China's Mixed Role in Africa

CHINA is transforming Africa, for good and ill. The United States and other traditional trading and aid partners of Africa need to help Africans craft policies that welcome Chinese investment and trade but condemn the taking of African jobs and the destruction of African industries. Africa and the West also need to dissuade China from supporting Africa's most reviled dictatorships.

China has become the largest new investor, trader, buyer, and aid donor in a raft of African countries and a major new economic force in sub-Saharan Africa . Chinese trade with Africa is growing at 50 percent a year. Already, that trade has jumped in value from $10 billion in 2000 to $25 billion last year. (US trade with sub-Saharan Africa in 2005 totaled nearly $61 billion.) China is building roads, railways, harbors, petrochemical installations, and military barracks; it is pumping oil, farming, taking trees, supplying laborers, and offering physicians. A number of African nations now depend critically on Chinese cash and initiative.

Growing rapidly and bursting out of its long underdeveloped cocoon to become a major world power and global economic source, China needs sources of energy and the raw materials --including copper, cobalt, cadmium, magnesium, platinum, nickel, lead, zinc, coltan, titanium --that African nations can supply. China competes with the United States for Angola's oil, controls most of the Sudan's oil, and is exploring for oil onshore and offshore in five other African countries. It is a major purchaser of timber from West Africa.

President Hu Jintao of China has visited Africa three times since 2003. China has embassies in more African countries than does the United States.

China is a force for GDP growth in Africa, but it also is a modern colonial colossus intent on stripping Africa of its wealth without leaving sustainable structures behind. A flood of cheap goods, especially textiles and apparel, has already begun to undermine and bankrupt local industry, forcing hundreds of thousands of Africans out of work.

The use of imported Chinese rather than local labor to build roads, mines, and factories -- a common phenomenon -- deprives Africans of employment opportunities.

In many cases, China has also buttressed the harsh rule of indigenous authoritarian governments. China implicitly backs odious regimes, propping some of them up, supplying corrupt rents to many, and always reinforcing a regime's least participatory instincts. In the Sudan, Zimbabwe, and elsewhere, China is supporting regimes condemned by the United Nations and world leaders. It supplies small arms and other weapons -- sometimes aircraft -- indiscriminately, and in defiance of UN strictures.

China respects local sovereignty. But given the genocide in Darfur, isn't influencing the Khartoum government to end mayhem a potentially better strategy than the one of laissez-faire complicity? By leaning on the Sudan over Darfur, China could win friends and partners in Africa and around the world without losing a source of oil.

The same logic holds true with regard to Zimbabwe, where China is the main buttress of the cruel and corrupt government of President Robert Mugabe. Good deeds now would unlock the potential of Africa for China. They would raise China's moral stature and emphasize its selfprofessed break with earlier colonial endeavors. Doing so would also lessen threats of a potential boycott of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

Africans have so far been uncertain how best to respond to China. Neither the African Union nor sub regional organizations like the Southern African Development Community have an articulated policy regarding China and Chinese influence. Each of the 48 sub-Saharan countries goes its own way, responding to China and Chinese entreaties (or Taiwanese in five cases) idiosyncratically.

The African petroleum producers, the African hard mineral producers, and the African vulnerable industrial cases would each benefit by developing specific policies toward China and by bargaining with China on the basis of such new functional groupings. Africa surely needs policies regarding the importation of Chinese laborers, special taxation privileges or not for Chinese firms (many are state owned), and protection or not for domestically produced goods. That complaint drove Zambian and Nigerian protesters earlier this year.

Africans welcome Chinese aid -- a promised $20 billion -- because it comes without immediately obvious strings (the Taiwanese question aside). For that reason, and because the Chinese espouse fundamentally different approaches to governance questions than the West does, the West (and Africa) should now encourage China to embrace positive principles for Africa's growth. China is a possible force for good in Africa; the West should help harness that potential.

Robert I. Rotberg is director of the Kennedy School of Government's Program on Intrastate Conflict and president of the World Peace Foundation.