Upon any discussion – or accusation at that – that the copious amounts of money China is investing in Africa equates to a form of colonisation, a charge in which Beijing vehemently refutes, it is important to note a few things. Firstly, we must be certain in what we mean by colonisation. It’s easy to conflate the power asymmetry in Sino-African relations and China’s sweeping economic and political reach within the continent as a form of colonisation. Indeed, this narrative is finding increasingly fertile ground as Sino-phobia takes root in the West. To be sure, a definition must be drawn and the dealings of Chinese activities be applied. The depth of the methodology – one that would require an exhaustive analysis of $229 billion in investments and contracts since 2005 – obviously falls outside the confines of this work here . Instead, an abridged version is hopefully given. Secondly, it’s cogent to recognize that the China-Africa relationship is fluid, dynamic and multifarious. To encapsulate the myriad of Chinese economic engagement in a continent as vast as Africa in binary form (colonial or non-colonial) is absurd and misses all nuance. Instead, and in jest of some academic prudence, I suggest an alternative which extends its parameters and provides more refined analysis.
Definitions on colonisation tend to centre around the process of settling among and establishing control over indigenous people and their land. Implicit in this process is the formalizing of a rigid power hierarchy between the colonizerand the colonized which creates opportune conditions to exploit and subjugate the domain. China hasn’t - and looks unlikely to - colonize Africa in the traditional sense. Rather, China has been labelled the new face of neocolonialism by mainly Western critics. Neocolonialism is a varying form of colonizing whereby the tools for dominance or influence over the subordinate state isn’t mustered from military might – as usually the case with colonialism – but from other indirect means. Chief amongst this is through economic dependence: A nation overly reliant on a single market renders its sovereignty obsolete to the whims and demands of the dominant state. What proves tricky is demonstrating that the dominant party’s intent to impose their agenda upon their subordinate partner is real and coordinated. Turning back to the discussion at hand, the focus becomes clearer. Has China made a concerted effort to exert their political will by leveraging or creating economic dependence upon African economies?
It’s worth mentioning here what exactly is meant by economic dependence as this will provide the framework to gauge China’s engagement in Africa. The dependency theory is the theoretical backbone to economic neocolonialism. It proposes that the global economic system comprises of wealthy countries at the center with poor countries at the periphery. Economic neocolonialism is the process whereby human and natural resources of a poor country is extracted for the economies of the wealthy countries, in our case China. Over time, blame assigned to these agents of exploitation has routinely changed and alternated between states, banks, or multinationals but the result is the same: Underdevelopment is a function of dependence and dependence is a tool of colonialism. Although the Dependency Theory has largely become discredited by free-market economists – who point to the growth of India and other East Asian economies that transitioned from state controlled to open trade – the crux remains pertinent for this essay: Exploitive economic policy can thrust dependence upon an underdeveloped state which in turn cultivates political submissiveness to its master.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Ethiopian Foreign Minister Workneh Gebeyehu speak during a joint press conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on Jan. 3, 2019, (Michael Tewelde/AFP/Getty Images)
How is China perceived in doing this? Most plainly, through “debt-trap diplomacy", which has become a buzz word in denouncing China's methods in diplomacy. It involves one the creditor country deliberately providing excessive credit to another debtor country with the alleged intention of obtaining economic or political concessions from the debtor should/when it defaults on its debt obligations often with strategic assets as collateral. This brings forth the neocolonial characteristics of inducing economic dependency – by way of debt – for political or strategic gain.
A brief overview of Africa’s debt situation quickly illuminates critics’ concerns. 20 percent of African government external debt is owed to China and 17 percent of African government external interest payments are made to China. According to the World Bank, at the end of 2016, African governments owed $130 billion of debt to other governments (also called bilateral debt), which amounts to 32 percent of all external debt (a further 32 percent is owed to private sector and 36 percent to multilateral institutions like the World Bank). China is owed 80 percent of that bilateral debt or 25 percent of all external debt (some $104 billion). There are factors in the methodology and other variables that suggests that this number is slightly exaggerated. But the impression remains: Africa is in Beijing’s firm grasp. It’s worth mentioning that the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in September 2018 announced a target of $60 billion in aid, investment and loans to Africa, the same amount as at the 2015 summit. This means that future lending is therefore likely to continue at a similar trend for the next two years as observed between 2015-2017. This $60 billion was pledged by President Xi to have supposedly “no strings attached”.
The task shifts now in determining whether this debt straddles African economies to Beijing’s sphere of influence and whether predatory economic tactics are utilized by China to systematically orchestrate this – sure displays of neocolonialism. Outlined below are the two countervailing arguments made by China critics who agree to the charges above and China’s sympathizers and other observers who flatly refute it. Lastly, the African perspective is offered, which sheds insight to how they judge the Sino-African cooperation and perhaps best adjudicates the debate at hand. Surely if China were a neo-colonial power then the African people – whose progress has been terribly mired by colonialism – would disprove of the working relationship.
The basic argument made by Western critics on China’s method for development on the continent can be roughly summarised by former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton: “China uses bribes, opaque agreements, and the strategic use of debt to hold states in Africa captive to Beijing’s wishes and demands”. Academics and commentators who see China’s involvement in this light have generally resorted to dress their critique in terms like “power asymmetry”, “soft power” and “debt-trap diplomacy”, which is nearly always referenced alongside the Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka. Some scholars, such as Langan in Emerging Powers and Neo-Colonialism in Africa, perceive China to have used trade to “co-opt African elites and governments into abiding and advancing Chinese mercantilist interests and for the protection of Chinese businesses at the expense of African people’s social and environmental concerns”. A look at Zambia under the presidency of Michael Sata offers a case in point. After winning the 2011 presidential elections on a campaign deriding Chinese businesses as neo-colonialists and promising to enforce tougher regulations on trade practices, Sata was proven powerless in the face of powerful Chinese lobbying that threatened to shut down crucial economic operations. Sata backed down and shelved the major reforms he campaigned on. It was – rather neatly – a clear demonstration of how corrosive economic dependence can be on state sovereignty.
Another angle that critics have taken is by drawing parallels between the wider costs of Chinese sponsored development and the conditions endured under European colonialism in the 20thcentury. One academic, Balasubramanyam, sees the interplay between trade, investment, and aid all facilitating exports for raw materials to China as “resembling” the extractive and exploitive colonial systems of the Old European empires . The fusing of Chinese economic pragmatism with an indifference to local welfare and an affinity to the political elite conjure similar descriptions of colonial settings.
What transpired in Guinea over 2017 and 2018 is revealing in understanding Balasubramanyam’s sentiment. Guinea’s bauxite reserves – one of the largest in the world – secured enough interest from China to land the country a loan double the size of its GDP (Kleven, 2019). Mining projects have since commenced in Guinea’s Bokè prefecture under the auspices of Aluminum Corporation of China Limited (Chalco) and another Chinese manufacturing company TBEA Co Ltd (Kleven, 2019). At a second site, CDM Henan China has also began excavating. In 2018, SMB-Winning Consortium pledged $3 billion for infrastructure and smelter projects in Boké and less than a year later another Chinese aluminum corporation, Zibo Rundi, won a 25-year mining concession containing 1 billion tonnes of bauxite (Kleven, 2019).
However, for all the investment spilling into Guinea’s booming bauxite industry, little trickles down to the local population. In what now seems jarringly out of touch or crudely insensitive, Guinea Budget Minister Ishmael Dioubaté lauded the growing investment in his country’s mining sector by recognising the potential benefits for his people, just months after workers had been on a two-week protest over the arrest of a union leader. A year prior, riots had broken out over health and environmental issues before being brutally suppressed by government forces (Kleven, 2019). The inequity of the situation in Boké – where there’s a drastic wealth discrepancy between the poor local population and the mining companies working there, and which is only exacerbated by the transferal of wealth to outside the country – pointedly illustrates the resemblance Balasubramanyam refers to.
Conversely, the proponents that quash accusations of Chinese “creditor imperialism” or economic neocolonialism in Africa dismiss such examples listed above as isolated and unrepresentative. Their basic argument acknowledges that public debt rising in Africa and China is centre to it, but sees little evidence of a pattern implicating Chinese banks, at Beijing's command, deliberately over-lending or funding loss-making projects to gain strategic advantages for China. Furthermore, the accusations as touted by Bolton amongst others, are often “overstated and mischaracterized”.
The purportedly tight grip Beijing has on Africa over its public debt is one such example. The International Monetary Fund estimates that as of late January some 17 low-income African countries already were, or were at risk of, “debt distress,” or of experiencing difficulties in servicing their public debt. In some of the 17 countries the I.M.F identified as vulnerable, China was the single-largest creditor. However, non-Chinese lenders still held the majority of the debt and only in Djibouti, the Republic of Congo and Zambia did Chinese loans account for half or more of the country’s public debt. In other words, China doesn’t command the pervasive hold in African country’s debt – which can wrench political sway – than what critics would have you think. It also dispels fears that the Chinese government is wittingly preying on countries in need – a definite telltale sign of economic neocolonialism – as unguided.
Instead, an alternative depiction of Chinese activity in Africa – which deviates from the binary colonial or non-colonial format – is offered by Chinese foreign policy expert Mark Akpaninyie. Akpaninyie perceives China’s debt diplomacy is in fact a misnomer and should instead by labeled as “Crony Diplomacy”. He sees the ambitions of Beijing not as expansionary or colonial-like but instead as purely Machiavellian:
“Instead of a state-lead strategy, Chinese firms – motivated by profit and abetted by a toxic combination of bureaucratic disorganization, incompetency, and negligence at the state level – have exploited poor nations, which are dependent on cheap, and sometimes bad, loans.”
Furthermore, the practice doesn’t ensnare debtor countries into entering unsustainable debt – a symptom of neocolonialism – but rather “allows Chinese companies to profit from often crooked deals building much-needed infrastructure in some of the world’s poorest countries, exploiting the undersupply of financing and these countries appetite for infrastructure projects” . It’s a countering argument that above all else, refutes the idea that China’s activity in Africa is confined to a binary form (colonial or non-colonial) and introduces the third prospective: economic opportunism.
What may prove the most enlightening input is the opinion of those affected. Although the Sino-phobic narrative is loudly trumpeted in the West, Africa largely eschews from such criticism. Though carefully astute to the considerable shortcomings of China as an economic partner – from mercantilist trade practices and heavy debt burdens to indifference to human rights and labour welfare right through to environmental concerns – Africans generally see this as a small, if regrettable, price to pay. The South African President Cyril Ramaphosa perhaps seals the conviction of the African stance by declaring Africa “refutes the view that a new colonialism is taking hold in Africa as our detractors would have us believe”. It would make for an interesting case whether shared African consensus – amongst leaders and civilians – on the legitimacy and propriety of China’s economic practices implicitly refutes the possibility that its colonial in nature.
In the shifting currents of international relations, Chinese investment in Africa has morphed into a globally partisan matter whereby objective analysis has been subverted by geostrategic biases. Though the African viewpoint is perhaps the only truly relevant voice on the matter - and their support for the investment is revealing on the very nature of Chinese investment - it doesn't allay all concerns. Flaws in Chinese lending practises persist that promulgate, if erroneously, Western notions of its predatory practises. Chief amongst these are: Chinese banks too heavily dependent on Chinese construction companies to source and build projects and deals are often struck without any open tenders, leaving opportunities for cronyism, and providing credence to allegations that projects are overpriced. In dismantling the Western narrative and dispelling all notions of colonial ambitions, Beijing will need to take steps at reforming their lending regulations and placing a greater emphasis on contract transparency. This, it seems, will have to be at the insistence of African governance considering how opaque China's own economic system is. It appears that the illusions of Beijing's debt-trap diplomacy aren't at the coercive hands of the Chinese but are the cumulative results of poorly negotiated loans by African governments and ill-thought-out projects.
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