Analysis: Untangling China's aid to Africa
HIGHLIGHTS
* A long history of aid and cooperation between China and Africa
* Questions about China's non-interference principle remain
* Experts predict a slow reform of China's aid policies
NAIROBI, 18 September 2013 (IRIN) - This year, the two most powerful men on
the globe, presidents Barack Obama and Xi Jinping, both embarked on Africa
tours, pledging to increase aid and investment and work with the continent
to improve development.
While this was Barack Obama's first extended tour of Africa since taking
office (he made a one-day stop in 2009 in Ghana), Chinese leaders have been
visiting the continent regularly for decades, quietly working on joint
development, trade, foreign direct investment and assistance projects.
"China is the largest developing country in the world, and Africa is the
continent with the largest number of developing countries," Jiang Zemin,
then-president of China, said in his opening remarks at the first Forum on
China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in 2000.
Since 2000, China has ramped up its aid to Africa, leading to significant
interest in and speculation over its motives for doing so. With each FOCAC
meeting, China has doubled its pledge to Africa, promising US$5 billion in
2006, $10 billion in 2009 and, at the 2012 summit, $20 billion.
A long history of aid
As Chinese officials are at pains to point out, China has a long history on
the continent. Its first major project was the 1,860km Tazara rail line. The
five-year scheme, completed in 1975, linked landlocked Zambia to the
Tanzanian port of Dar es Salaam, ending Lusaka's dependence on
minority-ruled Rhodesia and South Africa.
"China historically had a robust ideological engagement with Africa,
reflecting the revolutionary spirit of its foreign policy under Mao, but it
didn't have any substantial economic interests in the continent," Daniel
Large, professor at the Budapest-based Central European University (CEU) and
a leading expert on China-Sudan relations, told IRIN.
What is different today is that it now has economic interests, in addition
to being an aid donor.
Experts say China's role in Africa is often misunderstood.
"Given some of the more inflated claims about the impact of China in Africa,
often contained within arguments about a 'new scramble' or 'new
imperialism', there is a marked gap between the perceptions and exaggerated
projections of an inexorable Chinese rise in Africa and knowledge of how
this is actually playing out,"
<
http://afraf.oxfordjournals.org/content/107/426/45.full.pdf%20html> wrote
Large.
Some of the confusion, especially relating to aid, may be because China does
not release many statistics about how much aid it gives and has a number of
agencies responsible for distributing foreign aid to Africa. The structure
of China's economy - where many private firms are fully or partly
state-owned - and China's approach to assistance also blur the line between
investment and aid.
So how much aid is there?
Quantifying the China-Africa relationship is a difficult undertaking because
China does not break down its statistics or release detailed reports about
how much assistance it gives to Africa, and it has a different definition
from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) of
what exactly is meant by "aid". For example, China includes military aid in
its definition, while the OECD does not, but China does not consider
scholarships to students from developing countries as foreign aid when
calculating statistics.
As a result, estimates by experts on just how much China gives to Africa
<
http://international.cgdev.org/sites/default/files/chinese-development-fina
nce-africa_0.pdf> differ widely, ranging from $580 million to $18 billion a
year.
The Chinese government argues that it does not have the capability to make
the data available.
"There is an assumption in some of the Western media - and to a lesser
extent the African media - that the Chinese government has lots of data that
it refuses to make public. It is important to ask the question - how
accurate is the data we have?" said Ambassador Zhong Jianhua, China's
special representative on African affairs, in an
<
http://www.africaresearchinstitute.org/publications/ambassador-zhong-jianhu
a-on-trade-aid-and-jobs/> interview with the African Research Institute,
published in August. "The government's statistical capacity is that of a
developing country."
In 2011, the government did, however,
<
http://www.irinnews.org/indepthmain.aspx?indepthid=91&reportid=93749>
publish a white paper that broke down the data by region: 45.7 percent of
aid went to Africa in 2009, and between 1950 and 2009 it spent slightly over
$41 billion.
In 2012 and 2013, China AidData, in partnership with the Centre for Global
Development, came up with a database to measure how much aid was being
dispersed, using media-based sources. It classified Chinese-funded
development projects into "official finance", which includes projects in
four categories: those similar to Official Development Assistance (ODA),
those similar to Other Official Finance (OOF) - both of which OECD indexes
use - Official Investment (made up of foreign direct investment and joint
ventures), and <
http://china.aiddata.org> Military Aid without Development
Intent.
Their database includes 1,673 non-investment projects to 50 recipient
countries from 2000-2011, which they classified as ODA- or OOF-like. Over
the course of these 11 years, they found these projects totalled $75.4
billion.
"Chinese development finance was dispersed really widely," Austin Strange,
research associate at AidData, told IRIN. "The only outliers are countries
that diplomatically recognize Taiwan."
"In terms of the number of projects, sectors like education and healthcare
were at the top of the list," he added. Infrastructure, transport and energy
were also areas where China had a very large presence.
While most academics believe that transparency on Chinese aid is improving,
it still falls far short of the OECD, which releases detailed reports.
"There's still some secrecy in the official statistics," said Xue Lei, a
research fellow of Shanghai's Institutes for International Studies, noting
that transparency and reform is something being discussed by academics
domestically, too. "Maybe we need one structure, and more transparency on
the statistical side. I think in the next few years China will release the
actual number."
Those favouring reform point to the need to set up a single agency with
responsibility for aid programmes. For inspiration, many look to China's
Asian neighbours, arguing that taking a model from Japan, South Korea or
India could be successful.
Non-interference - really?
As China gets more involved in Africa, non-conditional aid is becoming a
hugely important form of soft power for the country. But many are unsure
whether China will be able to maintain its principle of non-interference in
another state's affairs should it need to protect its citizens in volatile
areas on the continent; it is estimated that there are between
<
http://www.amazon.com/Routledge-Handbook-Chinese-Diaspora-Handbooks/dp/0415
600561> 500,000 and 800,000 Chinese migrants residing on the continent.
Xue believes that the principle of non-interference will not change, and
that China's approach will be a long-term, stability-through-development
approach. "We want to try to stabilize the fragile states, to maybe prevent
the crisis or conflict from happening," he said, while acknowledging that
this would not always be possible.
"This whole mantra of non-interference and mutual cooperation is not unique
to China. It is part of a broader south-south cooperation agenda and
rhetoric," said Warderdam. Reconciling this in crisis situations, he
believes, will be very difficult.
Underpinning much of the criticism of China's role in Africa is the claim
that they are only interested in extractive industries and are plundering
the continent's vast resources. They've attracted prominent critics, notably
<
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/562692b0-898c-11e2-ad3f-00144feabdc0.html#ax
zz2e0RjsJZP> Nigerian Central Bank Governor Lamido Sanusi and
<
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7824cc28-83ed-11e2-b700-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2e0
RjsJZP> South African President Jacob Zuma.
"Africa is now willingly opening itself up to a new form of imperialism,"
Sanusi wrote. "China is no longer a fellow under-developed economy - it is
the world's second-biggest, capable of the same forms of exploitation as the
west. It is a significant contributor to Africa's deindustrialization and
underdevelopment."
Hong Kong University professor Adams Bodomo disagrees with Sanusi, believing
that his colonial comparison is flawed. "We are in a world where everybody
has their competitive advantages. We have minerals, they have manufactured
goods," he told IRIN. "In fact, the presence of Chinese manufactured goods
in Africa is an opportunity for African manufacturers to up the ante, to
compete. We need competition; we can't talk about free market and then not
like competition."
Kenneth King, professor emeritus at the University of Edinburgh who, for his
new book, China's Aid and Soft Power in Africa, travelled across Africa with
his wife and interviewed more than 200 people on the continent, also
dismisses claims that Africans consider the Chinese to be neo-colonialists.
"There are differences in perceptions, but they are remarkably positive," he
said, claiming that they had not noticed much antagonism towards China from
people on the ground.
But there is no denying that, at the local level, tensions sometimes run
high.
In 2010, when Chinese managers shot at coal miners in Zambia after a labour
dispute, the incident sparked outrage across the country, and Michael Sata,
then the opposition leader, used anti-Chinese sentiment to rally support for
his presidential campaign. Similarly, in Lesotho,
<
http://www.irinnews.org/report/76405/lesotho-anti-chinese-resentment-flares
> protests and resentment for Chinese migrants have occurred.
Earlier this year, tensions between China and Ghana increased over
allegations about illegal mining, leading to the Ghanaian government
deporting more than
<
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/15/ghana-deports-chinese-goldmine
rs> 4,500 Chinese gold miners.
"The miners in Ghana - this is very bad for China, and the Chinese
government is very upset about this," said Ward Warmerdam, a researcher at
the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague and an economic
researcher at the think tank Profundo. He explained that while the
government tries to influence the business practices of private Chinese
firms in Africa through a series of directives on foreign direct investment,
they are unable to influence companies that are not at least in part
state-owned or reliant on funding from the government, nor individuals who
migrate to Africa on their own.
"These are companies and actors that it doesn't have an influence over, and
this is going to be a big problem for China," he added.
CEU's Large cautioned that it is necessary to disaggregate core principles
of mutual cooperation and non-interference, to see how they meaningfully
impact more than just the elites in recipient states. "On win-win and mutual
benefit, these should be taken seriously, as constitutive of genuine
convictions," he told IRIN, "but at the same time seen as liable to more
instrumental uses."
The real question to ask is whether Chinese aid and development policies
benefit the population at large, not just leaders. "Just as OECD DAC
[Development Assistance Committee] principles or human rights can be subject
to all sorts of uses, the same is true of China's principles," he said.
According to Xue, there is much that China can learn from the West:
"Building a tall building is relatively easier compared with more in-depth
knowledge of the country and their needs. We can learn from Western
experiences in this," he said.
He believes that China has the opportunity to build a stronger network of
NGOs and grassroots projects in Africa that may have more impact on everyday
people, something that they have thus far steered away from in favour of
larger state-to-state projects: "We are gradually increasing aid provided to
other institutions, but a large part of the aid is still provided in
bilateral aid."
But, he said, "China's aid policy is still gradually evolving."
Warmerdam agrees, but believes that in that process of evolution, it is
crucial for African leaders and states to have a greater stake in the
decision-making. "The cogs aren't in place, and the dynamics of this
relationship aren't set yet," he said. "It's good for African leaders to be
careful."
aps/kr/oa/rz
Received on Thu Sep 19 2013 - 12:34:50 EDT