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Why the west fears China in Africa

We still like to see ourselves as saviours, and anxiety about Chinese investment is bound up with the politics of aid

• 
• • Peter Guest
  • guardian.co.uk, Thursday 5 November 2009 14.30 GMT
  • Article history

The reasons why China invests in Africa have been much discussed, and while there have been some very coherent and nuanced explanations given on these pages and elsewhere, the prevailing sentiment still seems to be one of unbridled fear. Likewise, we are engaged in a post Dead Aid discussion about the efficacy of western aid.

As Rwandan president Paul Kagame's article on Cif demonstrated, the two are not discrete issues. However, the public discussions on both have been alarmingly one-dimensional and highlight and a surprisingly retrograde notion of both Africa's self-determination and what constitutes influence in 21st-century global politics.

There have been valid criticisms of the way that China has invested in Africa, notably in terms of the import of labour in the early days. (Arms, too, but China is far from alone in supplying questionable regimes, to put it mildly). However, to think that China is a monolith is naive. China's models have been in flux since the new wave of investment began at the start of this century and Beijing is surprisingly sensitive to criticism. The rate at which China has evolved domestically is testament to its ability to learn.

There is a more persistent theme to the debate, though, which I think says more about us than any other. Does China's investment undermine human rights? Does China, with its record on curtailing freedom, transfer its values to the African states that it invests in? Does it have a pernicious influence that will tear Africa away from western values? Is China building a "Beijing consensus" to displace Washington?

I am not even convinced that the US, barring a few cold warriors, sees this element of danger. The last administration saw threats everywhere, but the Bush-era assistant secretary of state for Africa, Jendayi Frazer, rightly scolded me a few months ago for using the word "influence" when talking about the interplay of the international actors on the continent.

International relationships in the 21st century are not exclusive, and neither is there the cold war expectation that countries align to a dominant power then act at their beck and call – if that was ever a true paradigm. The US has been the biggest single investor and the biggest trade partner to the continent for decades. Why did this not translate into "influence"? The US has asked for African nations' support on the UN security council as recently as 2003. China's most persistent campaign for a say in Africa centred on its desire to get on to the security council in place of Taiwan. This was achieved in 1971, well before Beijing amassed its giant surplus of dollars.

And yet the fear seems to be durable. Why? Because it stands in stark contrast to the relationship we think we think we are supposed to have with Africa. We cannot separate this debate on China from the parallel one on aid and aid effectiveness. If anything is about influence, it is aid, and nowhere is this demonstrated better than Brussels.

I have just come back from European Development Days in Stockholm, the EU's annual aid community get-together. Here you can get to see what next year's fashion in development will be, and meet with the new donors on the scene. There were sizeable displays from the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovenia, for example, who have recently begun to operate national development agencies.

Accession countries do not give aid entirely for altruistic reasons, nor do they do so simply because they have bought into the global self-interest. They do it with at least one eye on Brussels, and probably both. Aid gives a disproportionate amount of influence – not in Africa, but in Europe. Aid gets you a seat at the table within the UN. Aid is not designed to be efficient, it is designed to be influential. This is why our own development agency, the Department for International Development, has been so committed to European multilateralism.

It is thus inevitable that there are hypocrisies. That is why subsidies – particularly in agriculture – destroy what aid builds and why donor cash is used for elaborate ceilings in Geneva. It is why vast amounts of money are spent on the proliferation of isolated projects that have little or no system-wide impact on poverty alleviation.

I am not a believer in Dambisa Moyo's thesis that aid is dead, but I feel we need to inject more realism into what we expect of it. Distilling the debate to "aid is bad, China is good" or vice versa, and not examining the complexities and the nuances of the two interlocking themes will leave us in a weak position to adjust to the new global paradigm. We still like to see ourselves as the saviours, and African nations as places dangerously liable to fall under the sway of seductive foreign powers. This is patronising at best.

As President Kagame has said, Africa is not a marginal player squeezed between two great giants. The cold war is over and the new world, while it might seem bipolar, is not. Africa – the whole developing world, in fact – is building relationships with a multitude of partners, some who subscribe to our values and some who do not. We are only ever going to be one of them, and unless we understand the full context and the interrelation of all of these factors, we are going to be a partner of waning relevance. If that happens, we have no right to begrudge anyone for stepping into the vacuum.