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China’s no-strings investment benefits Africa
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Editor’s note: This is the second and final part of a Xinhua report on China-African friendship.
In 2009, China became Africa’s largest trading partner. China-Africa trade reached US$198.5 billion in 2012. From 2000 to 2012, China-Africa trade volume, as a proportion of Africa’s total foreign trade, increased from 3.82 percent to 16.13 percent.
Meanwhile, cumulative Chinese foreign direct investment in Africa now amounts to US$21 billion, while loans-backed contract projects completed by Chinese firms in 2012 amounted to US$40.8 billion.
A cigarette and match factory on the outskirts of the Guinean capital, Conakry, in West Africa, is China’s first aid project on the continent. Guinea was the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to establish diplomatic ties with China in 1959. Chinese loans in the 1960s also helped build an oil-pressing factory, a cinema and a People’s Palace in the capital. This year, Chinese businesses signed contracts worth billions of dollars in the bauxite-rich country.
China Power Investment Corp pledged to invest US$6 billion in the coming few years to develop a bauxite mine and refinery and build a power station and a port, while Dreal Group inked a deal for US$8 billion over 10 years to build business offices and residential housing in Conakry.
Guinean President Alpha Conde expressed hope the projects would become the new symbol of sound China-Guinean cooperation and help Guinea stride toward urbanization.
In land-locked and resource-scarce Rwanda, an east African country roughly the size of Beijing, bulldozers manned by Chinese construction workers are common sights along new roads the capital, Kigali. The Chinese are also building a five-star hotel downtown as well as a government complex to house at least eight ministries.
“Western nations are being short-sighted by not investing more in Rwanda, but China took proactive steps to increase its support to national infrastructure projects and the local population is increasingly taking advantage of these innovations,” said Omar Halfani, a political science lecturer at the University of Rwanda.
“They (Western nations) criticize Chinese investment when, in fact, they wish they could be doing what China is doing on the continent,” Halfani said.
Old friends
Bordering Rwanda, Tanzania is one of China’s oldest partners in Africa. In the 1970s, China sent 50,000 workers, one million tons of equipment and materials to construct the 1,860-km Tanzanian-Zambian Railway, linking Dar es Salaam in Tanzania with Kapri Mposhi in Zambia. The railway has dwarfed other Chinese projects in Africa for decades.
In March this year, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited three African states — Tanzania, South Africa and the Republic of Congo — on his maiden overseas tour, only weeks after assuming leadership. Dar es Salaam was the frist stop on his Africa visit.
In a recent interview, Tanzanian Prime Minister Mizengo Pinda said Xi’s visit had made a difference in this year’s China-Africa engagement. “China decided to direct its funds to areas which have quick results for the purpose of bringing about development. I think this is a major shift,” Pinda said.
Infrastructure, energy, social services and agriculture were sectors identified to receive Chinese investment, the prime minister said, and the most significant project was construction of a gas pipeline from Mtwala to Dar es Salaam, expected to fuel industry.
In Republic of Congo, a US$3 billion deal was signed to construct a road linking the capital of Brazzaville to the port city of Pointe-Noire on the Atlantic. When completed in 2015, the road would benefit both Brazzaville and the Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the heart of central Africa.
By stopping in Africa on his maiden overseas trip, the new Chinese leader showed China cherished its traditional friendship with Africa, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said.
He said China would keep every commitment it had made to Africa, and would attach no political strings, so African nations could translate their advantages in natural resources into advantages in development, achieving diversified, independent and sustainable development.
Lansana Camara, a political analyst based in Conakry, said Chinese companies in Guinea filled a vacuum left by Western global mining firms, thus sustaining the pillar economic sector and saving many jobs.
Professor Deborah Brautigam of Johns Hopkins University said in her book, “Dragon’s Gift,” that, while “the West regularly changes its development advice, programs, and approach in Africa ... China does not claim to know what Africa must do to develop... (and argues that) countries should be free to find their own pathway out of poverty.”
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