Western criticism is driven by fear rather than genuine concern about promoting the continent’s development
Africa’s Agenda 2063 is a detailed strategic framework for the socioeconomic transformation of the continent over the next 50 years. President Xi Jinping has characterized China’s development agenda in Africa as a win-win deal for its aspiration to become the global trade leader. The Belt and Road Initiative seeks to fund transportation infrastructure and open up Africa for commerce. Moreover, China has filled the void created by the diminishing Western donors on the continent. Through such engagements, Africa seeks to accelerate the implementation of previous and current continental initiatives for growth and sustainable development.
The idea of Africa Rising – the swift trade and industry investments in Africa since 2000 – cannot be separated from the rise of China and the formation of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation 18 years ago. A new road map from the FOCAC Summit that got underway in Beijing on Sept 3 and 4 inevitably moved China’s relations with all 55 African states to a whole new level of development.
In large measures the 2018 summit, themed “China and Africa: Toward an Even Stronger Community with a Shared Future through Win-Win Cooperation”, took stock of the 10-point plan that President Xi unveiled during the 2015 FOCAC Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Foreign Minister Wang Yi spelled out the four-point agenda for the 2018 summit, hoisted as “a new historic monument” in Sino-African relations.
On top of Wang’s list was “building a strong community with a shared future” between China and Africa. This agenda seeks to reject the notion of a “clash of civilizations” and a “Thucydides Trap” scenario, both of which see a cold war between the United States and China as inevitable. Instead, China points to peaceful development as a safe pathway to shared prosperity for humanity.
Second, China is writing a new chapter for the alignment of the Belt and Road Initiative with Africa’s development. China meets the African dream in Agenda 2063, the continent’s development blueprint.
African countries are among 60 worldwide benefiting from the Belt and Road – a $1.2 trillion (1.05 trillion euros; ￡920 billion) plan. Several projects completed under the initiative include the Mombasa-Nairobi Railway in June last year, the Djibouti-Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) Railway completed in January and the 186.5-kilometer Abuja-Kaduna (Nigeria) rail line completed in July.
Third, a new path for China-Africa cooperation has been set toward the highest levels ever. Since 2009, China is and remains Africa’s leading trading partner. From 2015 to 2018, China spent $35 million on export credit and preferential loans to support trade with Africa.
In January, the value of China-Africa trade hit $16.5 billion. At the sixth Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in 2015, President Xi pledged $60 billion to support China-Africa cooperation initiatives, increasing lending to at least $20 billion a year. At this year’s 2018 Beijing Summit in September, Xi put another $60 billion on the table for 2018-21.
China has also put more emphasis on people-to-people diplomacy, thus providing opportunity for increased exchange programs that give youths in Africa access to education through scholarships, and open-ing more than 80 Confucius Institutes in 41 African countries. This is in line with Agenda 4 – connecting the people of China and Africa as one big family and bolstering China’s soft power capacity.
Sino-African relations have entered uncharted waters, confronting old and new challenges. A road map has been offered to address intractable challenges, including but not limited to political uncertainty arising from post-election impasses, conflict, terrorism and transnational crime such as piracy, trafficking in drugs, humans, arms and contraband.
China has stretched its peace and security footprint in Africa to strengthen peaceful development. Beijing has committed another $60 million to shore up the African Union peace and security paradigm. In January 2016, it established a military base in Djibouti primarily to bolster the Chinese Navy’s efforts to prevent piracy on the high seas and support military logistics for Chinese troops in the Gulf of Aden and peacekeeping and humanitarian operations in Africa.
China has also focused on building the capacity of African countries to tackle environmental challenges, including combating poaching and wildlife trafficking.
The summit provided a forum for China and Africa to share lessons learned in fighting corruption. China has tamed corruption at home. The big question is whether it can help slay the beast abroad.
Xi has waged a crusade against corruption. The African Union Summit in Mauritania in July emphasized winning the fight against corruption as a sustainable path to Africa’s transformation defined by the 2003 African Union Convention on Preventing and Combating Corruption.
However, there has been much criticism of Africa’s spiraling debt to China. Spearheading this criticism are forays from the US and Britain that reveal a wary West belatedly playing a catch-up game driven more by the fear that Africa is sinking deeper into a debt trap carefully laid by Beijing than by genuine concern about promoting Africa’s development.
For Africa, China is a valuable partner in its efforts to break the age-old poverty trap based on centuries of underdevelopment. An underdeveloped and impoverished Africa remains “a scar on the conscience of the world” – to borrow Tony Blair’s characterization.
Conversely, a developed Africa can repay its debts and pull its people out of poverty as China has done over the last four decades. After all, the US is the most indebted country in the world, with its total debt standing at $17.8 trillion. The US owes approximately 47 percent of its $12.8 trillion public debt to China, Japan, Ireland and Brazil.
Post-2018 Sino-African relations must focus on boosting production through industrialization to enable Africa to pay its debts.
The author is a research and policy analyst at the Africa Policy Institute, an independent, not-for-profit pan-African think tank geared toward providing policy research. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
(China Daily European Weekly 11/09/2018 page10)