IS CHINA AFRICA’S ONLY CHANCE?

by Mátyás Kohán

To China, Africa is the land of opportunity along the lines of what America used to be to Europe: a place where they can fetch resources, export goods and surplus workforce, get a local economy up to speed while supersizing their own, and then leave it up to the co-opted local elites to make of it what they will.

The possible outcomes are the same old ones, too: in Rwanda and pre-war Ethiopia, with average GDP growth rates of 5.23 per cent and 9.1 per cent respectively, Chinese investment has fuelled the take-off phase of the same capitalist miracle that made Canada and the US great. And in other, more resource-rich African countries, where corrupt local governments are handing over their countries’ treasures to China for a pittance to the budget and fat bribes for themselves, it’s hard not to see the parallels with some less lucky polities in Latin America that are strangled by their dependent capitalism.

We are often too quick to write off China’s African adventures as “neocolonialism” or “debt-trap diplomacy”. But that’s a fallacy, and so is the example most used to back it up: the case of recently-defaulted Sri Lanka. Despite having struck gargantuan infrastructure deals with China, Chinese creditors only held around 20 per cent of Sri Lanka’s public debt when it defaulted last spring. Chinese lending was hardly to blame for the woes of a state that had been mismanaged for so long at that point.

China has actually offered to this long-ignored continent, cynically abused by its own colonial masters as testing grounds for the Cold War development industry, a path towards substantial

Source: OEC, World Bank, Statista research Graphic: Alexandra Érsek-Csanádi change. It’s far from perfect, of course: it’s lined with the interests of an overpopulated superpower that’s vying for hydrocarbons, rare earths and arable land. But it’s a viable offer. And for many African countries, it’s the only one on the table at this time. No one keeps other powers from sketching up a better one.

The author is a foreign policy journalist