Is China the new Imperialist in Africa?

It happened in Zambia like it could happen elsewhere in Africa. Chinese investors made deals with the government to mine its natural resources, filling federal coffers with billions of dollars. Chinese immigrants moved into cities and rural towns. They started construction companies; opened copper, coal, and gem mines; and built hotels and restaurants, all providing new jobs. They set up schools and hospitals. But then instances of corruption, labor abuse, and criminal coverups began to set the relationship between the Chinese and the Africans aflame.

The Chinese have managed to accomplish at least one impressive thing in Africa—they have made everyone else uncomfortable. The Americans are uneasy, worried about (and perhaps jealous of) China’s rapid and profitable investments throughout the continent, and the developmental assistance
that it has started to provide in some areas. Europeans have only to look at trade figures: the share of Africa’s exports that China receives has shot from one to fifteen per cent over the past decade, while the European Union’s share fell from thirty-six to twenty-three per cent. China is now Africa’s largest trading partner.

Some Africans have become resentful, though, unhappy with unbalanced relationships in which China has taken proprietorship of African natural resources using Chinese labor and equipment without transferring skills and technology. “China takes our primary goods and sells us manufactured ones. This was also the essence of colonialism,” Lamido Sanusi, the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, wrote in the Financial Times earlier this year.

The threat (whether real or imagined) of a looming Chinese imperialist presence in Africa has given way to what has been called “resource nationalism,” in which countries aim to take control of the exploitation of their natural resources. But this idea potentially fails to address the fact that the Chinese in Africa are people, and not just part of a faceless imperialist mass.

In Zambia, a copper-rich country in southern Africa and the beneficiary of the continent’s third-highest level of Chinese investment, persistent unemployment and poverty have left Zambians wondering where exactly the fruits of their government’s lucrative deals with the Chinese have gone. President Michael Sata won election in 2011 partly thanks to anti-Chinese sentiment (he likened work at Chinese mines to slave labor and said he would deport any abusive investors), but immediately forged close ties with Chinese leaders.

“There will be a big fight with the mines,” Mooya Lumamba, Zambia’s director of mines, told me in May. The government has had battles with the mines before. Despite fears of scaring off investors, leaders, then recently elected, doubled the mine royalty rate nearly two years ago. Investors, including the Chinese, stuck around and even increased their direct inflows. This time, Lumamba didn’t seem worried.

Adapted from the New Yorker Magazine.

Posted in: Politics and policy