As Director of the China Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins University SAIS, Deborah Bräutigam has written extensively about the Chinese-African relationship. Bräutigam tells The Cipher Brief why she thinks China’s involvement in Africa has had a positive economic impact.
The Cipher Brief: We want to begin by setting the scene. How have you seen China’s investment in Africa change since you started your research? Where, geographically, are Chinese firms most active and in which sectors?
Dr. Deborah Bräutigam: When I started my research in 1983, the Chinese were involved only in foreign aid. So there was very little trade—there was some, but there was no investment.
I first started seeing investment come in 1987, and I have been watching it since then. The most striking thing is that, over the last decade, investment has increased dramatically, and it has increased in all sectors. No matter what sector you are looking at, the Chinese are involved in it.
TCB: Are there any countries in particular where you have seen more involvement?
DB: What everyone says who looks at this is that the Chinese are everywhere. They are in every country. Chinese companies are even active in countries where there are no diplomatic relationships with the Chinese government. They are most active in the biggest economies, so you find the most involvement in South Africa. They are also very active in Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Egypt, which are also the biggest economies in Africa. On a per capita basis, they are very active even in small economies. You see them in Mauritius, you see them active in Botswana. So I really do think there is no way to say that they are more in the West or South, or more in the East or the North—they are all over.
TCB: How has Chinese involvement impacted Africa? Has it had a general net positive or net negative impact for African economic growth?
DB: In terms of growth, I think it has been net positive. I do not think there is any question about that. In recent years, the Chinese demand for African commodities has been strong, though that has been dying back in recent years. Over the past decade, this demand has generated a lot of foreign exchange, which has gone into African economies. It is not just Chinese demand, but sustained demand from consumers of African raw materials all around the world that have stimulated this. And, of course, African growth is not just dependent on raw materials exports. We see growth happening across the board in Africa in countries that are not major raw material exporters.
This has led to a sort of healthy decade, which is starting to change now. It doesn’t look so promising at the moment. Now that China’s growth is leveling off and China is moving to more of a consumption-based economy, we are going to still see demand for African products, but it will not be at that sustained, really high pitch from before. We can see this in the trade figures: between 2004 and 2008, trade was expanding at an average of 40 percent a year, while between 2009 and 2014, trade averaged only 14 percent a year. That was a dramatic drop in the growth rate. So, while those are both growth rates, it shows why everyone started to look at China in 2004—because growth was very steep in those years—but now it is normalizing.
TCB: How would you compare China’s involvement in Africa to its involvement in Latin America?
DB: China has been involved in Africa a lot longer. The Latin America experience is much more recent, in part because Latin America has been very much in the American sphere, and also because many countries in Latin America still do not recognize Beijing, they still recognize Taiwan. That is especially the case in Central America and the Caribbean. For many years, China didn’t even have diplomatic ties with a lot of Latin American countries, because they followed the U.S. model, which did not recognize China until 1978—we were very late, and the Latin American countries followed. Meanwhile, business relations with China started a lot earlier in Africa and then transformed in the 80’s, 90’s, and the last two decades, so China has much deeper roots in Africa.
TCB: China’s involvement in Africa has caused concern in the U.S. and for some European countries. Why?
DB: Many European countries have ex-colonial relationships with their former colonies. In France, for example, they call it Franc-Afrique because of close relationships with the French government and Francophone Africa, and they have not really had any challengers to this economic and political relationship. The French have recently been very concerned with the Chinese coming in as newly prominent actors and perhaps getting in between and shifting business and political ties away from France or weakening those ties. I think the British have been concerned about similar relationships.
There is also a kind of a bifurcation in how Europe and U.S. look at Africa. On the one hand, we have active business involvement in the continent. We do care about that so the U.S. remains very active in, for example, Nigeria, Angolan oil sectors, and Equatorial Guinea, where I think we are the biggest investor. The U.S. worries about competition from Chinese companies who are believed to operate unfairly and not have a level playing field.
On the other hand, I think what the public is more concerned about is this image we have of Africa of being a fragile region, in which there are a lot of poor people who need our help. We kind of forget about our investment relationship, and we look at our aid relationship. We worry about the Chinese coming in and exploiting or taking advantage of these weak people who can’t make their own decisions. If I had a dollar for every time a newspaper reports about the voracious appetite and the desperate hunger of the Chinese—we have this image of them coming in and gobbling up Africa. Of course that is not what we do—at least we don’t like to think we do—so we tend to really view ourselves different from the Chinese, but there is not as great a difference as we like to think.
TCB: In your recently released book, Will Africa Feed China?, you mention that there are four misperceptions of China’s involvement in Africa, specifically with regarding to the so-called land grabbing problem. What are they, and why do you believe they are misperceptions?
DB: We do have four parts of that conventional wisdom. The first is that the Chinese have acquired a lot of land in Africa. Second is that the Chinese government is leading this effort. The third is that the Chinese want to grow grain on that land to send back to China, and the fourth is that they are sending Chinese farmers to do this. There is no evidence for any of those to be true. We spend a lot of time and effort to research this book: We visited 12 African countries and visited China to do many, many interviews. I, together with colleagues and my research team at SAIS, looked into all of these questions.
First of all, if you counted up all of the land that the Chinese are supposed to have acquired, it would be about six million hectors. We could only find evidence for 240 thousand hectares across a handful of projects, so they are not acquiring land. Second, what are those projects looking to do? The largest projects that actually do exist are growing rubber or sisal, which is something that goes into making rope. There are also several sugar projects, which is for domestic consumption in Africa. In fact, there is so much sugar investment that I wrote a whole chapter just on that in the book. There is one project doing rice, but that’s for domestic consumption in Mozambique. The biggest projects are mainly in either domestic food production or, if they are exporting the products, they are doing it with things like rubber. There are subcontracting projects for tobacco and cotton, but they are not doing food for China.
Regarding the role of the Chinese government, when you talk to Chinese companies they all say, “We wish the government was doing more to help,” because the government does not have a good incentive structure for agricultural investment. There are some general incentives for outward overseas investment, but there is nothing specific for agriculture. The Chinese companies say, “the agricultural sector is so much riskier than other sectors so the government should help us more.” They do not feel as though the government is leading this. They feel like they are trying to lead more, and the government is just sort of lagging behind.
There is the fourth idea that they are sending Chinese peasants off to settle in Africa. One news report recently said that there are one million Chinese peasants farming in Africa. We did not find anything like this. We didn’t find any villages of Chinese farmers that have relocated to Africa. We did find one project in Mozambique, in which where there were 162 Chinese farming experts, but these were not farmers. These were people working in the agricultural sector in China, and they were seconded to this large investment in Mozambique to work in training and also to produce on a temporary subcontracting arrangement while they trained Mozambican farmers, who are supposed to eventually takeover the project once they are fully-trained.
TCB: What are the implications for U.S. policy? Are there avenues for which the U.S. and China can work together in Africa?
DB: One thing I like to frame my research with is that the relationship with China is very important. If there are areas in which we want to be critical of the Chinese, we should reserve those to areas in which there is something to be really critical about. I think we tend to be critical of China’s engagement in Africa, but we misrepresent it quite a bit of the time. We tend to say that what the Chinese are doing seems to be more threatening, or neocolonial, or more extractive. Whereas, all of the things we could say about the Chinese involvement in the mineral sector or oil sector in Africa really could reflect equally on our own companies there, who also have very problematic investments in very poorly governed places, like Equatorial Guinea and Angola. So I think criticisms should focus on things that are really existing problems.
Land grabbing is also something that I have had people in the U.S. government ask me about, or state to me that they believe the Chinese are doing land grabbing. They believe this is creating problems in Africa. They are concerned with security implications of this, for example. I have to tell them that there really is very little agricultural investment going on. Perhaps there will be more in the future, but this is not something that you should be bringing up with the Chinese government. How embarrassing is it to bring up our idea of what is happening when it is not what is actually happening? That is not a very good basis for trying to work towards doing something jointly together.
Which brings me to the second part of your question: Are there avenues for joint U.S.-Chinese projects? I think there are a lot of things that we could do together with them. In my view the most promising one with regards to agricultural, and one that I understand is a sector in which we are already thinking of cooperating with the Chinese, is probably going to be climate change. Helping with research on drought resistance, or perhaps other types of irrigation, other ways to deal with climate change, and how that is going to affect Africa. Because Africa is a region that, as many people have said, contributes the least to global emissions and will probably be affected the most by that. That effect is going to happen in the agricultural sector. So, how can we jointly work together with African countries to help them get ready for that?
