Elizabeth Schmidt, Empires of Evil? Sidecar

China’s growing presence in Africa has captured the world’s attention. As its trade deals and investments dwarf those of the West, policymakers in the United States and the European Union are sounding the alarm: Beijing, they say, is exploiting the continent’s resources, threatening its jobs, and propping up its dictators, while sidelining political or environmental considerations. African civil society organizations are making many of the same criticisms, while pointing out that Western countries have long engaged in similar practices. In the English-language media, most assessments of China’s prospects are clouded by the rhetoric of the new Cold War, which portrays Xi Jinping as bent on world domination and calls on the forces of civilization to stop him. What would a more sober analysis look like? How should we understand Africa’s role in this hostile geopolitical matrix?

Chinese interests in Africa and Western concerns about Beijing’s influence are not new. To understand the current impasse, one must trace its history. In April 1955, representatives of 29 countries and territories from Asia and Africa met in Bandung, Indonesia, for a historic conference. They resolved to wrest autonomy from the capitalist core by promoting economic and cultural cooperation, as well as decolonization and national liberation, across the Global South. Subsequent Chinese engagement in Africa has been guided by this spirit of solidarity. From the early 1960s to the mid-1970s, China provided 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 workers' solidarity brigades to African countries that had rejected neocolonialism and been repulsed by the West.

In southern Africa, where white minorities persisted in the colonies and Portugal resisted demands for independence, Beijing provided the liberation movements in Mozambique and Rhodesia with military training, advisers, and weapons. When Western countries ignored Zambia's calls to effectively isolate the renegade regimes, China established the Tanzania Zambia Railway Authority, which built a railway line that would allow Zambia to export its copper through Tanzania rather than through white-ruled Rhodesia and South Africa. Throughout this period, Chinese policy was determined primarily by political imperatives, as the country sought allies in a global conjuncture shaped by the Cold War.

After the collapse of the USSR, China’s priorities shifted. 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 shift, Africa was no longer seen as an ideological testing ground, but as a source of raw materials and a market for Chinese products, ranging from clothing to cell phones and electronics to artificial intelligence systems. Political sympathy gave way to economic utility. African nations were valued according to their material and strategic importance to the CCP’s development plans.

In the first decade of the 21st century, China surpassed the United States 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, farmland, and materials for electronics and electric vehicles, China has spent billions of dollars on African infrastructure: building and renovating roads, railways, dams, bridges, ports, pipelines and refineries, power plants, water systems, and telecommunications networks. Chinese companies have also built hospitals and schools and invested in the garment and food processing industries, as well as agriculture, fisheries, commercial real estate, retail, and tourism. Recent investments have focused on communications technology and renewable energy.

Unlike Western powers and the international financial institutions they dominate, Beijing has not made political and economic restructuring a condition of its loans, investments, aid, or trade. While it has stipulated that public works contracts must be awarded to Chinese companies and that Chinese supplies must be used, these agreements have not required economic or political restructuring. Nor are they contingent on labor and environmental protections. While these policies are popular with African leaders, they are often contested by civil society organizations, who note that Chinese companies have driven African companies out of business and employed Chinese rather than local workers. When they do hire African labor, Chinese companies often force them to work in dangerous conditions for poverty wages. China’s infrastructure projects have also resulted in massive debts that have deepened Africa’s dependency, even though African countries still owe much more to the West. Even more damaging, Beijing gained its unfettered access to markets and resources by propping up corrupt elites, strengthening regimes that plundered their countries’ wealth, repressing political dissent, and launching wars against neighboring states. African leaders, in turn, provided China with much-needed diplomatic support at the United Nations and other international organizations.

For decades, China has opposed political and military interference in other countries’ internal affairs. But 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, a major oil partner, to accept an African Union-UN presence in Darfur; in 2013, it joined the UN peacekeeping mission in Mali, motivated by its interests in neighboring oil and uranium. and in 2015 she worked with Western powers and East African sub-regional organizations to mediate peace talks in South Sudan.

During this period, China initially refrained from military intervention in conflict zones, preferring to provide medical personnel and engineers. But this situation did not last long. China’s military presence was notable in UN peacekeeping missions in Burundi and the Central African Republic. The UN mission in Mali marked the first participation of Chinese combat forces in such an operation, alongside some 400 engineers, medical personnel, and police. Beijing also sent an infantry battalion of 700 armed peacekeepers to South Sudan in 2015. The following year, it contributed more military personnel to UN peacekeeping operations than any other permanent member of the Security Council.

The trend toward increased political and military engagement in Africa culminated in 2017, when China joined France, the United States, Italy, and Japan in establishing a military base in Djibouti: 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. It has allowed Beijing to resupply Chinese ships involved in UN anti-piracy operations and protect Chinese nationals living in the region. It has also helped monitor commercial traffic along China’s 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, which links countries from Oceania to the Mediterranean in a vast network of production and trade. This will help China secure its oil supplies, half of which come from the Middle East and transit through the Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait to the Gulf of Aden. Most of China's exports to Europe take the same route.

Although Washington denounces what it calls Chinese imperialism, its own military presence in Africa is far larger, consisting of 29 bases in resource-rich regions. The United States is committed to pushing back evil empires while boasting more than 750 bases in at least 80 countries, compared to China’s three. It has fought at least 15 foreign wars since 1980, with China joining only one, and the fiscal regimes it has imposed on African nations, based on privatization, deregulation, and fiscal restraint, have been ruinous. The American security establishment is now aiming to contain China’s rise by strengthening its military alliances, particularly with regimes that have benefited from Chinese investment. Yet 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 play their fighters off 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 peoples of the continent will not exercise true sovereignty. Today, the remains of Bandung are few and far between.

Read more: Giovanni Arrighi, “The African Crisis”, NLR 15.