high-ground with respect to Africa is likely to make that continent much more likely to seek another suitor. Staying silent in the face of genocide, refusing to allow impoverished nations to manufacture generic AIDS drugs at a more realistic price for the patients, and other shortfalls taint all of the positive American support of African nations.
We need to be more aware of the image that we engender in such areas of the world. Electing President Obama is a fantastic first step, and I expect many more to come. In the end, America may yet win the hearts of African nations and those in many other parts of the world.
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