China’s Influence in Africa Arouses Some Resistance - New York Times

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February 10, 2007 NEWS ANALYSIS

China’s Influence in Africa Arouses Some Resistance By MICHAEL WINES

JOHANNESBURG, Feb. 9 — China is often depicted as a juggernaut of sorts, its untroubled and unfettered rise into the ranks of global powers a fact that lesser nations can only watch with awe and trepidation. On Friday, President Hu Jintao of China completed a 12-day tour of Africa that suggested the reality was more nuanced. More than that, the visit tested a basic tenet of China’s economic relations: that business is business, and what a partner nation’s people think about it is not China’s — or the world’s — preoccupation. Mr. Hu swept through eight nations, among them some of China’s closest African allies, largest trading partners and most prominent objects of Chinese investment. He left behind a multibillion-dollar trail of forgiven debts, cheap new loans and pledges of schools and cultural centers, tokens of affection for a continent of strategic economic importance to Beijing’s future. Yet in Zambia, Mr. Hu was greeted with public disdain, and forced to cancel one appearance, even as he showered more than $800 million in gifts and investments on the nation, one of the world’s poorest. In Namibia, a decades-old ally, a newspaper and human rights activists assailed China’s foreign policy as selfish and lacking morality. In South Africa, a generally warm visit was clouded by President Thabo Mbeki’s recent warning that Africa risked becoming an economic colony of China, and by Johannesburg’s major newspaper, which devoted a full page this week to a scalding critique of China’s record on human rights and labor rights. Mr. Hu’s stop in Sudan, where China has extensive oil interests, reignited criticism that Beijing has helped shield its ally and oil supplier from global outrage over attacks on civilians in Darfur. Mr. Hu also met his share of flag-waving supporters, of course, and the official parts of his trip — the meetings and agreement-signings with heads of state — were a diplomatic and

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2/14/2007

China’s Influence in Africa Arouses Some Resistance - New York Times

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commercial success. Most African heads of state like China, which supported many of their liberation movements when liberation was not fashionable. And they like Mr. Hu, whose views on sovereignty, human rights and development are frequently closer to theirs than are those of Western governments. But an undercurrent of disquiet accompanied Mr. Hu’s barnstorming. Mostly, it came not from heads of state, but from the people they rule, some of whom resent China’s growing influence here — for economic, racial and ideological reasons. “It’s important to note the obstacles the Chinese are running into” in Africa, said Bates Gill, a leading China scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “It has a lot to do with their unfamiliarity with working in countries that have a vibrant private sector and civil society. These guys in the Chinese Embassy, they don’t understand that.” China is not yet an overwhelming presence in Africa. The juggernaut image aside, China imports less African oil, invests less money and spends less on aid than does the United States or Europe. As an African trading partner, China ranks third, behind the United States and France, and much of that trade is in oil purchased from Sudan, Angola and Nigeria, not in goods made by African workers. Unlike most other nations, however, China is frequently seen here as coveting Africa for its oil, gold and other valuable minerals and as a dumping ground for cheap Chinese goods — not for its people or talents. Mr. Mbeki said as much in December, warning in a speech that Africa’s relationship to China as an exporter of ore and oil and importer of finished goods threatened to become “a replication of that colonial relationship” between Europe and its African possessions a century ago. True or not, the perception has been telling. In Zimbabwe, Zambia and elsewhere in southern Africa, an influx of Chinese shopkeepers and street traders has pushed locals into bankruptcy. South African textile workers lost tens of thousands of jobs after the 2005 expiration of a global trade agreement allowed cheaper Chinese goods — including knockoffs of traditional African prints — to flood the country. Angry trade unions called for retaliatory boycotts of shops selling Chinese goods. Anti-Chinese sentiment has mushroomed in Zambia since 2005, when an explosion at a Chinese-owned copper mine killed at least 46 workers and spawned complaints of unsafe working conditions and poor environmental practices. In last year’s presidential election, the populist challenger to President Levy Mwanawasa based part of his campaign on a pledge to curb Chinese influence in the country.

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China’s Influence in Africa Arouses Some Resistance - New York Times

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This month, Mr. Hu canceled a visit to Zambia’s Copperbelt Province, in the nation’s north, apparently because of the threat of protests. For some foreign powers in Africa, such snubs are part of the territory; both the United States and Europe are regularly assailed for agriculture policies that are said to stunt African farm exports. One reason China has been welcomed into Africa, analysts say, is it can serve as a counterbalance to American influence now that the Soviet Union has vanished from the scene and Russia is far less active in the region. But while popular dissent is old hat to Westerners, it is less so to the Chinese, for whom foreign relations and domestic policies alike are shaped by governments — not activists, lobbies or public opinion. Having claimed a bigger role on the African and world stages , Mr. Hu is now reaping the first bitter fruits of pretension to leadership. One test comes in Sudan, where he must reconcile China’s doctrine of noninterference in other nations’ affairs with the outcry over the killings of civilians in Darfur. In Khartoum, he gave Sudan a $13 million interest-free loan to build a new presidential palace, but also said it was “imperative” to halt the deaths in Darfur.

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