Is China becoming Africa's new colonizer? In what is reminiscent of a new scramble for Africa, China has rushed to plant its flag on the continent, offering soft credit, bricks and mortar investment and promising non-interference in local politics. China's political clout in Africa has never been greater.
But is this all too good to be true? In November, China hosted an Africa summit in Beijing attended by 50 African leaders, the biggest showcase of China's new foreign policy shift towards the developing world, to expand its political reach and to secure raw materials to feed its rapidly growing economy. Beijing offered Africa US$3bn in preferential loans and US$2bn in export credits over the next three years. China envisaged annual trade with Africa to reach $100bn by 2010. Whereas Western nations such as the US, France and UK have year-on-year slashed development aid, China promised to double aid by 2009. Most of the Chinese aid to Africa is tied to business deals. Nevertheless, China has offered aid without insisting on onerous conditions as Western donors do. This is sweet music to African nations, who for long now have protested the hypocritical insistence by Western countries that they must open their markets, while they (Western nations) heavily subsidize their own agriculture sectors and maintain prohibitively high tariff barriers. As a case in point, China early this year granted Nigeria a $2.5bn loan soft loan and the Angolan government $9bn.But China has offered many African despots, such as Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe a lifeline. China has major investments in Sudan's oil-fields and fiercely supports the Sudanese regime which is responsible for an internal conflict that has seen millions perished and displaced. China worked effortlessly to water-down a United Nations resolution condemning the Sudan for the bloodshed in Darfur.
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