Look to Africa to see China’s ambitions in the Pacific

The first visit of a Chinese foreign minister each year is to Africa. For the past three decades, China’s top envoys have begun each new year with a flurry of deals and pledges of cooperation on one of the world’s poorest continents.

“As a friend of Africa, China will never sit by,” Foreign Minister Wang Yi said after landing in Kenya in January.

An employee of China Water & Electric Corp welds pipework at the construction site of the Gwayi-Shangani dam, 245km north-west of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, in June.Credit: Bloomberg

Beijing is now Africa’s largest creditor and financier of infrastructure. Examples are a $2.8 billion gas extraction and pipeline in Angola, a $850 million hydropower plant in Guinea and a $373 million Kpong water supply project.

China is now responsible for a third of all infrastructure projects on the continent. Annual trade between the two has grown by $142 billion since 2009.

China’s actions in Africa tell us not just about how it views the continent, but about its plans for the rest of the world.

“China is trying to make Africa play the same role in relation to China as the role that China has played for the last 30 years in relation to the West,” says Nadège Rolland a senior fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research who released a report documenting 50 years of China’s pursuit of influence in Africa in June.

Nadège Rolland, senior fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research in Washington, warns that China’s ambitions have not waned during the pandemic.

“They are increasing the dependence of countries in the developing world on China and creating a Sino-centric order so that the West doesn’t have the means to condemn, punish and sanction China.”

China’s investments have so far had three major impacts. First, they have helped build some much-needed infrastructure that Western governments, the World Bank and other international institutions could not or would not finance. Second, they have burnished China’s reputation in Africa – it is now enjoying approval ratings higher than the United States among young Africans, driving its diplomatic clout among developing countries. Third, they have helped some local communities and devastated others who say they have been driven into debt, had their resources plundered and relatives killed.

Western governments and companies have centuries of their own shameful history in Africa, but Chinese operators – backed by China’s state apparatus – are now the dominant international force on this continent. They face minimal scrutiny in what is becoming an increasingly vital contest to win control of multilateral institutions and global supply chains.

An aerial view of the Chinese-built Souapiti Hydropower dam in Guinea.Credit: GTC

On Thursday, Blood Gold, a Sydney Morning Herald and The Age investigation revealed a small community in northern Ghana had lost dozens of its miners killed inside Chinese state-linked mine Shaanxi. The same mine allegedly stole millions of dollars of gold by digging underneath the Australian mine Cassius next door. The local Gban villagers’ pleas for compensation have fallen on deaf ears, left to local authorities vulnerable to corruption. It is an allegory for a familiar story across Africa where billions of dollars worth of natural resources are being smuggled out, while many communities struggle to access basic services such as electricity and running water.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, local miners and the government are now locked in a bitter dispute with Chinese state-backed miner China Molybdenum over allegations it had been under-reporting its exports, robbing the country and its companies of $10 billion in royalties.

Chinese operators – backed by China’s state apparatus – are now the dominant international force on this continent.

Beijing did not stumble on its African investments by chance. It got there through a mixture of long-term planning and commercial opportunism. What was always seen as a lucrative stream of international partners under former leaders Mao Zedong (who thanked his African brothers for carrying China into the United Nations Security Council in 1971) and Deng Xiaoping (who relied on African governments for international support after the Tiananmen Square massacre) has had its status elevated under Xi Jinping.

In 2012, Xi made it clear to his foreign policy advisors that he expected a more ambitious plan for China’s global rise when he settled into the presidential compound in Zhongnanhai.

His advisors called it “advancing westward” and set their sights on Africa. Five years later, the same program was rebranded as the Belt and Road Initiative, the trillion-dollar infrastructure investment vehicle that now also spans Asia, the Pacific, Middle East and South and Central America. China said last week it would waive 23 interest-free loans to 17 African countries that are part of the initiative. It maintains this is due to its genuine interest in third-world development and poverty alleviation.

Feng Weijiang, a deputy director at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences defined China’s diplomatic future in Great-Power Diplomacy with Chinese Characteristics in 2016.

“Great powers are the key, China’s periphery is the priority, developing countries are the foundation, multilateralism is the stage,” he said.

The same principles now guide China’s actions in the Pacific, where it is courting diplomatic, security and economic partners like Solomon Islands to buttress its position and guard against threats to its rising status as a superpower.

“In the great game set out by the West to ‘contain and squeeze’ China’s strategic space, Beijing should look for opportunities to strike the enemy in places where it is more vulnerable,” said Zhang Hongming, an Africa researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

In China, they call it “encircling the cities from the countryside,” says Rolland.

China has targeted Africa, and now the Pacific, both areas where the US and the West have lost political, economic and diplomatic capital in recent decades.

“These are the games that great powers play,” says Professor Adekaya Adebajo from the University of Pretoria.

“There’s both a strategic political dimension to what China is trying to do. And of course, there’s an economic dimension to try and make sure that its sources of raw materials are guaranteed.”

Rolland says this push has accelerated since the war in Ukraine and amid rising volatility over the Taiwan Strait.

“What China has been doing for the past decade is really paying a premium to continue to get access to energy, natural resources and markets to disentangle itself from the West so that it can continue to survive even if there are increased tensions.”

Adebajo says African nations have been receptive after growing wary of the West’s pledges of “democracy and hope”.

“I don’t think Western governments necessarily go around spreading those systems abroad. I think they often flout their principles when it comes to foreign policy. We see the West support basically autocratic leaders in the same way that China does, sometimes even worse.”

Africa is now in a stronger negotiating position, both geopolitically and economically (Africa will have an 800 million-strong middle class by 2040). But Adebajo says the leaders of its 54 nations must get smarter and tougher.

“If Africans can learn to negotiate in a multilateral way it would be much better,” he says. “China is able to pick them off if they’re negotiating bilaterally.”

In May, Beijing attempted to split the Pacific Island Forum. The multilateral bloc resisted China’s efforts to negotiate security deals in return for economic investment with separate nations and eventually rejected its proposal for a region-wide agreement because it was not in the Pacific’s best interests.

Crucially, Adebajo says, if Beijing wants to transform Africa into the manufacturing, services and resources development base it has been for the West for the past four decades, it needs to transfer its technology.

“China has very effectively forced Western countries and companies that have invested in China to transfer the technology that has helped China to develop its own industries,” he says.

“More Africans need to get China to transfer technology rather [to them] than just building infrastructure to take raw materials out to the port. That was what colonialism was for centuries.”

In the middle of these economic and geopolitical manoeuvres are the villages that have to deal with the consequences.

In Gban, few residents are thinking about the great power games that helped bring a Chinese state-linked mine to their home.

Some mourn their sons lost to the mine. Others hope they have enough food to last until next week.

“I’m just waiting for death to come and take me to where my son is so I can join him there. I can’t work. I’m too weak,” says local mother Kekensomah Paha, who lost her son in the Shaanxi mine in 2019.

“As it stands now, we are being compelled to accept the situation because there is no support. The only thing we are sure of as I speak is that it is when death comes we will be free from this grief.”

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