The mid 2000s began a period in which academic research into China in Africa has become extremely fashionable. China has made inroads into several countries by offering large amounts of money for infrastructure development and becoming a major trading partner throughout the continent. From an African perspective, this new relationship suggests the possibility that China's investment could spark economic growth and social development. On the other hand, China's support has bolstered many leaders with questionable democratic credentials while renewed ties have led to an influx of people and goods. Overall, China's actions have therefore produced a decidedly mixed result along with charges of Chinese imperialism.
Analyses generally fall on a continuum between two divergent positions. On one extreme, ‘China threat’ theory, popular among conservative elements in the US, sees China as exploitative and invokes claims of a new imperialist scramble for Africa. Conversely, theorists of what Giovanni Arrighi (2007) calls China's ‘peaceful rise’ view Chinese engagement as a boon for the continent. The two extreme positions and their role in American foreign policy have been widely commented upon in academic literature on China in Africa.
In the West, the recent proliferation of scholarship about China in Africa has been dominated by notions of China as threatening and dangerous. This is perhaps why Arrighi highlights China's doctrine of ‘peaceful rise’ as a direct rebuttal to the idea of ‘China threat’. The notion of a peaceful rise expresses the view that China's emergence as a global superpower benefits neighbours instead of exposing them to violence and plunder. However, China can also be viewed as both capitalist and imperialist. In the context of what is clearly a major Chinese play for the African continent, it is crucial to not only ask whether China's development model can produce different outcomes for China and the world capitalist system, but also, fundamentally linked to that question, whether or not the theorised ‘Beijing Consensus’ can produce different outcomes for Africa than the neoliberal orthodoxy of the Washington Consensus.
The placement of a particular analysis on the ‘threat–benefit continuum’ often depends on the author's theoretical approach and subjective point of view. To argue either extreme is to take either with a pro-Western or pro-China position. Most sophisticated analyses – particularly analyses that claim to take an ‘African view’ – tend to reject the dichotomous understanding and instead fall somewhere in the middle. Clearly, then, the context of the African locale selected and the sector of the economy that is being investigated are important variables in determining exactly how a particular analysis is formed.
Angola has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention from those who wish to investigate the role of China in Africa (see Corkin 2011; Alves 2010; Vines et al. 2009; Campos and Vines 2008). Around the world, headline-grabbing announcements proclaim the vast amounts of Chinese investment in Angola and the new importance of the country – which currently alternates on a monthly basis with Saudi Arabia as China's top supplier of crude oil – for China's energy security. The Angolan case is most often selected due to the depth of Chinese engagement and is particularly useful in making wider generalisations to other cases in which China is engaged in significant natural resource extraction. Within certain limits, the Angolan case can also be applied to draw broader conclusions about China in sub-Saharan Africa.
This paper reviews perspectives on China in Africa, as well as the main features of Chinese engagement with the continent, in order to interrogate the ‘divide’ between the positions outlined above. The goal is not to take a centrist position, but rather to suggest that China represents for Africa both a new imperialism and a new model of development. While differentiating between the new Euro-American and Chinese imperialisms, China's new engagement, exemplified by its relationship with Angola, is a project of recolonisation and appropriation of economic surplus. The Chinese variety of imperialism, however, offers African states a compromise to their elite and to their citizens that has heretofore been missing from post-colonial Euro-American imperialism – the prospect of sustained economic growth and improvement to the quality of everyday life.
The new scramble for Africa
Political economy scholars have mainly dwelt on the question of whether China will compete with Europe and the US, either in terms of global dominance or in shifting the world system away from the hegemony of neoliberalism. However, this question cannot be disentangled from the context of Euro-American and Chinese imperialisms. It is here that Africa presents not only case studies, but entirely different perspectives for evaluating claims of a ‘Chinese model’.
Scholars of African political economy are increasingly speaking of a ‘new scramble for African resources’ (see Yates 2012; Southall and Melber 2009; Ampiah and Naidu 2008; Guerrero and Manji 2008; Alden 2007; Manji and Marks 2007; Klare and Volman 2006; Watts 2006). In the current moment, not only China, but also Europe, America, and other strongholds of global capitalism, are looking to Africa for new opportunities. The past decade has seen a shift in how the rest of the world views Africa. Today, Africa is more likely to be called a new frontier of opportunity than a lost continent. It is in this geopolitical context that John Saul refers to the ‘recolonisation’ of Africa by the ‘Empire of Capital’ (Saul 2008, 2010). Just as Africa has been peripheral to the centres of global capitalism, it has historically been peripheral in debates about global political economy. However, in the current moment of world history, African development is becoming an increasingly central theme in key debates about global political economy in the same way that the exploitation of Africa's resources is becoming increasingly important for the functioning of the capitalist world system.
The new scholarly focus on China in Africa shifted into high gear in 2006. In a show of its new power and influence, China attracted 41 African heads of state and government to its African cooperation forum in Beijing.1 The summit, along with China's sponsoring of the annual meeting of the African Development Bank in Shanghai a year later, marked the beginning of increased scrutiny of China's involvement in Africa in both mainstream and critical scholarship. At the same time, increasing attention has been placed on China's energy situation in light of its growing demand for oil, fuelled by a booming Chinese economy, which incredibly grew an average of 9% per year between 1978 and 2005 (Lee and Shalmon 2008, 110).
As Alden notes, China turned from net exporter to net importer of petroleum in 1993 and now consumes more petroleum than Japan (Alden 2005, 148). The energy dimension of China's (and the US's) engagement with Africa warrants further consideration before proceeding to an analysis of China in Africa based on the Angolan case. Eighty-five per cent of new global oil reserves found between 2001 and 2004 were on the west/central coasts of Africa. These resources are particularly attractive for both advanced petroleum-dependent economies and the so-called emerging ones, given that 90% of the world's untapped conventional oil reserves are owned by states, most of whom exclude or sharply limit outside investment in oil (Sautman and Hairong 2008, 92). Crude oil accounts for roughly 70% of Africa's exports to China, a country that is particularly dependent on foreign oil. Coupled with the fact that China also requires many other minerals and natural resources that are found in large quantities in Africa, and that the West also needs these resources in the manufacture of high technology products, it is no wonder that many are referring to a new scramble for Africa.
Unfortunately, Marxian political economy moves very quickly and at a high level of abstraction from the empirically well-defended position that China is capitalist, to a more contestable yet still well-supported view that China is imperialist, before arriving at a very crude assumption that China offers nothing different to the Global South than traditional relations of neocolonialism. This approach leaves a reader interested in an African or even a Chinese perspective on China's engagement in Africa completely unsatisfied. Therefore, the basic principles and core theoretical contributions of the Marxist approach must be re-examined and reapplied in order to better reflect the reality of what China's approach to Africa means to the continent.
China's new engagement with Africa can be best understood through an understanding of its role in the global political economy. In his book on China's changing role in the capitalist world economy, Minqi Li writes:
To restore the profit rate and reinvigorate capital accumulation, it is necessary for the core states to shift their capital out of certain economic sectors with declining profit rates and relocate these sectors to geographic areas in the periphery and semi-periphery where the wage and taxation costs remain sufficiently low… China has been the primary beneficiary of the latest round of global capital location. (Li 2008, 107)
What Li describes is a what David Harvey (2003) calls a ‘spatio-temporal fix’, a dynamic that he describes as particular to capitalism. Harvey explains: ‘The capitalistic (as opposed to territorial) logic of imperialism has, I argue, to be understood against this background of seeking out “spatio-temporal fixes” to the capital surplus problem’ (2003, 89). However, China's manufacturing capacity has grown so rapidly, it must constantly seek new markets for the vast quantities of goods it now produces. As an illustration, China's total exports to Africa have increased from under US$5 billion in 2002 to over US$60 billion in 2010 (UNCTAD 20112). By sending its surplus commodities elsewhere, China switches the surplus from commodities to money. This can often only be done with the advancement of credit to facilitate the switching in locations where the state has limited resources. This excess capital must be absorbed through new spatio-temporal fixes. For this reason, Harvey (2003) writes that imperialism under capitalism is set apart by the capitalist logic and endless capital accumulation.
Interest in the topic of China in Africa, and particularly in oil extraction (which has been central to the new scramble for Africa), has also been generated by a spate of recent high-profile energy deals. The largest of these deals have involved China's closest ally on the continent, Angola. Beijing has been a major player in Angola for several years. The international community caught on to just how serious a player China was becoming in 2005 when China provided a US$2 billon aid package to Angola. The loan from China's EximBank was secured by future Angolan oil production. China followed this up with a second US $2 billion loan and a further US $500 million. These loans represent only the tip of the iceberg in terms of Chinese financing.3 In fact, the international watchdog organisation Global Witness details several loans to Angola (through the state oil company, Sonangol) worth close to US$14 billion from various, mostly Western European, banks (Global Witness 2009).
As a result of China's new relationship with Angola, trade between Angola and China has gone from US$1.1 billion in 2002 to almost US$25 billion in 2008. Despite lower trade volumes in 2009 due to the global financial crisis, by 2010, trade between the two countries was back to 2008 levels (UNCTAD 2011). In 2007, China overtook the US as the largest importer of Angolan crude oil. By 2009, it was importing nearly double the amount of the US, which remains the second-ranked importer of Angolan oil (MINPET 2010). This means that Angola alone supplied nearly 17% of China's total imports of crude oil that year.4 At the same time, foreign investment from China has also skyrocketed. Data obtained from the Angolan Agency for Private Investment (ANIP) shows that in 2009 there was US$166,403,000 of private Chinese investment in Angola, making China second only to Portugal as a source of foreign investment. The construction sector accounted for US$152,299,000 of China's private investment recorded by ANIP. The data excludes most oil investment, since this investment is made under the terms of the Production Sharing Agreements and also excludes all public investment (including private investment from China under the loan arrangements with China Exim Bank).
Many commentators have viewed China's loans as undercutting the efforts of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to impose transparency on Luanda. However, a standby agreement between Angola and the IMF was reached in 2009 in a changed context in which Western diplomacy with regard to Angola has become increasingly pragmatic. It is therefore more accurate to view China and the West as competitors in Africa engaged in similar types of activities. This point must be understood in order to properly contextualise the impact of China in Africa and the notion of a Chinese alternative to the dominant Western paradigm of development.
Perspectives on China in Africa
Stephen Marks argues that there is such a thing as a Chinese model of development because, like Japan and the ‘Asian Tigers’, China did not develop by following the prescription of the Washington Consensus. Like many of the other authors writing on this subject, he outlines two views on the Chinese model of development: a ‘Western’ view that China avoids good governance and human rights conditionality in its relations with others, and a counter-view that China has a greater relevance to Southern countries because it too is developing and can therefore engage in South–South cooperation in areas such as rural development, and intermediate technology (Marks 2007, 6–7). Of course the dichotomy, like most dichotomous understandings of complex phenomena, is a false one.
A more complete picture of African development and underdevelopment can be reached by accepting that the propositions of both extreme standpoints are fundamentally correct, although not necessarily interchangeable. Rather than being a question of either one perspective or the other being true, this is clearly a case that calls for a ‘both/and’ approach in which the two supposedly contradictory views are both understood to be true from different standpoints.5 A more sophisticated study of Chinese engagement in Africa, grounded in African political economy, reveals that while China acts with a logic of new imperialism that clearly displays characteristics of accumulation by dispossession, it offers at the same time something different to traditional Western models of engagement with Africa.
At the level of foreign policy, China's involvement in Africa is understood as part of China's entry onto the world stage. The Council on Foreign Relations’ More than Humanitarianism, which mainly reviewed the United States’ growing interest in Africa, devoted an entire chapter to China, charging that it protects rogue states, deploys its influence to counter Western pressure to improve human rights and governance, and unfairly competes with US firms in contract bids. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded by arguing that China has a ‘strategic partnership’ with Africa based on political equality, mutual trust, economic win–win cooperation, and cultural exchange (Sautman and Hairong 2008, 88). For this reason, China often contrasts its policy of offering aid without political ‘strings attached’ with what it views as European and American interference in domestic affairs.
The entry of China has been a factor in Africa's own emergence onto the world stage – presenting an opportunity for African governments to ‘play the China card’. The Chinese goal of a ‘strategic partnership’ with Africa as part of its ‘peaceful rise’ raises a potential challenge to Euro-American hegemony. Chinese foreign policy at the global level is very concerned with American hegemony. This reflects the US's position as the only power with the political will and military means to thwart Beijing's interests (Alden 2005, 152). China is deeply concerned about the US's intentions and the long-term objectives of US imperialism. This has caused it to focus more on foreign policy and find strategic partners with common interests (important interests include mutual respect for state sovereignty, non-intervention in domestic affairs, etc).
In the American government, there are two dominant discourses of ‘threat’ and proposed strategies to address the ‘threat’, roughly corresponding to the two perspectives outlined above. The divide can be seen as a shift from the Clinton administration's view of China as a ‘strategic partner’ to the Bush administration's view of it being a ‘strategic rival’. Alden sees this as a divide between administration ‘hawks’, who are primarily concerned with defense and who see China as a force to be actively countered, and more moderate forces from the state department and foreign policy establishment, including many democrats, who argue for cooperation and dialogue with China (Alden 2007). Arrighi also notes this divide by citing a debate in the pages of Foreign Policy between Mearsheimer (representing the ‘containment/China threat’) and Brzezinski (representing ‘engagement’).
Competing perspectives on China have led the Council on Foreign Relations and the Heritage Foundation, two of the major protagonists in what can be characterised as the cooperation/containment debate, to very different analyses of what to do about resource security. More than Humanitarianism notes: ‘It would be easy, but mistaken, to consider China an adversary in Africa. Like other growing economies, China is a legitimate competitor for natural resources’ (CFR 2006, 52). However, in their short paper for the Heritage Foundation, Peter Brookes and Ji Hye Shin argue that:
The United States must also be alert to the potential long-term disruption of American access to important raw materials and energy sources as these resources are ‘locked up’ by Chinese firms for the PRC's domestic market to maintain China's economic growth. (Brookes and Shin 2006, 2)
By 2006, those calling for dialogue and cooperation with China seemed to be winning out. In making a case for viewing China as a ‘strategic partner’, Gill et al. write:
Recent experience has affirmed that the two countries stand a far better chance of dealing with the many security challenges they face – from stemming the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea to securing energy supplies to tackling the problem of global climate change – through cooperation and healthy competition rather than confrontation. (Gill et al. 2007, 15)
Engagement is also the basis of the Obama Administration's approach to China in general and to China's engagement with Africa. However this policy has not stopped the US from issuing warnings about China. In a June 2011 trip to the continent, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton warned against a ‘new colonialism’ as China expands its presence in Africa:
We saw that during colonial times, it is easy to come in, take out natural resources, pay off leaders and leave… And when you leave, you don't leave much behind for the people who are there. We don't want to see a new colonialism in Africa. (Krause-Jackson 2011)
Speaking to an audience in Zambia, Clinton warned that China too often pays African elites to extract concessions in new investment opportunities. She reassured her audience: ‘The United States is investing in the people of Zambia, not just the elites’ (Carmichael 2011).
The tension is apparent on the ground in Angola, which is perhaps the site of the fiercest US–China rivalry. Yet even in Angola an American diplomat emphasised US–China cooperation regarding Angola and suggested that the containment approach had never been operationalised in American foreign policy, even during the Bush years, and was no longer influential either in Washington or in the embassy in Luanda.6 The diplomat's comments were somewhat contradicted a few weeks later at a public forum in Luanda on the role of China in Angola when an American defence attaché from the embassy commented publically that China was trying to create ‘a new slave empire in Africa’, demonstrating that the extreme ‘China threat’ position is still alive and well amongst many in the Pentagon.
In private, American diplomats have been quite keen to denigrate the quality of Chinese infrastructure projects in the country and argue that the Chinese ‘don't have any interests here other than resource extraction’. The representative from the US embassy mentioned above quipped: ‘It's plain and simple. They are just here for the resources. They are not interested in the country's well-being, only in extracting what they need economically’. The diplomat went on to insist that the United States espouses a much more holistic set of interests than China:
Yes, Angola is the sixth largest supplier of oil to the US, but that is not the sum total of our relationship. We still promote democracy and human rights, and our goal is free, secure, and peaceful relationship with Iraq – I mean Angola. (Ibid.)
Although they may both be engaged in one form of (re)colonisation or another, both the US and China seem eager to disassociate themselves from the worst forms of the other's naked imperialism.
China's engagement with Africa
This paper will argue that China's actions in Africa are in general no different to what Western countries have done and are doing, though there may potentially be more advantages to China's relations with Africa. In order to assess China's involvement in Africa since the 1990s, it is necessary to look at three broad categories suggested by Guerrero and Manji (2008); namely: aid, trade, and foreign direct investment (FDI).
China uses its aid strategically to support commercial and investment interventions in Africa, just as the West does, by supporting key infrastructural development projects, training programmes, debt relief, technical assistance, and tariff exemptions for selected products from Africa. Additionally, both American and Chinese aid is largely tied. In 2000, total trade between China and Africa was US$11 billion. Sino–African trade hit US$55 billion in 2006 and US$74 billion in 2007 (Taylor 2009, 1). By 2010, trade between China and Africa was just under US$120 billion (UNCTAD 2011). Today, China is Africa's second largest trading partner after the US, ahead of the UK. However, China's trade with Africa is still a small proportion of China's trade with the rest of the world. Finally, Chinese FDI to Africa has, along with trade, been growing rapidly. By the end of 2006, various estimates of China's FDI stock in Africa put it at around US$8 billion (Sautman and Hairong 2008, 93), with one estimate putting it as high as US$11.7 billion (Asche and Schüller 2008, 26), up from US$1 billion in 2005.
In terms of military cooperation, Chinese engagement with Africa can be broken down into peacekeeping, military training, and the supply of arms. In the year 2000, China deployed fewer than 100 peacekeepers. Since then, there has been a dramatic 20-fold increase in its contributions (Gill and Huang 2009). As of April 2008, China had 1457 military peacekeepers, observers and police participating in UN peacekeeping operations in Africa, out of 1981 Chinese personnel in such operations worldwide. Its commitment makes China the twelfth largest contributor of personnel to UN peacekeeping missions, compared to the US, whose 300 personnel rank forty-third (Shinn 2008, 177).
Chinese military assistance pales in comparison to Western, and particularly US, engagement. At the same time, China's programmes are, on a smaller scale, essentially indistinguishable. Asche and Schüller write:
The programmes providing military training and arms supplies to the most important oil customers were so similar that the conclusion had to be drawn that China's efforts to acquire oil assets in Africa followed an ‘essentially indistinguishable pattern’ to that of the United Kingdom, France and the USA (Klare and Volman 2006). In our observation this is incorrect in only one significant aspect, namely that China does not maintain any notable military bases in Africa – or at least not yet. (Asche and Schüller 2008, 70)
Asche and Schüller go on to note that: ‘China is the world's fifth-largest supplier of weapons, and one of the largest in Africa. China has supplied weapons to Sudan, supplied both sides in the wars between Ethiopia and Eritrea, and also supplied arms to Zimbabwe’ (2008, 44). At the same time, the West has supplied arms to conflicts in Africa and around the world, propping up repressive regimes and not only fuelling but also intervening in civil strife. A notorious example of this was its support of the murderous Doe regime in Liberia. A more current example would be the continued supply of tear gas to Egypt for use against demonstrators in Tahrir Square. In Angola, the US supported the rebels of UNITA, who were themselves heavily supported by apartheid South Africa (another US ally for many years).
Brookes and Shin assert that:
African dictatorships are regular buyers of Chinese weapons and military equipment, which they often use to oppress minority populations, quash political opposition, harass neighbouring countries, and extinguish any glimmers of democratisation. (Brookes and Shin 2006, 4)
However, given the examples above, their assertion would be equally valid if the word ‘Chinese’ were to be replaced with the word ‘American’. Additionally, while China's arms sales to Africa are significant, they represent only 6–7% of all arms delivered to Africa (Alden 2007, 25, citing Curtis and Hickson 2006 and Tjonneland et al. 2006).
In terms of political cooperation, China has worked closely with many African governments, engaging them in robust and reciprocal relations and treating African leaders as equals. This differs sharply from the Euro-American tendency to treat Africans as junior partners at best (Rupp 2008, 68). Since the mid 1990s, Chinese leaders have criss-crossed Africa several times, visiting numerous countries and building friendly relationships. This has led to a popular perception that China interacts with African countries more as equals. Although Brookes and Shin write: ‘China rewards its African friends with diplomatic attention and financial and military assistance, exacerbating existing forced dislocations of populations and abetting massive human rights abuses’ (2006, 1), this again is a sentence in which the word ‘China’ could equally be replaced with the word ‘America’. Examples of US misdeeds in Africa in no way excuse China for supporting repressive regimes in Sudan, Zimbabwe, and elsewhere. Rather, such cases simply add balance to the ‘both/and’ analysis being advanced in this paper.
It is indisputable that, in many respects, the actions of the Chinese are generally similar to the North Americans and Europeans. In many instances, Chinese actions – particularly in terms of investments – are likely more positive for Africa, particularly in countries like Angola, which are of key strategic importance to China. In Angola, Chinese investment can be seen everywhere – it is difficult to walk around the capital, Luanda, without tripping over a Chinese construction project. For Angolan non-governmental development organisations, Chinese projects are similar to Western ones in terms of outcomes. The most noticeable difference articulated by one Angolan development practitioner in Luanda was that the volume of Chinese investment seems much higher given their very visible programme of investment in infrastructure, education, health, agriculture, and fisheries.7 This is a commonly held view in Angolan development circles.
The similarities between Western and Chinese engagement raise important questions about the discourses of ‘threat’ that have come to dominate Western and some African analyses of China in Africa. As we have already seen, notions of a threat to African development, particularly in the West, are understood to come from China. Obviously, neither the US nor China has direct control over any African state. Therefore, it is necessary to examine China's military, political, and development cooperation with Africa in order to get a handle on the depth of China's engagement, as well as to establish what is so threatening about what China is doing, and who are the perceived victims of this threat.
(New) imperialism and (re)colonisation in the ‘new scramble for Africa’
This paper has asserted that Chinese activities in Africa are no different to Western ones. In no way does this assertion condone what Harvey (2003) calls accumulation by dispossession, which for any given state has many forms both internal and external. This premise informs the argument made above that China's engagement with Africa has created situations both of mutually beneficial cooperation and of exploitation.
A tension exists among Western scholars in terms of how to analyse China outside of the discourse of threat, even for those who do not necessarily see China that way. In the opening lines of his book, Rotberg writes that China and Africa need each other – China needs Africa to grow, Africa needs China to develop. Therefore, ‘both benefit significantly from this remarkably symbiotic relationship’. A sentence later, Rotberg adds, ‘China hardly wants to colonise, but it does have immense mercantilist ambitions’ (2008, 1). These two sentences, appearing back to back at the beginning of page one are contradictory. Mercantilism, the theory ‘informing’ the golden age of European expansion and the making of the ‘Third World’, is plunder at worst, or, at best, it is profiting by exchanging items of low value for items of high value. There is no sense in which a mercantilist foreign policy can be understood as symbiotic.
Naidu and Davies (2006) argue that the biggest difference between the nineteenth century scramble for African resources and the contemporary one is that Beijing's economic engagement is accompanied by investment. Indeed, as outlined above, there are concrete benefits to what Davies (2008) has referred to as China's development model. More in depth, country-specific analyses are needed to appreciate the differences between Chinese and Euro-American imperialism. This paper provides a framework for such studies, moving beyond simplistic analyses of China from both the right and left. This approach, however, need not necessarily deny the negative and outright imperialistic aspects of China's position.
Africans have good reason to be uncomfortable with a unipolar world characterised by Western dominance. According to Ndubisi Obiorah:
China's emergence as a major axis of global power is often welcomed among African intellectuals, who hope that it may herald a return to global multi-polarity in which milieu Africa and the developing countries will have a greater role on the global stage than they currently do. (Obiorah 2007, 40)
As Stephanie Rupp writes, China has been increasingly open and responsive to African concerns about imbalances in economic competitiveness and the effects of Chinese imports on African economies and African industry. It has been willing to find middle ground with countries, particularly countries that are central to its Africa strategy.
According to Rupp: ‘This willingness to find middle ground with their African counterparts, indeed making concessions to support African industries that compete directly with Chinese investments, marks a significant departure from classic relations of dependency’ (2008, 71). To back up her claim, Rupp observes that when China, in an attempt to respond to South African concerns, withdrew its imports of textiles from South Africa, a key African market for China, this led not to a relaunch of South African businesses, but to an opening for cheap imports from Bangladesh and Vietnam. This example suggests ‘that in the twenty-first century Africa is being buffeted by the broader challenges of globalisation, rather than by specific competition from China’ (ibid.). China's development and infrastructure projects also depart from the classic model of colonialism and are part of a concerted effort to target people in rural communities and those whose lives are directly affected by the presence of Chinese extractive industries.
In tackling the question of imperialism, Horace Campbell writes:
Chinese banks, oil companies, insurance companies, construction conglomerates and trading firms do not yet have the kind of self-confidence and track record to act with imperial impunity, as did the more robust and experienced imperialist entities from those societies that underdeveloped Africa. (Campbell 2008, 102)
Campbell goes on to say that:
The other area where the interests converge is on reparations. China has been forthright in its call for the Japanese to rewrite its textbooks to reflect a different account of the Japanese occupation of China. African activists share the same goal of calling on Europe and the USA to repair their relations with Africa after centuries of the slave trade and colonialism. (Campbell 2008, 103)
Although Rupp and Campbell are persuasive in defense of China, it must be noted that there is a tendency for all material relations between actors of differing power to be exploitative. In terms of contemporary capitalism, David Harvey (2003, 2006) has convincingly argued that increasing reliance on accumulation by dispossession is an in-built and ongoing feature operating in concert with capitalist accumulation. Therefore, with the lessons of the first scramble for Africa in mind, Africans ought to remain guarded against (neo)imperialism and (re)colonisation.
The struggle against recolonisation requires a sophisticated analysis of how new imperialism operates in sub-Saharan Africa in the current conjuncture. Embracing such an analysis requires critical theorists to move beyond the anachronistic belief that an acknowledgement of a tendency toward exploitation necessarily suggests the classical theory of imperialism. In particular, it is incorrect to assume that late nineteenth and early twentieth century theories of inter-imperialist rivalry have saliency in the context of the new scramble for African resources. To bolster his claim of a new rivalry, Campbell quotes German Chancellor Merkel as saying: ‘We Europeans should not leave the continent of Africa to the People's Republic of China… We must take a stand in Africa’ (Campbell 2008, 92, citing Godoy 2006). However, while Campbell implies that this quotation is evidence of rivalry, it turns out that he has taken the Chancellor's words out of context. In the source, an article in the Asia Times by Julio Godoy, the two sentences in this quote are separate. From the article, it is clear that Merkel, speaking to a conference on urban development, makes the first remark to encourage continued responsibility for Africa's development (Godoy 2006). With the call to take a stand, which in Godoy's article is unconnected to the first assertion, Merkel is actually calling for fair extraction of natural resources and sustainable development.
Rupp writes that due to recent American and European moves in Africa (e.g., the creation of AFRICOM and the EU–Africa Summit), it ‘is clear that China, Europe, and the United States are engaged in a triangular competition for influence in Africa’ (2008, 67). This statement highlights the problem of different meanings of the word ‘competition’ at play in analyses of China and the West in Africa. For some authors, competition evokes the inter-imperialist rivalry of the past, while for others it merely signifies the competition inherent in the global capitalist system. This connotative difference raises an important question about the bases upon which it is assumed that China's role will be in opposition to that of America and Europe and the basis upon which it is assumed that China has different motivations than the West. While there clearly is a scramble for African resources, this scramble requires more nuance in analysis than the classical theory of imperialism allows for.
China and new imperialism in Angola
For Harvey, new imperialism is defined by the domination of capitalist logic of accumulation. In his 1982 book The Limits to Capital (2006), Harvey expands the ‘first-cut’ theory of crises of overaccumulation based on Marx's theory of the tendency of the profit rate to fall. He does this firstly by integrating temporal dynamics introduced by the credit system (the ‘second-cut’ theory of crises) and secondly by integrating social space under capitalist relations of production and exchange into the theory of crises through the concept of uneven geographical development (the ‘third cut’ theory of crises). New imperialism, through the lens of Harvey's theory of crises, can be viewed as a powerful conceptual apparatus for understanding imperialism under capitalist social relations.
In Limits, imperialism and continued exploitation under capitalism is explained as a ‘spatial fix’ for the contradictions of capitalism (Harvey by 2003 had renamed ‘spatial fix’ to the more accurate ‘spatio-temporal fix’). As Harvey writes: ‘Centres exploit peripheries, metropolis exploit hinterlands, the first world subjugates and mercilessly exploits the third, underdevelopment is imposed from without, and so on’ (2006, 439). In The New Imperialism (2003), Harvey explains further. Following Arendt, he argues that endless capital accumulation requires the state to ‘endlessly seek to extend, expand, and intensify its power’ through geographical expansion and spatial reorganisation (2003, 43).
Continued exploitation and plunder under the capitalist mode of production resembles what Marx refers to as ‘primitive accumulation’. However, since he views it as peculiar to call an ongoing process ‘primitive’, Harvey (2003) terms the wide range of processes used to plunder wealth under capitalism ‘accumulation by dispossession’. China's recolonisation of Africa, though it involves a compromise with domestic elites that may produce very different developmental outcomes and potentials than European imperialism in the first scramble for Africa and Euro-American neo-colonialism, must be understood as accumulation by dispossession. Using Angola as a case study, it will be shown that accumulation by dispossession is an important and meaningful concept for understanding China's engagement with Africa.
Rather than focusing on the size of China's massive loans to Africa, the political economy of China in Angola begins with the simple question of asking who benefits from these loans and what effect China is having on Angolan development/underdevelopment. Angolans are keenly aware of the positives and negatives of China's role in its post-war reconstruction. The almost exclusive use of Chinese labour, Chinese firms (including subcontractors), and Chinese materials in projects financed by Exim Bank, despite provisions that 30% of the value of the contracts will go to Angolan firms, along with the lack of significant technology transfer from Chinese investment, demonstrate the most obvious ways in which Angolan reconstruction benefits the Chinese. In turn, Angolans are well aware of the strong possibility that their own government officials may be privately benefitting from the opaque deals with China.
On the one hand, the roads, bridges, and other infrastructure being built are sorely needed in a country devastated by decades of war, while investments in schools and hospitals are investments in Angolan's human capacity. China's new role in Angola has brought the financing needed for the country's reconstruction and significant investment has been made in key sectors of the economy. Journeys that once took most of a day can now be completed in a few hours and neighbourhoods are being connected to national power grids for the first time. Chinese assistance is having a real impact on people's everyday lives – not only through their credit facilities but also through cheap access to scooters, electric generators, and countless other products that have increased the average person's buying power and standard of living.
Highlighting the ways in which Chinese trade and investment is having an impact on the average Angolan, one Angolan living in Cabinda Province noted:
My personal opinion, not being aware of the numbers of the amount of money coming from China, is that what counts are results in everyday life. What we see with Chinese projects is that they make quick results for the population of the country and we are noticing a lot of improvement because of Chinese cooperation. I have to accept these changes are bringing a benefit to the community.8
Through the Angolan Ministry of Finance, details were made available about the public works undertaken with financing from China Exim Bank and completed prior to the 2008 national election.9 The projects included several large irrigation projects, electrification projects, and the construction of several new health clinics, hospitals, schools, polytechnics, and agricultural institutes. Although the government has been less transparent since the election in updating the data, there is little doubt that the projects are having a major impact on the country. Concerns remain over the implementation of the project, with key concerns including wasteful spending, stories of which abound in Angola. Some of the worst examples are in the government programmes to promote industry, agriculture, and fisheries, which often fail due to a large-scale modernisationist approach that went out of style decades ago. However, in a country that is defined by a system that Steve Kibble (2006) has called the ‘the politics of disorder’, elites, defined by their relationship to presidential patronage, are the main beneficiaries of government investment.
China plays a key role, not only in providing opportunities for corruption, but also in allowing the government to avoid popular demands for substantive and participatory democracy. One very well-connected Angolan journalist I spoke with complained to me that ‘accountability is awful with the Chinese’. A economy correspondent for one of the most important news sources in the country, he admitted he had no idea how much money Angola has got from China, but concluded that it is highly likely that powerful people are gaining from Chinese loans.10
In explaining uneven development under capitalism, Harvey writes:
Imperialistic practices, from the perspective of capitalist logic, are typically about exploiting the uneven geographical conditions under which capital accumulation occurs and also taking advantage of what I call the ‘asymmetries’ that inevitably arise out of spatial exchange relations. The latter get expressed through unfair and unequal exchange, spatially articulated monopoly powers, extortionate practices attached to restricted capital flows, and the extraction of monopoly rents. (Harvey 2003, 31)
Interestingly, the Chinese have been accused of engaging in all of these practices in Angola, although the biggest beneficiaries of their employment may actually be the Angolan elite. China's business dealings in Angola's oil sector are obscured behind a murky relationship involving Sonangol, Sinopec, and the quasi-private Chinese firms that have come to be known as the ‘88 Queensway Group’, after their common Hong Kong business address (Levkowitz et al 2009). China's business dealings in the Angolan oil sector highlight the worst aspects of how the Chinese benefit from a lack of transparency and accountability and how they have been quietly building a kind of indirect empire through the activities of supposedly private Chinese firms. After losing out in earlier attempts to gain stakes in the Angolan oil sector,11 Sinopec turned to a man named Xu Jinghua (also known as ‘Sam’), whose connections to Angola date back to his involvement in selling arms to the government during the civil war.12 His association to Angola's President may date back even further to an association from their days as students in the Soviet Union (Economist 2011; Brautigam 2009, 372). Sinopec's move led to the entry of the ‘88 Queensway Group’ into Angola and into the oil sector. The US–China Economic and Security Review Commission (Levkowitz et al. 2009) and Chatham House (Vines et al. 2009) have produced detailed reports on the group, naming several individuals connected to the group. Chatham House names Xu Jinghua as Director of China Beiya Escom, Board Chairman of Dayuan, and Board Chairman of the China International Fund (CIF), while the Congressional report produced by Levkowitz et al. make several attempts to connect Sam and his empire to the Chinese state and its security apparatus.
In Angola, in addition to CIF, ‘Sam’ is in charge of a group of companies called ‘China Sonangol’, including China Sonangol International Holdings Ltd (CSIH) and China Sonangol (Shanghai) Petroleum Co, Ltd, which on the ground in Angola are one in the same. Under ‘Sam's’ direct control, China Sonangol has investments in many countries including Gabon, Guinea, Tanzania and Zimbabwe in crude oil, minerals, manufacturing and construction. China Sonangol's investments in diamond mining in Zimbabwe, have been acknowledged by Sonangol's CEO Manuel Vicente in Sonangol's glossy publication Sonangol Universo (2011). ‘Sam’ has also recently been accused of providing funding and material support to the Zanu–PF and the notorious Zimbabwean Central Intelligence Organisation (Swain 2011) and appears to be behind the funding of new airplanes for Air Zimbabwe (Africa–Asia Confidential 2011), all the while shoring up access to valuable mineral resources.
While Chatham House's report on China and Africa distinguishes between CSIH and Sonangol–Sinopec International (SSI), the same individual from the China Sonangol (Shanghai) Petroleum Co, Ltd has represented SSI and China Sonangol at group meetings for partners in the blocks held by both companies, possibly the source of confusion about whether certain blocks were actually held by China Sonangol or SSI.13 In late 2009, Sinopec bought a majority stake in SSI and it now appears that they are integrating their own staff members into SSI, while ‘Sam’ retains control of both CIF and China Sonangol. Although there have been reports of a fractured relationship between China and Angola, notably after the government blocked Marathon's sale of 20% of Block 32 to CNOOC and Sinopec, it appears that many signs that were taken as evidence of a growing rift may have been a simple reorganisation of assets between Sinopec and the 88 Queensway Group. While Sonangol exercised its right to buy back the 20% stake in Block 32, one source confided to me that the stake ended up going to China regardless. This assertion was later confirmed by the company's CEO, Manuel Vicente (Sonangol 2010).
The heavy involvement of private Chinese companies in Angola's oil industry and indeed the entire project of Angolan reconstruction, in which China plays a central role, allows the Angolan elite – particularly those who are well connected to the ruling party, the MPLA, and the military – to maintain privileged positions within the Angolan state and Angolan society. Tony Hodges (2004), in his well-known political economy of Angola, foresaw that the Angolan elite were shifting their strategies of accumulation from the more crude methods of the past and to more sophisticated strategy involving integration into domestic and international circuits of capital. As a result, these elite have cultivated fantastic new opportunities to accumulate wealth. On the other hand, CIF has also been involved in bringing new industrial development to Angola in sectors as diverse as cement production and automobile assembly. This accomplishment has led one of the most well-respected Angolan development practitioners to comment that Chinese investment is actually better for the majority of Angolans than investment from Brazil or Portugal.14
Multiple sources in Angola (both Angolan and Chinese) confirm that many, if not most, Chinese civil construction projects are actually completed at a loss – both by state construction firms and by CIF.15 The fact that these companies are willing to carry out projects at a loss suggests that these projects are part of the compromise the Chinese state and Chinese capital are making with the Angolan elite to allow Angola to be both a continued supplier of natural resources and a consumer of Chinese finished commodities. Sonangol's interference in the open sale of Marathon's asset to CNOOC/Sinopec and under the table awarding of it to China–Sonangol (whose Angolan ownership is unknown) highlights not only the differences between different Chinese actors, but also the tendency for the worst aspects of the accumulation of wealth and power by a small elite to thrive in the intersection between oil, geopolitics, and the recolonisation of Africa by what is more rightly understood not as an ‘empire of capital’ but empires of capital. While Chinese imperialism may have more benefit for average citizens, the vast majority of the benefit accrues to African elites and their Chinese partners.
Conclusion
That ‘China’ is not one actor in Angola but many necessitates a ‘both/and’ answer to the question of the effect of China's involvement in the country. China represents a potential solution to many of Angola's most pressing needs while it reinforces some of the most objectionable practices of its elites. Unlike in previous eras of imperialism, China's engagement with Africa offers a real potential benefit. Angola can and does share in a rent-surplus extracted from its natural wealth. While it would be foolish to suggest that such extraction does not involve both dispossession and degradation, it would also be foolish to ignore the potential benefit of that surplus for one of the most underdeveloped countries in the world. It is through the operation of this premise, exemplified in the Angolan case and visible throughout sub-Saharan Africa, that a new moment can be imagined and understood – as both a moment of opportunity and of dispossession.
Although presented as ‘either/or’, the dual outcomes are well-captured by Deborah Brautigam (2008), who understands the opportunity for increased industrialisation as a model of ‘flying geese’ and the dispossession as a danger of a ‘hidden dragon’.16 The ‘flying geese’ model represents the Japanese example of moving actual production from Japan to other countries (as in the example of Japanese textile production being moved to Thailand). This follows a logic of what Harvey (2006) called ‘relative locational advantage’. In the flying geese model, the Japanese then established joint ventures with locals and eventually sold their stakes in the industry altogether, leaving it to locals. However, with China, Brautigam writes, there is a real danger of the ‘hidden dragon’ – that Chinese exports could simply contribute to deindustrialisation, which has been ongoing since the imposition of trade liberalisation in Africa.
Whether Chinese engagement leads to economic growth or deindustrialisation may depend not as much on the Chinese model as on internal dynamics within particular African states. As the Angolan case demonstrates, surplus appropriation and dispossession are at their worst in oil economies. The accumulation of wealth by the Angolan elite has so altered the balance of power in Angola that civil society is struggling to push for a redistribution that would allow the majority of the population to share in that wealth in a meaningful way. This moment for Angola and for Africa is pregnant with the possibility of significant economic growth and development – a possibility that has not seemed as real to many of its citizens for many years as it does now. The important question, being asked over and over again by Angola's small yet determined civil society organisations, is to whom those beneficial results will accrue.
The recolonisation of Africa is a capitalist project. Just as there are varieties of capitalism, there were varieties of colonialism – British, French, German, and Portuguese colonialism in Africa operated according to very different logics and had different outcomes on the ground for Africans. Although the new scramble for Africa is one that is situated wholly within the framework of capitalist accumulation and recolonisation by empires of capital that come from both the east and the West, Africans must be cognisant of the differences between Euro-American and Chinese imperialisms in order to struggle against the different yet similarly unjust social relations inherent in each.
Note on contributor
Jesse Salah Ovadia recently completed his PhD in Political Science from York University in Toronto, Canada. His dissertation focused on oil and development in Angola and Nigeria. Jesse's work has been published in New Political Economy, Canadian Journal of African Studies, and Journal of Contemporary African Studies. Jesse has been a consultant for the DFID project Facility for Oil Sector Transparency and Reform in Nigeria (FOSTER) and is a Researcher at the York Centre for International and Security Studies.