(From Il Partito Comunista, May-June 2019, no. 395)

For centuries the African continent has been plundered and exploited by the capitalist powers. Now they have been joined by China whose presence in Africa, over the course of two decades has grown to such an extent that it has become the main economic partner for many of the countries there.

Chinese capitalism, whose annual rate of growth of GNP has been around 9% since the 1980s, has become a major power which can now lay claim to an influence in international politics that is proportionate to its economic, financial and military size.

The first triennial Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FoCAC) was held in 2000 to ratify the influence China has on the continent. In the Forum held in Beijing on 3 to 4 September 2018, in the presence of over 50 African government leaders and heads of State, President Xi Jinping ‘offered’ 60 thousand million dollars of financial backing, as well as announcing the cancellation of debt for some of the poorest countries or those experiencing difficulties. Of the 60 thousand million, pledged over the next three years, 15 of them will consist of aid and loans at zero interest, 20 of credit lines, 10 for a special development fund, 5 to support Chinese imports from the black continent and another 10 to serve as incentives to Chinese firms to invest in the various African countries. These funds will be in addition to those allocated in previous years, and indeed the growth of Chinese financial commitments in Africa has been exponential: 5 thousand million in 2006, 10 in 2012, 60 in 2015 and another 60 thousand million in 2018.

Rhetoric, Chinese and western

Sino-African relations, which go back a long way, have undergone an evolution over time that is strictly linked to the phases of capitalist development in China. We can thus identify two distinct phases marking the relations between the Chinese People’s Republic and Africa.

In the first phase, after China, with the victory of the Communist Party in 1949, had won independence and national unity, the main task for its bourgeoisie was transforming a backward and almost exclusively agricultural country into a modern industrial one, through a difficult accumulation of capital. Over the same period Africa was still largely under colonial rule and the struggles for national independence, an indispensable premise for any plans for economic development, were beginning. In this context, in April 1955, during the First Afro-asiatic Conference held in Bandung, China’s premier, Zhou En-lai met with Egyptian president Nasser, and in May 1956 Egypt would be the first African State to establish diplomatic relations with Beijing.

A major step forward in foreign policy was Zhou En-lai’s visit to ten African countries, between the end of 1963 and the beginning of 1964. The declared aim of the trip was to express support for the national liberation movements and the young “socialist” governments that emerged from decolonization, and to seek allies in the so-called Third World in order to combat China’s diplomatic isolation. Nine of the countries visited would institute formal relations with the Popular Republic. The political approaches were always accompanied by small amounts of economic aid, more symbolic than anything, used to build stadiums, presidential palaces and government buildings, but also infrastructure such as the Tanzania-Zambia railway, or else socially useful investments such as hospitals, provided with Chinese qualified medical personnel, which as well as having an ideological agenda, offered grants to African students who were becoming influential members of the local political classes. By the end of 1978 China had established diplomatic relations with 43 African countries.

The second phase would begin at the end of the seventies and extend to the start of the new millennium. To maintain the spate of impetuous growth of Chinese capitalism from 1978 onwards, Deng Xiaoping’s pragmatism in domestic politics (capitalism is always “pragmatic”) would require Beijing to orient its foreign policy towards more concrete economic and commercial relations. The principal stages were: 1978, when Beijing’s policies of “openness and reform” began”; 1993, when China became an importer of oil; and 1995, when the Council of State decreed that aid, commercial loans and “developmental” aid in Africa should be linked to Chinese commercial interests.

The final stage began in the year 2000 with the creation of FoCAC. With relations between China and Africa having been accelerated, due the Chinese need to find outlets abroad following enormous growth in its productive and financial apparatus, China’s descent into the infernal circle of imperialism was complete. China, in competition with the old European, American and Russian imperial colonial bosses, now required greater submission from the African countries.

By 2013, China had established diplomatic relations with 50 African countries, which is practically all of them. Today Swaziland alone continues to maintain relations with Taiwan. The Chinese People’s Republic has always demanded the recognition of the existence of only one China, with Taiwan an integral part of it, the sole legitimate government of which is in Beijing.

What has also changed are the principles which the Chinese government proclaimed would have to inform its relations with the African States, principles which have been refined over time in a numerous series of reports.

In the first phase the relations of China with Africa were based on the “Five Principles” of peaceful co-existence of 1953 and on the Eight Principles of foreign aid enunciated by Premier Zhou in the course of his visit to Africa in 1964.

The Five Principles proposed reciprocal respect of territorial integrity and sovereignty; non-interference in internal affairs; equality, mutual advantage, and peaceful co-existence.

The “Eight Principles” advocated assistance to foreign countries according to the principle of equality and mutual advantage; respect for the sovereignty of the beneficiary countries, no ties or fixed privileges; the provision of loans at low or zero rates of interest; assistance for beneficiaries to commence their own autonomous and independent economic development; the achievement of rapid outcomes through small investments; the provision of high quality Chinese equipment, goods and materials; help with technical training, with experts in the beneficiary countries and from China accorded the same treatment.

What is more in this first phase attention was drawn to the similarity of the interests of China and the African countries, with a shared history as nations oppressed by colonialism and with a common economic and social “model” (“socialism”) insofar as they were developing countries. In such a way did Beijing aim to differentiate itself from both the West and from Moscow.

After 1978 however, during the wave of economic modernization, Chinese attention shifted from aid programs in Africa to more commercial and profitable links. Beijing opted to develop a policy in Africa that moved towards “mutual advantage” and “win-win cooperation”, in which in exchange for the creation of infrastructures China would be provided with African natural resources. From the enunciation of political principles and ideologies there was a move towards leveraging common interests and reciprocal benefits.

And yet China – as all imperialisms do – also conceals a predatory face behind the mask of cooperation and the advantages that the African countries can hope to derive from strict ties with the Asiatic giant. Even at the FoCAC summit China hid its predatory aims under the phraseology of cooperation and development: “The objective of Sino-African relations is the improvement of people’s living conditions”, declared Xi Jinping.

At the Forum the Chinese president listed eight important areas of cooperation between China and the African countries: promotion of industry, infrastructures, exchange facilities, environmental development, exchange of know-how, health assistance, interpersonal exchanges, peace and security. The Chinese media announced that “the cooperation between China and Africa is between two brothers”.

The Chinese oppose western practice with a policy based on the “Five Nos”: No interference in internal affairs, No imposition of Bejing’s will on African countries, No seeking of selfish political gains in investment and financing cooperation with Africa, No attachment of political strings to assistance to Africa, No interference as regards models of development, which are to remain in line with the respective national conditions.

As far as the West is concerned, the growing influence of China on the African continent has provoked criticism and reaction from its hacks and politicians. In the West, where the cult of putrefying democracy and freedom of speech is on show (that is brainy people cashing in) the criticism of Chinese expansionism in Africa ranges across the entire political spectrum, from ‘right’ to ‘left’. Beijing is accused of ‘neocolonialism’, of luring Africans into the debt trap, of only being interested in exploiting the mineral resources. Others, adopting a moralistic tone, reproach the Chinese for having no respect for democracy and ‘human Rights’. And then there are those who reproach their own governments for having no interest in the African continent: the Chinese expansion in Africa had supposedly caught them ‘unprepared’, with Trump’s United States having ‘forgotten’ Africa, and Europe seeing it only as the source of the migratory problem.

All this rhetoric, whether Chinese or anti-Chinese, is merely to disguise the true nature of the struggle happening on the African continent, which sees the new arrival, China, carving out space for itself within the spheres of influence of the other imperialisms, while using the same financial weapons and the same vile and deceitful ideological justifications. It is a real war, and, like all wars, it is only resolved, at least temporarily, with the victory, on a military level, of one of the contenders.

The Chinese in Africa

Since the beginning of the 21st Century, commercial exchange between China and the African continent has increased annually by around 20%. With a volume of trade of around 170 thousand million dollars, for 9 years China has been Africa’s main trading partner, ahead of the United States and France. Alongside this there has been an enormous increase in Chinese investment. The 60 thousand million promised recently is in fact going to be added to that already invested over the last 17 years: between 2000 and 2017 the Chinese government, banks and various funds have put 143 thousand million dollars into Africa.

China started to become interested in the African continent in a more active sense in the early years of the new millennium. This was a period in which the strong growth in its economy required ever greater quantities of raw materials. The clear objective of the first relationships established by the Chinese with the African countries was the supplying of factories in the mother country with oil, copper and other minerals, in short with everything needed to sustain and increase its industrial expansion.

Over the last few years China, having become the factory of the world, has not only discovered the necessity of guaranteeing ever new outlets for the products of its manufacturing sector, but is in search of investment opportunities for its excess capital.

To respond to capital’s requirements, the Chinese directors are trying to implement the great Belt and Road Initiative project (BRI), the so-called New Silk Road, composed of various maritime and terrestrial commercial routes winding their way from China to the West. The full extent of the project is difficult to quantify since it is composed of myriad infrastructural works which traverse the whole of Asia before converging on Europe. But Africa as well is part of it. Much more than the other regions with an interest in it, the African face of the project consists of a complex and stratified system of treaties between China and the various African countries. In any case the focus is on infrastructures: by initiating building and dock yard projects throughout Africa, Beijing is integrating the African continent into the great New Silk Road project.

The most important of the infrastructure projects already accomplished by China in Africa certainly relate to railway networks. In the last ten years China has contributed to the construction of more than 5,700 kilometers of railway track. In East Africa the already existing Chinese infrastructure may be considered part of a broader network of branches which connect the ports to the hinterland. Within the region the Chinese have achieved two important rail links which give a good idea of the huge investments being made. At 800 kilometers long, the new Djibouti Addis Ababa railroad is the longest electrified track in Africa, and goods trains can cover it in less than 10 hours, as opposed to before, when goods transported in trucks could take three days. The cost of the line was 3.4 thousand million dollars and it is the first part of a project that aims to construct 5,000 kilometers of railroad track by the end of 2020 in Ethiopia. The Mombasa-Nairobi railway meanwhile is a high-speed train, which covers the 450 kilometers separating the capital of Kenya from the coast in just four and half hours. Costing 3.2 thousand million dollars, this project has created 50 thousand jobs and contributed to a 2% increase in the country’s national GNP. The development of this railway line is also the premise for connecting up countries without an outlet to the sea, such as Rwanda and Uganda, to the ports on the Indian ocean.

Another fundamental sector into which Chinese investment is being directed in Africa regards the modernization of ports, like Djibouti, Port Said in Egypt and Lagos in Nigeria. In Tanzania thanks to Chinese loans the port of Bagamoyo is under construction, which may well become one of the most important stopovers on the continent due to its capacity to dock mega-ships. The importance of investment in port facilities is provided by the fact that around 90% of African importations and exportations are by sea. In this way, according to analysts, China wants to put in place a kind of encirclement of the African continent with the dozens of ports financed by them.

In addition to investments in the railways and ports, Chinese capital up to now has financed the completion of more than 4,300 kilometers of motorways, 14 airports, 34 electrical power plants and around a 1,000 small hydroelectrical power stations. In general, Chinese capital has been employed principally in three sectors: transport (38 thousand million), energy (30 thousand million) and mining activity (19 thousand million).

China is showing an increasing hunger for raw materials which Africa is capable of satisfying, a land rich in resources ready to plunder. Ensuring access to its raw materials, above all oil, is one of Beijing’s main priorities. But the mining, processing and transportation of African raw materials is in many cases only possible through the building of new infrastructures, and 75% of China’s imports from Africa relate to raw materials. The payment of loans contracted with China are indeed often effectuated through the provision of raw materials. For example, over the last 14 years Angola has contracted debts with China of over 19 thousand million dollars which for the most part is repaid in oil.

Finally, it should be noted that China is delocalizing a lot of its own industrial production. According to some studies there are more than 10,000 companies currently operating in China, 90% of which are privately owned; according to the African Development Bank, the number of Chinese in Africa is around 1,300,000. One of the main countries identified by the Chinese for industrial production is Ethiopia. The Hawassa industrial Park in this country, which has attracted dozens of industries for producing clothing, was realized with Chinese investment. The construction of similar parks is also currently underway in Kenya and Egypt.

There are a number of factors which underlie this strategy. First of all, transferring industrial production to Africa means that the cost of transporting raw materials can be reduced; indeed, since these raw materials are available in situ, the cost of transporting them to the centers of production in Africa, thanks also to the infrastructures constructed by China, is extremely low, thereby increasing profit margins for the companies. To which may be added the fact that the Chinese firms whose production is situated in Africa have at their disposal a vast and expanding internal market in which to sell their products.

But a decisive factor underlying the tendency to delocalize regards rising wages in China. The times are long gone when Chinese capitalism had at its disposal an endless supply of poor wretches prepared to offer their labor for an extremely low wage. Over the last decade Chinese workers have obtained annual wage increases of around 12%. On the other hand, whereas in China the population has tended to fall following the one child policy, the fast expansion of the population in Africa means there is plenty of young labor power available. It has been calculated that in Africa it would be deemed acceptable to offer wages that were 45% of those in China. The African continent is becoming, therefore, an abundant reservoir of labor to exploit, overflowing with millions of young limbs available for capital.

From this point of view, Chinese investment in Africa is contributing to turning the African working class into one that is more robust, employed to work in the constructions financed by Chinese capital and in the factories. But, for the rest, the expansion of Chinese capitalism in Africa has nothing positive to offer African proletarians because it happens within an international context of bitter imperialist conflict which will inevitably lead to ever more disastrous wars and crises.

Land Grabbing

China and the other imperialisms are in competition in Africa also as regards so-called land-grabbing, that is, the progressive acquisition of vast swathes of land by States and big companies in foreign countries and for the most part in the poorer ones. The hacks in the West, loyal servants of their own bourgeoisies, are used to depicting China’s acquisition of land in Africa in hysterical terms, often resorting to hypocritical rhetoric about poor peasants being chased off the land. We will therefore draw attention to two important aspects. First of all: even if the data is not precise, the Focsiv report “I padroni della Terra” estimates that, of the 88 million hectares of fertile land already nabbed by various States and multinational companies, the main “Lords of the Earth” turn out to be those in the United States, in first place with 10 million hectares acquired since the year 2000, and far ahead of China with its 3 million hectares. Secondly: Half of the land that China has acquired abroad is not in Africa but in countries in South-East Asia, such as Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia.

The events in the years 2007-2008, with the explosion of the economic/financial crisis and consequent food crisis, are what underlie this ‘land grabbing’, of which Africa is the main victim. Commencing in early 2007 there was a vertiginous increase in the price of food products, which peaked in the Spring of the following year, with the cost of rice and wheat eventually going up by 150%. Thence the interest in investing capital in agriculture, which prompted the rapid growth in buying land abroad: if in 2008 it was a matter of 4 million hectares being purchased, by 2009 it had already risen to 59 million.

Those who suffered the most from the effects of this increase in the price of foodstuffs were above all the people in the poorest countries, where increasing hunger provoked major social disorder and revolts, with Egypt one example. The food crisis thus became a threat to the well-fed ruling classes, and demonstrated the fragility of those States which, with limited resources within their own national borders, depended on being supplied from abroad.

Food has always been a critical factor in the history of the People’s Republic. Millions of deaths would result from the failure of the Great Leap Forward, indeed up until the eighties there was still food rationing and meat was only eaten on special occasions.

China, with around 20% of the world’s population has only around 8-9% of the available arable land. Furthermore, according to official statistics, around 40% of its soil is being rendered progressively less fertile through soil erosion and pollution. The impetuous rate of industrial growth has seriously damaged much of the cultivable land and has compromised water supplies due to pollution of the water table, rivers and lakes.

Things only changed after the reforms in the eighties. From 1978 a notable increase in agricultural production of about 4.8% per annum was registered. The total intake of calories, per person per day, has risen considerably from 2,163 kcal in 1980 to 3,102 in 2014. If in the rural areas the diet continues to be mainly based on the consumption, and auto-consumption, of vegetable and cereal products (rice in the south, grain in the north), the diet of the urban population (enjoying a pro-capita income about three times higher than in the rural areas) is characterized instead by the consumption of a significant amount of animal protein. The increase in the consumption of animal products has been immense, and between 1985 and 2005 the consumption of meat quadrupled, and has continued to increase since then.

What is more, the divide between productive capacity and the need to feed the population, taken together with the abundant availability of capital, has propelled China, from around 2010, to rent or buy up land abroad. To begin with this was in neighboring countries, but soon its attention turned to Africa, which has low priced land of excellent quality available and political regimes that are well disposed towards China. Thus it is now growing rice and other food products on African land.

Vain attempts that will be able to do very little, in the context of a mode of production that is incapable of satisfying the most essential needs.

The Base in Djibouti

The export of Chinese capital into Africa requires military back up. Clearly the Chinese must conceal their military expansion under humanitarian rhetoric, in this instance as well following the Westerners in their lurid hypocrisies, who as good democrats are still the masters of talking peace whilst simultaneously bringing death and destruction.

Therefore, the Chinese also take part, with their soldiers and military vehicles, in the so-called “peacekeeping” operations. According to the data of the European Council on Foreign Relations, China’s military presence in the African continent amounts to about 2,500 soldiers, employed on missions under the United Nations mandate. Of these, 1,051 are based in South Sudan, 666 in Liberia, 402 in Mali, and the rest in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African republic, and Sudan. To these can be added the thousands of so-called “contractors”, employees of private companies, mercenaries, to whom are delegated a whole series of military and policing operations which are not managed directly by the State army. Not huge numbers, therefore, but destined to grow as the Chinese penetration of the continent increases. Over recent years Chinese influence in Africa has increasingly required the use of the military to protect its interests on the continent and in order to reinforce its geopolitical position. The Chinese military presence is necessary to safeguard the substantial investments made by the Chinese government and companies and to protect their infrastructures and production hubs.

Soon China will be able to station other soldiers in Africa following the opening in Djibouti of its first permanent military base abroad, which has the capacity to accommodate up to 10,000 soldiers.

The base in Djibouti, which opened in 2018, is situated in a strategically very important position. Djibouti, a small State on the Horn of Africa with little more than 900,000 inhabitants, faces onto the Bab el-Mandeb strait, situated between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden in the Indian Ocean. Like the straits of Hormuz and Molucca, it holds a fundamental importance for the Chinese economy, situated as it is on the route to the Suez Canal: through which passes the flow of oil destined for China, and through which its exports arrive in Europe and fully reconnects with the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative.

The new military base therefore guarantees security to the maritime section of the Silk Road, and at the same time represents a good point from which to consolidate and extend the Chinese penetration of the Ethiopian market and the Horn of Africa in general. With Djibouti, the PRC’s first military base outside China, Beijing is consolidating its presence in Africa, and, potentially, a new contender has arrived to join the armed imperialist gendarmes on the continent.

The “Djibouti Model” will be reproduced by China in the development of its other bases abroad, such as the one profiled in Walvia Bay, in Namibia.

Finally, another factor indicative of the growing weight China is acquiring in Africa, and which ties it to the African countries, is the exportation of arms. Over the last few years China has surpassed America in the sale of arms in Africa. According to the last report by SIPRI China is the second provider of arms in Africa after Russia. Despite the overall importation of arms into Africa decreasing by 22% in the period 2013-17 as compared to the previous five years, the arms provided by China went up by 55%, reaching 17% of the total.

This expansion of Chinese imperialism in Africa, on the military, industrial and economic levels, is worrying the other imperialists, who are trying to push back by increasing their own military presence in the continent; one whose strategic importance is increasing as every day goes by.

The ever more frequent episodes of bloody encounters between guerilla militias and regular armies, often passed off as caused by ethnic and religious tensions, are instead provoked by this subterranean struggle between the major global imperialisms.

African proletarians, oppressed in many cases not only through the exploitation of their labour-power in the factories, fields and mines but also by wars, famines, and illnesses caused by unsustainable living conditions, will have to rediscover their essential unity and power as a class if they are to douse the fires of war lit by imperialism; they will have to proclaim their own war, a war against the bourgeoisie and its accomplices, whether in the West or the East, but most importantly of all, against their own national bourgeoisies and their own bosses.