Another Perspective On China In Africa

In this blog post Dr Shou Huisheng, Senior Fellow at the Statecraft Institution, and Research Fellow at the National Strategy Institute, Tsinghua University, points out some common misconceptions about China’s role on the African continent.

He argues Chinese state activities in Africa are mistakenly understood through the lens of neo-colonialism. There may be something to this idea. UCLA professor Ching Kwan Lee spent six years doing fieldwork in copper mines and on construction sites in Zambia for her 2017 book The Specter of Global China. She concluded that “Chinese state investment presents unique potential and perils for African development” which are distinct from those posed by “global private capital”. She found Chinese companies (often with close relationships to the Chinese state) showed a tendency to favor lasting ties with government and industry in Zambia over short-term profits.

Shou’s post raises important questions about how we understand Chinese investment in African countries, but short of rather vague references to development, he doesn’t pin down China’s objectives on the continent. He argues that quantitative research is the route to understanding the relationship between China and Africa and laments the lack of such studies. Interestingly, Shou points to domestic public opinion as a potential factor in the CCPs failure to provide statistics on its activities on the African continent:

Strands of [public opinion] see China’s involvement in Africa as “handing free gifts to other countries” while many regions of China are still relatively poor.

Shou’s post should be treated with caution. He makes some useful points about the exaggerations and inaccuracies which underpin a neo-colonial framing of China’s activities in Africa. But when it comes to accounting for China’s objectives on the continent he presumes ‘development’ to be a sufficient explanation—that’s not going to fly with readers familiar with the contentious history of foreign aid.