China's distinctive links with Africa

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Topic: Development Politics, grade: 1,0, Norwegian School of Management, BI (Norwegian School of Management, BI), language: English, abstract: ¿China has become the most confident and assertive commercial player in Africa.

It appears that China will over time displace Western commercial interests and

political influence on the continent. But China is not the new coloniser. It is an

expanding global power toward which Africa must pragmatically align itself.¿

(Dr. Martyn J. Davies, Director, Centre for Chinese Studies).

Sino-African trade sextupled from 1998 to 2005 to $1 36 bn (Schüller and Asche,

2007: 4) and on a conference in Beijing in 2006 Chinäs Premier announced the

aim to increase the trade volume to $ 100 bn in 2010 (Hui, 2006). These figures

represent Chinäs growing engagement in Africa. But it is not quite clear if

Chinäs impact on Africa is positive or not. One point of view, of which the quote

presented above is a part, is that Chinäs engagement has the potential to increase

Africäs importance in the global economy and to significantly reduce poverty on

the continent. Whereas others heavily criticize Beijing¿s approach towards the African

countries and claim that China is nothing but a new coloniser.

The purpose of this study is to conduct a descriptive analysis of Chinäs impact on

Africa. We therefore first describe Chinäs economic and strategic interests in Africa.

After this, we are going to present negative and positive effects of Chinäs

engagement in Africa and try to reveal a general tendency in the nature of Chinäs

impact on Africa. Before giving some concluding remarks, we will compare

Chinäs approach towards development aid, the so-called Beijing Consensus, with

the Washington Consensus, which can be characterized as the approach of the

western world, because this is an increasing ideological conflict with important

consequences for Africa (Sautman, 2007: 21).

As this is a descriptive analysis rather than an empirical study, we are not going to

present any hypothesis.