This outstanding volume starts on an unequivocally positive note. Robert Rotberg begins his wide-ranging introduction with the words “China and Africa desperately need one another. China cannot easily grow without Africa. Nor can Sub-Saharan Africa subsist, and now prosper, without China.” What follows, however, not least from Rotberg himself, raises questions about that enthusiastic generalization, but most of all informs.
Fourteen chapters are brought together. All are excellent. Space precludes kudos for each. Wenran Jiang looks at strategic partnerships, of which China really has only five or six (sub-Saharan Africa contains 48 states): with Angola, Sudan, Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, Congo and South Africa. Harry G. Broadman is enormously informative on China and Africa as a model of south–south trade. Martyn J. Davies looks at the Chinese-built Special Economic Zones in Africa but fails to note that whereas the original model, developed in Taiwan by Y. K. Yin and other economists, provided an opportunity for local companies to compete in an international market outside the tariff wall and thus fostered development, China's purpose seems to be to source African and world markets. Veteran diplomat David H. Shinn's summary of military and security relations between China and African states is outstanding. Joshua Eisenman on the activities of the Chinese Communist Party's little known but critically important International Department helps to supply a political context for actions that most read, uncritically, as economic. The case study of China in Nigeria, by Ndubisi Obiorah, Darren Kew and Yusuf Tanko is remarkable.
That said, like any collection of essays, this one suffers from ever shifting focus and lack of clearly defined themes. Thus one may ask whether Africa as Africa is not in fact incidental to the story, which is really one of China's attempt to secure resources overseas. Raw materials – petroleum, minerals and agricultural products – are fully 86 per cent of African exports to China. In many cases these are extracted by Chinese government-owned firms, employing Chinese workers for even the most simple tasks, separated from the reality of Africa by walled compounds and what Rotberg perceptively calls “the profound Chinese disdain for Africa and Africans” (p. 12). (By contrast, Chevron's work force is 88 per cent local in Angola, as is Total's.) Africa is also a market for Chinese goods: 36 per cent of her exports to the continent are textiles, apparel, and footwear. Indigenous African companies have difficulty competing. We learn that in the 1980s Nigeria had about 175 textile plants employing roughly 250,000 workers; by 2007 only 26 remained employing 24,000 people.
No author quite comes out and says as much, but the evidence suggests that the real driver here is not Africa, but rather China's ever-growing need for resources, exacerbated by the abject inefficiency of her energy usage and other aspects of industry. China is now the world's second largest petroleum importer and Africa simply happens to be the place China has chosen to look for it. Ambassador Shinn outlines how the strategy of obtaining vital raw materials from abroad is in turn creating a felt need to secure that supply chain militarily, by means of overseas bases and a blue-water navy.
This strategy makes little sense, militarily or economically. Thus oil loaded at Port Sudan must move through an obstacle course of choke points, straits and waters under potentially hostile control before reaching China, perhaps 6,000 miles away. No Chinese navy, or American navy for that matter, will be able to keep the sea lanes open from Sudan to China given the slightest hostility.
All of which suggests that political considerations may be at work here, at least as much as economic. No one in the volume adequately recapitulates China's inspired and highly successful African diplomacy of roughly the 1960s, aimed at creating a sufficiently numerous group of friends to break the hold that the USSR and the US had on many issues and to open the way to diplomatic recognition by France.
Ultimately the book is at odds with itself. Rotberg observes at the beginning that “Africa and China, in Auden's terms, have at last met….” The reference is to the poem “As I Walked Out One Evening” which reports the pledges of a lover overheard: “I'll love you/Till China and Africa meet/And the river jumps over the mountain/And the salmon sing in the street” (November 1937) – which is to say always, as the meeting of China and Africa is flatly impossible. Of course they have met, but the book is full of enough shadows: waste of resources, dumping of manufactured goods, military supply to corrupt regimes warring with one another or their own people, to put a check on the seeming optimism with which it began. Whatever happens, Julius Nyerere, who knew China as well as any African, will not be proven wrong. The two are “most unequal equals.”
