The ugly face of China's presence in Africa
By Victor Mallet
September 14, 2006
The Financial Times
Original Source: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2bc332bc-438e-11db-9574-0000779e2340.html

In the 1960s, we had the ugly American. The catchphrase started life as a popular political novel in 1958, became a film starring Marlon Brando and captured the perception that an arrogant and culturally insensitive US was blundering around south-east Asia and losing popularity to its cold-war communist rivals.
In the 1980s, it was the turn of the Japanese to be accused of neo-imperialism. The criticism culminated in a book by Friedemann Bartu attacking Japan's post-war stranglehold on Asian economies. Its title was The Ugly Japanese: Nippon's economic empire in Asia.
It is now only a matter of time before people complain about the ugly Chinese. Beijing is a rising power. Its relentless pursuit of natural resources and political influence is raising hackles not only in enfeebled Asian states such as Burma and Laos but as far away as Africa, where it is accused of conniving with genocide in Sudan and supporting dictatorship in Zimbabwe. For good or ill, Africa is again a place where the superpowers compete. The speed with which China has staked its claim to Africa's riches - including oil, timber and the continent's 54 votes at the United Nations - has startled Beijing's rivals in the US and Europe. After a false start in the 1970s, when bemused Africans watched Chinese labourers poorer than themselves toiling at ideologically driven projects such as the Tanzania-Zambia railway, the Chinese are back in force.
There is much that is good about Chinese involvement. The raw capitalism used by China's nominally communist leaders to drag their country out of poverty is seen as a model for struggling African economies. Chinese traders invest and take risks in difficult African markets such as Sierra Leone that have long been shunned by westerners. Two-way trade between Africa and China is growing fast and is likely to exceed $40bn this year, up from less than $1bn at the start of the decade.
For African governments, China is a new source of investment and low-priced consumer goods and a useful counterweight to the US and Europe. Last December, Africa's first Confucius Institute, an educational and cultural centre equivalent toa British Council office or anAlliance Française, opened in Nairobi.
Better still, Beijing claims to attach no inconvenient political, environmental or social conditions to the money it hands over. Anyone who looks back over the past century and a half at the behaviour of the European colonial powers - and the Americans and the Soviets during the cold war - can see the absurdity of heaping blame only on China for behaving callously in Africa.
China, however, should now brace itself for outbreaks of hostility from within some of its African client states. It is, after all, behaving like an old-fashioned colonial power, employing cheap labour - sometimes imported from China - to extract natural resources for its own use and selling manufactured goods whose very competitiveness undermines local producers. Nigerians and South Africans in particular are upset by the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs in the textile industry.
Perhaps inefficient African manufacturers have no future anyway. A more serious complaint about China is that by shunning western (and African) attempts to link aid and investment to human rights, environmental safeguards and the promotion of transparency in the oil business it is condoning abuses and corruption across the continent.
The fact that China imports 7 per cent of its oil from Sudan does not excuse the sale of arms to Khartoum. Nor does it justify the use of China's United Nations Security Council veto to protect from sanctions an Islamic regime overseeing the mass murder of black Africans in Darfur. In Angola, where China is the largest oil customer after the US, a $2bn Chinese loan relieved the notoriously corrupt Luanda government of the need to improve transparency in the oil sector in order to secure funds from other donors.
This was a triumph for those who divert Angolan oil revenues for their own ends while keeping the country poor. But China needs to be reminded that the delight among African leaders, especially dictators, about unconditional Chinese aid is not always shared by ordinary Africans.
Even the rhetoric about conditionality and non-interference by China in the affairs of sovereign states is nonsense. The conditions imposed are simply different from those of western governments, as Zambians discovered this month. China's ambassador, angered by a presidential candidate's courting of Taiwan and his criticism of conditions at a Chinese-owned mine, threatened a suspension of Chinese investment in mining, construction and tourism.
The Chinese are still popular in much of Africa. Yet Beijing's support for some of the continent's most unsavoury regimes suggests that its Africa policy, although advertised as neutral and business-friendly, is becoming at least as grasping and immoral as those of other foreign powers in the post-colonial era.
Unless it injects some responsibility into its dealings with Africa, China will not be hailed, as President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe hopes, for establishing a new global paradigm. Instead, it will be remembered as an ally of rogue states, a pillager of tropical forests and a friend of murderers and tyrants. In that case, the epithet ugly would be well deserved.