Building empires: the dragon's great leap.

China Safari

On the Trail of Beijing's Expansion in Africa

By Serge Michel and Michel Beuret

Photographs by Paolo Woods

[pounds sterling]15.99 Nation Books

ISBN 978-1-56858-426-3

The headline figures, quoted in the prologue of this book, tell the remarkable story of China's recent engagement with Africa. Bilateral trade between the two regions multiplied fiftyfold between 1980 and 2005, quintupling between 2000 and 2006 from $10bn to $55bn. Two further key statistics were a 2006 estimate that there were 900 Chinese companies operating in Africa with total investments of $6bn. A seminar held in South Africa the same year heard that there were 750,000 Chinese resident in Africa.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Even if official Chinese figures said there were only 500,000 - the implications are obvious. Compare even the lower Chinese figure to the number of Lebanese or French citizens living on the continent (250,000 and under 100,000 respectively) and it becomes clear that China's involvement in Africa is serious and only likely to grow even stronger.

Authors Michel and Beuret give one explanation: "Until the late 1990s the ruling Chinese Communist Party, embarrassed by the exodus, attempted to limit emigration, but today China encourages its brave citizens to try their luck in Africa. Chinese leaders, especially President Hu Jintao (who is sometimes referred to as 'the African') see emigration as a good way to lower demographic pressure, economic overheating and pollution in mainland China."

China is prepared to engage with Africa. And, as they report: "Against a backdrop of 'colonial arrogance', Chinese discretion and humility have impressed many Africans the Chinese encounter, thousands of whom already speak or are learning Chinese. Many more praise their perseverance, courage and efficiency. Africa welcomes any competition that shakes up the Western, Lebanese and Indian business monopolies."

After centuries of exploitation, Africa has found in China a trading partner that is prepared to deal with the continent as an equal. Economic engagement is offered without the paternalistic and pious preaching that historically characterised so much of the West's approach.

Nevertheless, there are those that counsel caution in Afro-Sino relations. They are mindful of the teachings of Sun Tzu, the brilliant Chinese military strategist: "To defeat your enemy, first offer him help so that he slackens his vigilance; to take, one must first give." Michel and Beuret consider this viewpoint - as well as the alternate opinion that holds, as the authors put it, "the arrival of a new power in Africa is a 'win-win' relationship".

The authors go to China and a dozen African countries to discover the truth, but travel to Africa independently. Beuret, the foreign editor of the Swiss magazine L'Hebdo, visited Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Niger, Senegal and Sudan while Michel, the former West Africa correspondent for Le Monde, accompanied by award-winning photographer Paolo Woods, travelled to Algeria, Angola, Congo-Brazzaville, Nigeria and Senegal. Michel also visited Guinea.

The book's 13 chapters begin in China itself and the 2006 China-Africa Summit, and the following chapters tackle a specific African country or issue, sometimes told through the profile of a particular Chinese businessperson.

In chapter two we meet one Jacob Wood, a businessman born in Shanghai who claims to have been the first Chinese person from Communist China to work in Nigeria. Now heading a corporation employing 1,500 people, 300 of whom are Chinese, Wood began as the manager of the Chinese restaurant on the top floor of Lagos's Eko Hotel before striking out for himself, opening his own restaurant that specialised in hosting banquets for Lagos's rich and famous.

China using Africa

While this chapter also discusses the massive investments made by China for oil interests in Nigeria, clinching exploration contracts in return for multi-billion programmes of infrastructure projects, we are cautioned that the people who "regard China's state-financed infrastructure as a simple down payment for Africa's raw materials" miss the point. "Chinese businessmen and entrepreneurs like Wood are investing for the long term in private business empires ..."

"I'm going to be honest with you," Wood told the authors, "China is using Africa to get where the US is now, and to surpass it." Then Wood speeds around Lagos to show them his business empire - everything from massive housing construction projects to machinery parts factories - at the wheel of one of his fleet of SUV police cars. "Very practical for the city's go-slows," Wood comments wryly. He has been granted permission to run the 'police cars' in return for organising an annual banquet for the Association of Police Officers' Wives!

The book next takes us to Congo-Brazzaville and deals with what China critics suggest is a significant problem with its involvement with Africa - a cavalier approach to environmental matters. In this case it concerns industrial logging within Congo's national parks by Chinese-owned companies, in alliance with influential Congolese politicians with semi-opaque vested interests, who are ripping through the country's precious rain forest.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The authors identify 1995 as a recent key date, the year when then Chinese president Jiang Zemin exhorted the Chinese business community to "go abroad! Become world players!" The authors then suggest that Africa was an obvious place to start, "a place where the Chinese dragon could sharpen its teeth before taking on the big boys; Europe and the US". They go on to note that within five years, Chinese infrastructure projects in Africa were receiving full government support.

Next a chapter describes Chinese investments in Niger, focusing especially on the uranium sector but also profiling Wu Wenyi who is married to a prominent, successful businessman, Aboubakeur Karda. Her husband mediated in 1996 a new deal between Niamey and Beijing. But this book is as much about how Chinese labour and individual enterprise are transforming Africa's economic landscape as it is about the huge state-sponsored projects, and a following chapter describes how the authors met would-be Chinese emigres in China.

The junk invasion

The middle of this book sees the authors tackle another controversial issue - the flood of cheap Chinese-made goods sold at rock-bottom prices all over Africa. "As well as the spoons, triple-A batteries, voluminous bras and mattresses ... there's everything else: clothes, shoes, shampoo, pumps, generators, telephones. You get the idea, the list goes on and on ..." With examples of the tensions arising from the Chinese ability to undercut local goods and services in Africa - including, according to the authors' research in Douala, the oldest profession in the world - we are given a short tour of the continent, from Cameroon to Senegal to Egypt, where even tourist souvenirs are manufactured in China. In short, we learn how Chinese imports are contributing to the disappearance of local manufacturing and artisans.

Equally as disturbing is China's attitude to arms trading with Africa, a subject that is investigated in a chapter entitled 'For Sale: Weapons for Dictators'. What the authors say is that "China's policies on military intervention [in Africa] are beginning to resemble the policies of the former European colonial powers. China appears increasingly willing to support repressive African regimes and rebellions alike, and to profit from the resulting chaos by selling weapons [to both] ..."

Which takes us neatly to chapter nine and Sudan. But here the narrative shifts - to the "fabulous success" of 33-year-old Zhang Fenghua (who arrived in Sudan in 2001 to become the most successful foreign vegetable farmer in the country) and other Chinese agri-business enterprises in the country.

Then the book addresses the thorny issue of Darfur: China's role in this conflict and a possible role in its resolution. In this instance, China's oft-stated policy of not getting involved in the affairs of other countries loses some of its attraction.

No book on contemporary China's interest in Africa would be complete without a chapter on oil, and Sudan provides the authors' jumping-off point to discuss this industry.

However, they take the cue of Erica Downs of the Brookings Institution, who they quote as saying "Chinese companies are not about to win the race for African oil". Nevertheless, she cautions that Africa supplies 30% of China's oil but only 15% of the US demand, and suggests that while the West "is busy locking-up as much of the Gulf of Guinea as possible" China has been focusing on East African acreage.

The final chapter, 'The New Great Game', is concerned with the possibility that China and the US are on a collision course over Africa. It opens with an interview with an anonymous US-China White House advisor. He appears remarkably sanguine about China's involvement with Africa (a 'panda-hugger' rather than a 'dragon-slayer', in the authors' parlance) but who was still was under no illusion of the potential dangers. The expert admitted that the US "devotes more time on the War on Terror than on finding out what the Chinese are or aren't up to".

Lengthy chapters on Chinese activities in Angola and Zambia indicate that perhaps this US policy focus, or lack of it, should be re-examined, but it is the conclusion of the final chapter that is the most interesting. The authors recall: "When President Hu Jintao announced in Beijing in November 2006 the amount of money that China planned to make available, an African leaned over [to us] and whispered: "Right now we need our leaders to be very, very wise."