Perceptions of the China-Africa Relationship: An Interview with Dr. Deborah Brautigam

Dr. Brautigam speaking at UNC's FedEx Global Education Center
DEAN Correspondent Emily Feng sits down with Dr. Deborah Brautigam, who recently spoke at the Duke-UNC China Leadership Summit about the development of relationships between African nations and China as well as the misunderstandings associated with these relationships. (Note: This transcription is slightly edited to preserve flow and improve readability.)

I’m interested in hearing, first of all, how you got interested in Africa so early, and specifically Africa and China. Now it’s a hot topic, but I’m sure it wasn’t when you began.

No, it wasn’t a hot topic at all. I was a China scholar, so I lived in Hong Kong and Taiwan, studied Chinese after college, and then I went to graduate school. I went with Chinese as my language, and I was very interested in Chinese development. But, in graduate school, I became interested in Africa. I’d never been there, but a lot of my professors worked there, and they made me appreciate the challenge of development in Africa, those challenges being more acute than in other parts of the world. So, I realized that probably the best place for me to be working would be not in China, but in Africa. And also it wasn’t easy to do research in China in the 1980s on development.

So, I went off to do my Ph.D. dissertation in Africa looking at Chinese aid, particularly in agriculture, and that was my first book, which sank like a stone; nobody was interested in that topic at that point! But, when people did start to get interested, I was in a good position to be a kind of interlocutor to explain how China operates in Africa, the history of this engagement, and what I had learned over the years I had been studying it.

What is the history of that? I think a lot of people are surprised to find out that there has been a working relationship specifically in things like infrastructure, transportation, and as you mentioned now, investment between China and Africa going back into the 60s and 70s.

Yes. If you include North Africa, the first Chinese diplomatic ties were in places like Egypt and Algeria, and Sudan was the first country in sub-Saharan Africa. This goes back to the late 1950s and early 1960s. But of course during that period it was the Cold War. In the United Nations, Taiwan was sitting in the China seat in the Security Council. A lot of countries in Africa, the United States, and most of the world recognized Taiwan as “China”, and Beijing was kept out of the United Nations. So, for the Chinese, Africa became a very interesting place -- not just for the Cold War—that was never that important to them—but it became very quickly an important area for diplomatic ties, a way to win entry into the United Nations by voting Taiwan out.

The Chinese tried to win diplomatic ties by a kind of charm offensive, you might say, and a lot of that involved foreign aid. So, the earliest relationships were foreign aid-based. Things like the Tanzam Railway, this huge project between Tanzania and Zambia—that was funded by the foreign aid program. There was very little investment. There were some investments from about the mid-80s onward, but very few. It was really in the 1990s that that took off—in a small way, but it started to rise from there.

When did people start taking notice of China and Africa, and Africans start going to China?

In 2004, a Chinese bank gave a big loan to Angola. This was the first of these big, oil-secured loans. It was $2 billion, so people paid a lot of attention to that. From about 2004 onward, I would say, there has been a lot more attention paid. The second Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) meeting in Beijing was huge, and a lot of African heads of state came. So, from about November 2006 when the FOCAC was hosted in Beijing, it was on the map.

It seems to me that the interest in the China-Africa partnership proportionately exceeds the actual, by-volume dollar amounts of exports that go on between China and other countries. Why do you think that is the case? Is it because it has a larger strategic implication for other countries, including the US? Africa, I mean.

I think it’s a good question. First of all, as I suggested in my talk today, there’s a general lack of understanding about how large the relationship is. In terms of foreign aid, today I gave estimates of Chinese aid from that the RAND Corporation. They said that Chinese aid was in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually. But people who know this subject well accept a different figure:  globally, it’s less than $6 billion a year. Rand didn’t understand clearly which kinds of activity should be counted as aid. They counted investments, commercial loans and everything as “aid.”  

So, this is an example of how some have exaggerated how big the relationship is. You can see this with regard to aid, and you can see it with regard to investment. People think it’s bigger than it is—they think the Chinese are the biggest investors in Africa, and they actually aren’t. Europe as a whole is far larger, and even the United States, in terms of our accumulated investment in Africa, is bigger. Australia’s a big investor in Africa—they may even be as big as the Chinese. So, there are a lot of other actors there that people don’t focus in on. I remember seeing one study that said that Canada had been the biggest investor in one year, and who thinks about that? Of Canada as being the biggest investor in Africa?

So, we don’t have good information. The information we do have is often exaggerated, so people think the relationship is bigger than it is. But on the other side, the trade relationship has blossomed enormously. We have good data on that. And that grew so quickly. It’s been a stunning development.

But why the particular emphasis on China and Africa? Why not Canada, for example, and Africa? It just doesn’t have the same ring to it, or no one feels threatened by the fact that Canada is investing heavily in Africa?

The world is really fascinated by China, and I think that’s a product of two things. One is that China is communist, and we still have this Cold War feeling and fear about a country run by a communist party. We don’t really understand it, we don’t know quite what that means, and we’re conditioned to be afraid of it.

And the second is that Chinese are Asian. Like when Japan was rising economically, people don’t understand an Asian power, and people in the West and the European extraction think that Asia is much more different in some ways than it is. You can see this in the stereotypes of “yellow peril” that have arisen in our own history with Chinese immigrants – that there is something to fear and not understand in a very different culture. Samuel Huntington talked about this in the “Clash of Civilizations.” The Chinese are a “different” civilization, if you want to put it that way. That, I think, leads people to feel they don’t really understand this actor. They’re not “like us”, whereas Americans understand Canada, because they are “like us”.

Can you talk about some other myths that you mentioned in your talk about misunderstandings when it comes to the China-Africa relationship?

Well, I think another myth is that everything is done in a coordinated way that we might call “China, Inc.” We used to call it “Japan, Inc.”—somebody in Beijing says “Jump!” and all the companies in Africa say “Where?” and “How high?” It just doesn’t operate like that at all. It’s far more disorganized and far more company-led, so a lot of the business is generated by the firms themselves. Back in Beijing, they’re trying to support this, but they aren’t directing it. They try to guide it, and they try to provide incentives, but it’s much more market-based than a lot of people believe. That said, there’s a lot of what I call the “Asian developmental state approach” in China’s approach. They are like Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore. They have a lot of government instruments to boost business, foster business, and get it going, but they’re not controlling and directing it all the way people think. The myth is that there’s someone orchestrating this all as part of a grand strategy in Beijing.

There’s another myth that I deal with in my upcoming book, which is called Will Africa Feed China? And my answer to that question is “probably not.” There’s an idea that the Chinese are leading the land grab in Africa, and there’s really no evidence for this. There’s been a lot of interest—in fact, there are about four or five cases I can think of where companies have come to Africa, and there’s been a press conference of some kind, and African leaders said, “Oh boy, this is gonna be really huge.” Then the company’s gone away, and they were never heard of again. But nevertheless, the project gets into the media as something China is doing even though it actually never went forward. There hasn’t been a lot of good investigative reporting, which leads to this myth that the Chinese are very active in land acquisitions in Africa and they’re trying to grow food to send back to feed China. No part of that is true. They’re not active in land acquisitions, although that could change. I expect it to change because the level right now is so low.

I’m sure you know Howard French wrote a book about this last year, but he suggests that it may be even more complicated because individuals themselves are shaped in different ways when the countries are interacting. What are some other unexpected ways that you see this relationship taking off in the next few years—not on the level of countries or even companies but among the people who decide to uproot themselves and move to either of the two continents?

Right now, the number of Chinese who have moved permanently to Africa is still relatively small—they’re a drop in the bucket compared to all the Africans who have moved around to different parts of Africa. The impact of this is not going to be anything that will be felt immediately, but migration is a positive force in most places where it happens. We continually have to make that point here in America where there’s a lot of anti-immigration sentiment. A lot of people want to keep immigrants out, and yet all of the research suggests that this is a net bonus to our country to bring in immigrants. I think the same thing is true in Africa—that they will find that, over time, having people who are industrious, want to work hard, want to produce things locally, and want to create jobs will be a benefit for their countries.

That’s not an easy argument to make. There’s a lot of xenophobia in Africa, and people there are quite rightly concerned about competition. Those are the same fears that we have here. But I do think that if you look at Southeast Asia, for example, you will see that the Chinese communities have been positive contributors to those countries’ economic development. Look at Singapore; it’s one of the most developed countries in the world at this point. The Chinese who came before 1949—part of the first wave of the diaspora—have made really positive contributions to development in the countries where they settled. Mauritius, for example, became an export powerhouse, in part because of the 3% of their population that was Chinese and that helped bring in Hong Kong investors and themselves operated some of the manufacturing factories. And you see this also in South Africa where Chinese have gone into the professions. They’ve become entrepreneurs, and they contribute to development there. We can see Chinese in Mozambique—the finance minister is of Chinese extraction. The education minister in Zimbabwe was of Chinese extraction. So, there are examples of people that are part of that diaspora that have done a lot. I understand that that’s a difficult argument to make, but I think it’s the right one.

(Transcribed by Pramodh Ganapathy)

Dr. Deborah Brautigam is Professor of Comparative Politics and Director of the China Africa Research Initiative (CARI) at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Look out for her new book Will Africa Feed China? which is due to be released this year by Oxford University Press.

Emily Feng is a senior at Duke University and the president of the Duke East Asia Nexus.