China Programme • Volume 10 • Number 7 • November 2006
The New China–Africa Partnership
Chinese and African leaders have sealed a deal that is to vastly expand China’s aid, trade and investment in the resource-rich but cash-poor continent.
At a China-Africa summit held in November, China’s President Hu Jintao promised to double Beijing’s current level of development assistance to African countries by 2009. He also pledged US$5 billion in concessional loans and credits over the same period along with a further US$5 billion to set up a fund that will encourage Chinese businesses to invest in Africa. By some accounts China is already a bigger lender to the continent than either the US or the World Bank.
In addition, President Hu announced new debt cancellation initiatives and the extension of duty-free market access to more products from Africa’s least-developed countries, and unveiled plans to train 15,000 African professionals, as well as pledged increased support to regional efforts to combat malaria and promote economic integration.
Trade Flows to Double
Summit participants adopted a declaration, proclaiming the establishment of a ‘new type of strategic partnership’ between China and Africa and calling for enhanced “South-South cooperation and North-South dialogue to promote balanced, co-ordinated and sustainable development of the global economy.” The document urged rich countries to boost foreign aid spending, honour commitments to open markets and expand debt relief in order to help African countries reduce poverty, control desertification, and achieve the UN Millennium Development Goals. Chinese and African governments committed to doubling the volume of two-way trade to US$100 billion by 2010. The US$50 billion in trade projected for this year already represents a near-fivefold increase from five years ago.
Much of the growth in the China-Africa trade and investment relationship is driven by China’s drive to secure access to commodities, and oil in particular. One third of China’s oil imports come from Africa, primarily from Sudan and Nigeria. In recent years, Chinese companies – many of them state-owned or -affiliated – have vastly increased their operations in the continent.
Investment, Aid and Human Rights
The Beijing Declaration states explicitly that “the politicisation of human rights and the imposition of human rights conditionalities on economic assistance should be vigorously opposed to as they constitute a violation of human rights.” In this spirit, China’s African loan and investment contracts contain no human rights, good governance or environmental clauses. Civil society organisations have charged that such ‘no-strings-attached’ loans help bolster governments guilty of serious human rights violations. Even World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz recently warned that Chinese lenders risked repeating Western banks’ history of granting loans to support damaging behaviour by corrupt regimes. Citing the principle of non-interference in other countries’ domestic affairs, China vigorously rejects these claims.
African leaders warmly welcomed the prospect of more Chinese aid, trade and investment, which they said would help reduce the continent’s dependence on Western donors and markets. André Habimana, a senior official at Rwanda’s Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning, called China’s non-conditional approach to development aid a ‘breath of fresh air’ that would relieve some of the pressure exerted by ‘conditional-based donors’.
Nevertheless, local resistance is on the rise in some countries. Earlier this fall, riots broke out in Zambia, where miners protested against poor working conditions in Chinese-owned copper mines, and textiles traders complained that Chinese retailers had harmed their businesses by selling cheap imported garments in traditionally Zambian-dominated open markets. There is also concern over Chinese companies’ practice of bringing the bulk of their labour force from China to the detriment of employment opportunities for nationals of the host country.