While western nations are reluctant to open up trade with Africa and prefer to support the Continent by donating money to poor countries, the Chinese have taken a different approach. There is an old Chinese saying that goes: “Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, you feed him for life.” China is living up to that mantra and has dominated Africa in every aspect.
The West is baffled as to how deeply embedded China’s tentacles have become in Africa, in such a short period of time. The Chinese have succeeded in investing in Africa’s infrastructure and are also training African workers to prepare them for the job market. This approach has yielded trust between native Africans and the Chinese, because Africans do not view Chinese as attempting to recolonize them.
The West on the other hand is not trusted by native Africans. Every move is second-guessed. Every donation is looked at suspiciously with the recipients wondering when the strings attached to each donation will be pulled. The Chinese have refrained from sending any military-related assistance to the Continent…
(…) People warn us dim-witted Africans about China all the time. What I find amusing – I no longer have the energy for anger – is the fact that these words of wisdom always come from Europeans and Americans and South Africans who are part of the Western sphere of influence. There are many ironies that are lost on these people. Because they are too numerous to mention, I will share just a few. Firstly, it is extremely problematic that, as a man who has spent almost half a cen- tury on this planet, I thought, for most of that time, that the English-speaking parts of the West were the philosophical, cultural and economic centre of the universe. This is a product of centuries of cultural and economic domination which, in many cases, was imposed violently.
Secondly, I did not experience China as a hegemon. It is America and Europe that imposed themselves and their ways on us.
Thirdly, my experience of the hegemony of the West has largely been that of a gap between its liberal democratic aesthetic and the moral content of its relations with the ‘Third World’…
In a time of astonishing transformations, the hardest thing to adjust is the way we think.
As John Maynard Keynes once responded to a critic, ‘when the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?’
Europeans and Americans have a particular challenge with Africa in this regard. They have traditionally regarded it as a place lagging behind in development (…)
Quite simply, the idea of an Africa always in need of help is obsolete. Many African countries are forecasting economic growth rates over 5 percent. Portugal’s prime minister is soliciting financial help from his country’s former colony, Angola. The growth of a substantial middle class in countries such as Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana, in a continent that is home to over a billion people, is increasing both Africa’s strategic importance and its integration into consumer markets. The popular risings in North Africa remind the world that no political system lasts forever…
Great article. Like the author said “Quickest to appreciate some of the changes taking place has been the business world”, but these changes are more profound.
(…) China is more like Europe than it seems. Indeed, when it comes to economics, China is more a thin political union composed of semiautonomous cities — some with as many inhabitants as a European country — than an all-powerful centralized government that uniformly imposes its will on the whole country.
And competition among these huge cities is an important reason for China’s economic dynamism. The similar look of China’s megacities masks a rivalry as fierce as that among European countries
The West continues to be confounded by why governments they help around Africa continue to tilt towards China. How the African intelligentsia, overwhelmingly educated in the West and major consumers of Western cultural products like movies, music and lifestyles appear to have their heads turned to a China whose language and habits are profoundly alien to them.
Many good arguments about strategy have been made. But one little matter appears to elude the eye of Western analysts. Africa craves a respect China offers that the West does not.
By 2030, China may become the largest economy in the world. Less than one decade from now, emerging markets including Brazil, China, India, Mexico and Russia, will comprise half of world’s top 10 GDP list.
The global remapping of economic power presents significant opportunities and challenges to U.S. and European policymakers and companies operating in emerging markets, especially as businesses strive to operate amidst growing populations, resource scarcity and environmental degradation
