China's African safari strictly business
By Kent Ewing
HONG KONG - Read China's state media and you will learn that, thanks to
projects financed by Chinese companies and the central government, Africa is
booming while the continent's political leaders trip over one another to
express their appreciation for Beijing's helping hand. And it's all true.
Bridges, dams, roads, railroads and airports are rapidly multiplying. Oil
refineries and zinc, copper and cobalt mines are going at full tilt. Beijing is
even catering to Africa's favorite sport as Chinese-designed and Chinese-built
football stadia sprout up across the continent.
By all accounts, it's an impressive tally. No wonder praise for
China in the state houses and parliaments of Africa is also a boom industry
these days. Gross domestic product (GDP) in many African nations is on the
rise, with China playing a big role in spurring this growth. But these
impressive GDP figures come with a nagging and potentially explosive problem
that African leaders are loath to acknowledge: the economic benefits of China's
huge push into Africa are not trickling down to the more than one billion
people who live on the continent. And rank-and-file Africans are not echoing
the praise that African leaders have been heaping on Beijing. Perversely, as
Chinese investment grows in Africa, so does resentment of the Chinese.
Indeed, China's ventures into Africa are proving as self-serving and
exploitative as anything perpetrated by Europeans during Africa's colonial
period. But there is also a big difference that is much appreciated by the
continent's political elite.
The Europeans brought with them a hypocritical moral justification for their
greed, famously captured in Rudyard Kipling's poem "The White Man's Burden".
Written after the United States had joined the colonial party by taking over
the Philippines through the Treaty of Paris in 1898, the poem exhorts Europeans
and their descendants to perform their moral duty - despite the sullen
resistance and benighted ignorance that they should expect to encounter - to
civilize the darker races of the world:
Take up the White Man's burden
Send forth the best ye breed
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild
Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.
No 21st-century Western poet worth his salt would dare write such a racist
rant. That said, however, the condescending conditions attached to Western aid
often read like bureaucratic paeans to democracy and clean governance that, in
the eyes of leaders in the developing world, continue to presume the
superiority of Western institutions and to treat the people of their nations as
second-class citizens.
What African elites like about Chinese neo-colonialism is that it comes without
any moral imperatives. There are no demands for democracy, no harangues against
corruption. Indeed, Beijing's Africa policy is, by design, completely devoid of
politics. It's a business plan that sees management as Chinese, Africans as
unskilled labor and the continent's vast resources as fire and fuel for China's
economic juggernaut.
The Chinese leadership characterizes this policy as a principled stance of
"non-intervention" in African affairs. Critics see it as a free ride for
African leaders who rake in Chinese money and claim credit for Chinese-built
infrastructure with no strings attached. Meanwhile, in return, those grateful
leaders have supplied Beijing with shipments of timber, coal, copper and oil
that have kept the Chinese economy churning - even during the 2008 economic
downturn from which Western nations are still struggling to recover - and made
China Africa's second-largest trading partner, behind the United States.
Chinese-African trade rose a stunning 700% from 2002 to 2007, to US$73 billion,
as Beijing cozied up with some of the most odious dictators on the planet,
including President Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and Sudan's President Omar
al-Bashir, who is currently the subject of an arrest warrant issued by the
International Criminal Court for his part in alleged genocide in the Darfur
region of his country. As of 2007, China was purchasing 40% of Sudan's
25-million-ton annual oil output, which amounted to 6% of all Chinese oil
imports. Some of the billions of petrodollars Beijing is investing in Sudan may
very well be paying for arms purchases that contribute to the alleged
atrocities in Darfur.
China has never been morally choosy about its African friends, but before its
recent capitalist thrust into Africa, those friends were chosen and aid (albeit
much less of it) dished out based on the Cold War litmus test of whether they
at least pretended to embrace the Communist ideology of Mao Zedong, not by
their potential for exploitation and economic gain.
Now, however, that exploitation has become so widespread and rank that the
African people are turning against the increasing influence and presence of the
Chinese on their continent. Reports of disgruntled Africans working on Chinese
projects for what amounts to a slave's wage have come to epitomize Sino-African
relations as much as any sparkling new infrastructure.
There was a particularly ugly reminder of this last month in the southern town
of Sinazongwe in Zambia, where Chinese managers of the Collum Coal Mine fired
on workers protesting against their dismal pay conditions. In the ensuing
mayhem, 11 Zambians were wounded; three Chinese employees were also injured.
Two Chinese managers of the mine, Xiao Li Shan and Wu Jiu Hua, have been
charged with attempted murder and released on bail of $10,000 as an
investigation into the shooting continues.
Understandably, the Collum shooting has fed rising resentment against the
Chinese among Zambians, provoking an angry reaction. Reading the ugly mood,
Zambian President Rupiah Banda correctly appealed for calm in his country, but
his words were ill-chosen.
"Let's be careful that we do not single out people," the president said. "Every
day people are shot at by Zambians, whites, Americans. This business of
'Chinese, Chinese', we should not create a phobia against people."
Then again, those words were spoken by the president of a poor country whose
mining industry is humming thanks to the more than $400 million China has
pumped into it.
The violence in Sinazongwe was not the first such incident at a Chinese-run
Zambian mine. In 2007, labor unrest at a copper mine run by China No. 15
Metallurgical Construction Company also culminated in a shooting. This time,
one worker was killed and, to avoid embarrassment, Chinese President Hu Jintao
was forced to cancel a visit to Zambia's copper belt.
Miners in Zambia are paid as little as 555,000 kwachas ($115) a month to work
and live in often scandalously deprived conditions. While not all Chinese-run
mines are guilty of such heartless exploitation, wretched wages and conditions
are widespread. And the theme recurs across the continent.
In Mozambique's capital of Maputo, according to a recent report in the South
China Morning Post, African laborers building a 40,000-seat football stadium
earn $150 or less a month from their Chinese employer, while Chinese workers on
the same site pocket a minimum of $850 and live in comfortable dormitories in
which they dine on Chinese food three times a day, watch TV, surf the Internet
and enjoy health insurance not given to their African counterparts.
Mozambican employees of the Chinese firm, which is involved in infrastructure
projects all over Africa, have twice gone on strike for better wages and
working conditions, with the last one ending in violence in April when police
fired into a rioting crowd, wounding two people.
In the same Post report, African construction workers in the Sudanese capital
of Khartoum complained of earning only 10% of what their fellow Chinese workers
made.
A $9 billion joint venture between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and a
consortium of Chinese companies has been dubbed the "roads-for-minerals" pact.
In exchange for infrastructure projects in the African country, Chinese
companies have virtually taken over mineral-rich Katanga Province; more than
90% of the province's minerals now go to China. Meanwhile, African workers in
Congolese mines get the same raw deal as their comrades in Zambia.
The Western model for engagement with Africa is a proven failure; so far, the
Chinese one looks no better.
Kent Ewing is a Hong Kong-based teacher and writer. He can be reached at
kewing@netvigator.com
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