China and Africa: A Century of Engagement

4. Trade Relations

4 Trade Relations Driven by Chinese resource purchases and African demand for affordable consumer products, trade is now the largest feature of the China-Africa economic relationship. China-Africa trade deals concluded before China’s economic reform and opening up in the late 1970s were politically expedient , but rarely amounted to much trade. Although trade with Africa was briefly, and marginally, important to China at the height of its international isolation during the active period of the Cultural Revolution, 1967–1971, it did not become a sizable portion of Africa’s total world trade until the second half of the decade 2005–2010. Together, China’s increasing demand for raw materials and ability to produce affordable consumer goods and capital equipment has become the dual catalyst for the sharp growth in China-Africa trade. As of 2011 multimillion -dollar trade deals between China and African countries are commonplace . The dollar value of China-Africa trade has risen twenty-fold over the last decade—from $6.3 billion in 1999 to $128.5 billion in 2010—when it represented about 13.5 percent of Africa’s total world trade and 4.3 percent of China’s. This chapter traces the China-Africa trade relationship from the establishment of the PRC in 1949 until 2011 and concludes with an examination of China’s relations with African regional organizations. China-Africa Trade Data The largest problem we confronted in researching China-Africa trade is the lack of reliable and consistent data. Despite the attention China-Africa trade has received over the last decade and the numerous publications on 100 Chapter 4 the topic, none since Larkin (1971) has included a year-by-year dataset. Generally speaking, those trade numbers cited in journalistic accounts are from China Customs data that do not reflect African figures, which can be quite different. We found good reason for this lack of contemporary trade data and that even after compiling a ‘‘complete’’ China-Africa dataset important questions still remained. Such questions forced difficult choices; for instance, according to African countries’ trade data, China has run a trade surplus of varying sizes since 1978. By contrast, China reported that Africa had a surplus in some years and China in others. This was just one of the many inconsistencies we were forced to reconcile. Unless otherwise noted, all graphical displays in this chapter that indicate levels of China-Africa trade as a nominal figure or in percentage terms were calculated based on the International Monetary Fund Direction of Trade Statistics (IMF DOTS) and UN trade statistics, with preference always afforded to the former when available. Three principles guided this effort: accuracy, comprehensiveness, and repeatability. To best approximate the true level of China-Africa trade we included data from both the IMF DOTS China pages and African countries pages. The trade statistics used in this chapter are a combination of African countries’ reporting on imports from China and China’s reporting on imports from Africa. We used the same system for individual country trade figures in the four regional chapters . Since tariffs are extracted from imports, customs officials, the logic goes, tend to keep closer tabs on them than on exports, which can be difficult to trace. After much deliberation we concluded that these numbers are the most accurate available. To achieve comprehensiveness nearly every year of IMF or UN data back to 1948 was used to ensure that whenever possible the most recent published statistics were selected. Also, China’s trade relations with those states (Algeria, 1969–1977; Egypt, 1949–1950, 1956–present; Libya, 1982– present; Nigeria, 1969–1977, South Africa, 1948–1968), which at times have been counted apart from Africa as a whole, were sought out and included whenever necessary. A complete China-Africa trade dataset for each year including both imports and exports from the China and Africa pages is available in Appendix 2. Following is a series of graphical displays based on our China-Africa dataset. Each display is intended to add another layer of specificity to our presentation of the data. The first set of displays (Figure 1) presents the breadth of China-Africa trade beginning with the data available tracing Trade Relations 101 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 1948 1950 1952 1954 1956 1958 1960 1962 1964 1966 1968 1970 1972 1974 1976 1978 1980 1982 1984 1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004...