China has financed, developed or operates 35 big African ports and thousands of miles of roads and railway lines. However, many worry that China is losing interest in Africa
In truth, relations between African countries and China are rather less sunny and far less equal. But they are deep. China has financed, developed or operates 35 big African ports and thousands of miles of roads and railways. Trade in goods between Africa and China, which reached almost $200bn in 2019, far surpasses that with America . Infrastructure loans have made China Africa’s biggest bilateral creditor.
The shrinking promises of future largesse match what is already happening on the ground. In 2019 Chinese lending to Africa fell to $7bn from a peak of $28bn in 2016, according to the China-Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins University. This is partly because several African countries struggled to repay their loans and asked China for debt relief. Meanwhile Chinese construction and engineering firms’ African revenues have been sliding steadily since 2015.
Yet money is not the only thing that China has to offer to cement its links to African countries. Its policy of non-interference in domestic affairs means it is just as happy dealing with despots as it is with democrats . It trumpets this by saying that its aid comes without political strings attached, though in fact it expects countries getting Chinese aid to support it in international organisations and to suppress criticism about its own abuses of human rights.
Even so, China’s help is now less distinctive than it was in the past, when it was more willing than other donors to finance big infrastructure projects aimed at helping Africa industrialise, laments Carlos Lopes, an economist at the University of Cape Town. These days “it’s about Africa as a consumption market,” he says.
Even as China’s involvement in Africa begins to look more like the West’s, Western countries are starting to mimic China. On a recent visit to Nigeria Antony Blinken, America’s secretary of state, sounded almost Chinese when he said America had provided vaccines against covid-19 “with no political strings attached”. This week the
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