China and Africa: A Case in ‘Petro Politics’
BY MARCEL KITISSOU
China has forged extensive political, economic and military ties with most of the fifty-four African countries, in part to secure a stable oil supply. However, the implications of “petro politics” for the stability of the African countries concerned may not always be positive.
China’s trade with the continent has tripled since 2000, from $10.6 billion to nearly $30 billion. However, China’s presence in Africa is far from being a new phenomenon. Beijing has been present on the continent since the 1950s, supporting revolutionary and independence movements, balancing the influence of the former Soviet Union, and countering the West. Since the end of the Cold War era, business ventures have replaced military activities.
China is rebuilding the railroad network in Nigeria. It paved more than 80 percent of the main roads in Rwanda, and its firms are exploring for oil and gas and rebuilding electricity grids and telephone networks in more than a dozen countries. One of Zambia’s largest copper mines is owned by Chinese companies, and a major timber operation in Equatorial Guinea is under Chinese businessmen’s management. In Lesotho, nearly half of all supermarkets and a handful of textile companies are run by Chinese. China has also established economic and political ties with Ethiopia, a non-oil producing but strategically located country whose capital, Addis Ababa, is headquarters of the Africa Union.
China voluntarily waived $1.2 billion in sovereign African debt in 2000; the same year, the China-Africa Cooperation Forum (CACF) was formed with forty-four African countries. Following the 2002 CACF Ministerial Meeting, an African Human Resource Development Fund was created exclusively to train African personnel. A subsequent forum held in Addis Ababa created a three-year program to train 10,000 Africans in a variety of fields. In 2004 alone, China invested almost $10 billion on African oil. China is now represented by 602 businesses in forty-nine of the fifty-four countries on the continent. Officially, the raison d’etre for that cooperation is to build strong ties. However, to understand that ideological discourse, one should first look at Chinese domestic needs and international challenges.
In 2003, China was the top buyer of cement in the world, importing 55 percent of global production. Additionally, it bought coal (40 percent), steel (25 percent), nickel (25 percent), and aluminum (14 percent). In 2004, it was the 2nd largest importer of oil after the United States, with Africa supplying 28.7 percent of its crude oil. It is expected that by 2030, China’s consumption of energy will equal the current combined consumption of Japan and the United States. The inability to supply enough energy for this gargantuan growth means either domestic instability or increased imports of foreign oil. By 2030, China will need an extra 8 million barrels of imported oil per day, according to Richard Orange, “requiring a supplier the size of Saudi Arabia to meet demand.”
As a result, China has begun to consider oil procurement a matter of national security, using all state resources to satisfy the nation’s need for energy. Michael Klare in his recent book, Blood and Oil, noted that, “To quench its growing thirst for petroleum, China will have no choice but to turn to the same source the United States has: the Persian Gulf, the Caspian Sea basin, and Africa. And because Beijing is no less concerned about the security of its imports from these areas than Washington is, it will likely pursue a similar policy of plying oil-producing regimes with arms, advisers, and military technology.” As David Zweig and Bi Jianhai wrote in the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs, “Another important feature of Beijing’s resource based policy is that it has little room for morality.
This explains the current Chinese policy in Sudan: supporting oil contracts with military equipment, and trying to soften UN sanctions against Khartoum for gross human rights violations in Darfur. “What’s more, many Chinese companies operating in Africa are government owned and less concerned with near term profits. Indeed, by reaching out to African leaders who are shunned by Western nations, and throwing money at projects Western companies avoid, Chinese officials and businessmen say they are able to secure more business deals and build political influence at a far more rapid pace…. A similar pattern is now playing out in Zimbabwe.” China has established ties with regimes of the Gulf of Guinea from Nigeria to Angola, and others such as Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Libya, Niger, and Sudan where, reportedly, it has 4,000 nonuniformed troops to ensure the security of its oil- producing facilities
These policies have some problematic implications for international stability and peace. Chinese competition with Washington and Moscow increases the risk of local arms races and exacerbates regional tensions. The United States has taken notice of China’s actions, and an atmosphere of competition is forming around Africa. Former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Walter Kansteiner once said, “China has simply exploded in Africa, as in Katie-bar-the-door stuff.” Rep. Ed Royce of the U.S. House Subcommittee on Africa said, “China’s increasing engagement in Africa is a concern, and we need to focus on it before Beijing becomes fully established.”
Resource-based politics in Africa may exploit local divisions, support unsavory regimes, and wage proxy wars on the continent. Africa offers plenty of opportunities. According to Laurie Garret in “The Lessons of HIV/AIDS,” “Most of the countries now hit hardest by HIV/ AIDS already had ‘youth bulges’ before the virus arrived, meaning that a disproportionate percentage of their populations were under twenty-nine years of age. HIV/AIDS is now exaggerating these bulges, with the greatest percentage of increases appearing in the adolescent population. In 1975, only seventeen countries in the world had youth bulges so severe that more than half of their population fell in the 15-29 age brackets. Today, thirty-seven countries belong to that category, nearly all of them in sub-Saharan Africa. Several studies show that countries that had such radically large youth bulges in the period between 1990 and 2000 were three times more likely to suffer civil wars, coups, or armed insurrections.”
Also, as I noted in 2003 in Breaking the War Trap: Civil War and Development Policy, the World Bank reviewed fifty-two intrastate conflicts from 1960 to 1999. The study concluded that roots of civil strife are more economic than ethnic. In a given five-year period, a low-income country has 17.1 percent chance of falling into civil war. That risk drops to 12.3 percent if 2 percent economic growth is sustained for a decade. Economic diversification is also an important factor. If primary-commodity exports (oil particularly) account for 10 percent or less of the GDP, the risk is reduced to 11 percent but rises to 33 percent when such exports exceed 30 percent of the GDP. Similarly, societies with dominant ethnic groups are more likely to fall into civil war compared to those so diversified that no single group can dominate. All things considered, history is the one single predictor of the likelihood of civil war. A country that has just emerged from a civil war runs a 44 percent risk of return to conflict within five years.
These endemic risks, exploited by local political entrepreneurs with external supports, are aggravated by other factors including environmental degradation, uncontrolled urbanization, food shortage and scarcity, and mismanaged water resources. Most serious is the problem of governance. Generally speaking, African regimes are minority regimes ruled by small elites, be they urban, military or ethnic. The worst cases, such as Mobutu’s Zaire and Eyadema’s Togo, are countries run as satrapies or military principalities. Political authority is more imaginary than real, and policy imagination is authoritarian, imposed top-down and lacking a vision that is inclusive and perceived as legitimate by a significant part of the population. This results in great instability and an uncertain future for all.
Africa and the countries engaged there must devote more resources to build a better future for all, and eliminate the fear of another Rwanda or Darfur. If these goals can be achieved, Chinese involvement can greatly benefit Africa as well as China, and it need not to be a source of tension with the West. However, it is too early to tell whether Chinese engagement will take such a positive form, or whether it will be fully directed only toward China’s geopolitical goals.
Marcel Kitissou (mkitisso@gmu.edu) is faculty director of Global Humanitarian Action and International Development Programs at the Center for Global Education (http://globaled.gmu.edu/).
