Demonising China: pundits get its role in Africa wrong

China is presented in the discourse as “indifferent to Africa’s authoritarian despots, as it courts the continent for energy and minerals,” as a leading British journalist put it. But the US and France support most despots in Africa, providing them with military assistance and legitimacy. The West is also implicated in the trade in money and trade in people.

Some 40 per cent of Africa’s private wealth has been sent overseas (Martin Meredith, “The Fate of Africa: a Survey of Fifty Years of Independence,” Washington Post, January 20, 2006), much of it to banks that trade interest and secrecy for these funds. London and Zurich, not Beijing, receive these fruits of capital flight and tax evasion. Western states trade their citizenship for the skills of hundreds of thousands of African professionals, especially doctors and nurses who have trained in, but are now lost to Africa. China has trained tens of thousands of Africans to be doctors, engineers, agricultural specialists, etc. and they generally return to Africa (“China has Education Cooperation with 50 Countries,” Business Daily Update, November 28, 2005).

The China-in-Africa discourse lacks a comparative approach and reflects Western elites’ perception of their national interests and moral superiority. Its proponents fail to question Western government rhetoric about “aiding African development” and “promoting African democracy”. At the same time, they seize on any example of supposed exploitation by Chinese in Africa.

Many Africans - and some Westerners - question the binary view of a new Western “civilising mission” versus the actions of “amoral” Chinese who don’t fully practice neo-liberalism by, for example, conditioning loans to African states on reduced spending on social services. They are increasingly rejecting a discourse that draws attention away from Africa’s systemic problems of exploitation and human rights and toward blaming Chinese, not for what they actually do in Africa, but for being the newly-perceived strategic competitor of the West.