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Business English: China treads on western toes in Africa
It says it is only doing what rich donors have done for decades, yet Western donor governments and the multilateral banks they control are worried that this highly visible presence could do more harm than good.It is not hard to tell when China is on a charm offensive in an African country. New government buildings spring up, office walls are decorated with ancient Chinese poems. The hotels are thronged with Chinese soldiers. And a growing number of Chinese traders are selling food and shoes in the street markets.
Western donor governments and the multilateral banks they control are worried that this highly visible presence could do more harm than good - that by ignoring rules that prevent aid money being misspent and government debt rising out of control, China is undoing years of patient work.
China's presence in the developing world is unique. It has a huge and rapidly growing trading economy but a national income per head less than a seventh of the US, which gives its banks the best of both worlds: immense lending clout but few of the elaborate policy frameworks that constrain rich countries' aid ministries, banks and export credit agencies.
Many such agencies rely on safeguards protecting the environment and human rights as assessed by the World Bank and its private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation. Philippe Maystadt, head of the European Investment Bank, recently caused a stir by suggesting the EIB and the World Bank lower their standards to avoid being undercut by Chinese banks.
Such safeguards at present do not apply to the China Development Bank (CDB), whose assets are bigger than the World Bank and Asian Development Bank combined, nor to the China Export-Import (ExIm) Bank, the official government export credit agency. Both have few qualms about backing controversial projects.
The ExIm bank, created only in 1994, is now one of the world's largest financiers of dam-building - often highly controversial projects that involve mass resettlement of people. Influenced by a special commission on dams whose sceptical report was published in 2000, the World Bank and some national export credit agencies have retreated from dam-building.
The bank declined to finance China's controversial ''Three Gorges'' dam, which involved moving almost 2m people, for example, but the CDB, which counts the project's state-run developer as one of its biggest clients, was happy to oblige. Similarly, where no oil major would touch the Sudanese oilfields given the human rights catastrophe in the country, China stepped in.
Social and environmental campaigners now have a trickier target than the World Bank. Peter Bosshard, director of the California-based International Rivers Network, says: "We don't have leverage here like we do elsewhere; we can't put pressure directly on the Chinese government, and neither can Chinese NGOs."
Mr Bosshard has been pleasantly surprised by the willingness of Chinese officials to listen, but has yet to see a real difference to activities on the ground. China retorts that it cannot be expected immediately to adopt rules written for rich countries, especially since those nations violated such principles globally for decades.
"Operating in the international market is a very new issue for Chinese companies and they have to be brought eventually into common practice," says Fan Gang, director of China's National Economics Research Institute.
Chen Yuan, governor of the China Development Bank, told the FT recently the bank would avoid funding projects that violated other international rules.
Much of what China is doing now is only a bigger version of what rich donors did. For example, its low-interest concessional loans to poor countries, which the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund fear could be saddling poor governments with unpayable burdens of debt, was abandoned only a short while ago by most rich donor governments. Japan, the world's second-largest aid donor, has continued to lend.
Developing countries say China is often prepared to help when traditional donors are not, and will sometimes pay over the odds to secure natural resources. The west African state of Gabon, for example, after trying unsuccessfully for years to interest American and European investors in extracting its rich iron ore deposits, found China was eager. China also has some historic capital saved up. Dipak Patel, until recently trade minister for the southern African state of Zambia, says: "In Zambia we greatly admired the Chinese for what they did when the rest of the world looked the other way."
China built a railway from Zambia to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania in the 1970s, at a time when apartheid-run South Africa and Rhodesia blocked Zambia's traditional trade routes, and is now restoring it. But Mr Patel warns that the embrace can become smothering. Michael Sata, an opposition candidate, got a disturbing number of votes in Zambia's election in September, arguing that Chinese investors should be expelled.
"Does Zambia need Chinese investors who sell shoes, clothes, food, chickens and eggs in our markets, when the indigenous people can?" Mr Patel asks.
If tensions are not reduced, he says, the scenario where Ugandan dictator Idi Amin expelled Indians from the country in the 1960s "will repeat itself all over Africa, except this time it will be the Chinese". That may seem alarmist, but China's operations in the developing world are ringing bells of warning.
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FTD.de, 19.01.2007
© 2007 Financial Times Deutschland,
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