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Letter from China: Growing Chinese trade with Africa a threat
November 17, 2006 12:43 PM
Copyright The International Herald Tribune
Howard W. French / The New York Times
Published: November 16, 2006
SHANGHAI: The traffic has returned to its normal sluggish pace in Beijing after a week of absolute gridlock, and the banners touting China’s eternal friendship with Africa - including an unfortunate one that showed Papua New Guineans in festive attire - have come down.
Outsiders should resist the urge to smirk at the event that caused all of the commotion, or to regard it with cynicism, though, as some have. The convocation of 41 African presidents and prime ministers to a high-level summit meeting should be seen for what it is: the consecration of a new era in relations between the world’s most populous nation and the fastest-growing major economy, and its second-largest continent, home to the greatest collection of failed states and underdeveloped nations anywhere.
The speed with which China has achieved its African breakthrough is nothing short of stunning. For the last four decades, it was France alone among global powers that paid consistent, high-level attention to Africa. French-African summits became fixed biannual rituals, a sort of geopolitical high mass, as they came to be called, meant to bolster France’s place in the world and to harness Africa’s economies to France’s.
Suddenly, even France’s ties to the continent, which date back centuries and include periods of slavery, conquest, colonization and what some have called neocolonization, look decidedly old hat.
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The new Chinese player on the block carries none of the historical baggage of its Western counterparts, and has been completely uninhibited in its new African embrace.
Having begun not long ago from a very small base, in the last year or so, China surpassed Britain as Africa’s third-largest trading partner, behind the United States and France. China may still be a developing country in some respects, but it has also recently zoomed past the World Bank as a lender to the continent, which should tell us something both about China’s ambition and Western generosity.
China’s leaders have not only summoned their African counterparts to Beijing. In recent years, they have also traveled to Africa with a frequency that leaves their Western counterparts in the dust. This year, in the space of six months, the Chinese president, prime minister and foreign minister all made multicountry visits to the continent.
The political classes in Africa resent few things more than the neglect of the outside world, and they have responded to China’s attention with great enthusiasm.
Just listening to the words of Olusegun Obasanjo, the president of Nigeria, the continent’s most populous nation, during the visit to his country last April by Hu Jintao gives one the flavor.
“From our assessment, this is the century of China to lead the world,” Obasanjo said. “And when you are leading the world we want to be very close behind you.”
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Posted at 12:43 PM
