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8. China and Africa in the Era of Neoliberal Globalisation with Cameroon as a Case Study
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177 8 China and Africa in the era of neoliberal globalisation with Cameroon as a case study Introduction The People’s Republic of China’s renewed interest in Africa in the era of neoliberal globalisation is one of the most significant developments on the African continent. While there was little evidence of China’s presence in Africa two decades ago, hundreds of major Chinese businesses are now active there, bolstered by tens of thousands of Chinese labourers, retailers and tourists. The growing importance the Chinese leaders are attaching to the African continent was manifested when they dubbed 2006 to be the ‘Year of Africa’ to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and African nations. At the beginning of 2006, the Chinese government promulgated a White Paper outlining ‘China’s African Policy’ (Government of China 2006), which was followed by official visits by the Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Li Zhaoxing, President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao to several African countries. The third gathering of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) was held in Beijing at the end of 2006 and was attended by numerous African heads of state and ministers. The Forum expressed its wish ‘to deepen and broaden mutual beneficial cooperation in political relations, economic cooperation, international affairs and social development’.1 Remarkably, China’s increasing engagement with Africa went largely unnoticed in African Studies for some time. Most of the existing literature on Sino-African relations deals with the Cold War era (cf. Larkin 1971; Ogunsanwo 1974; Snow 1981) and some Africanists have aptly distinguished two phases in this period (Taylor 1998; Bräutigam 1998). The first was the Maoist era when China’s Africa policy was primarily marked by ideological and strategic considerations as the country attempted to export its revolutionary 178 The Politics of Neoliberal Reforms in Africa model to Africa, undermine western and Soviet influence there, and counter the diplomatic inroads being made by Taiwan. The second phase started with Deng Xiaoping’s economic modernisation policies when, for pragmatic reasons, China decided to focus on economic cooperation with the West. As a result, its interest in Africa was starkly reduced, all the more so because of Africa’s growing economic stagnation (Konings 2007b). It is only recently that Africanists have acknowledged that China’s profile has dramatically changed since the end of the Cold War and that it has become a key external actor on the continent in today’s era of neoliberal globalisation (Alden 2005, 2007; Tull 2006; Kaplinski et al. 2006; Holslag 2006; Broadman 2007). For some scholars (Jaffe & Lewis 2002; Hurst 2006), the drive to secure energy resources for the country’s rapid economic expansion is behind China’s growing engagement with Africa. This certainly captures an important dimension of its interests in Africa but it would be a mistake to ascribe a single motive to this relationship. This chapter argues that China sees Africa as a partner in the fulfilment of its strategic goals, namely resource security, new markets and investment opportunities, and political support for its expanding global interests. While China’s growing presence in Africa is most visible on the economic front, which is a natural consequence of its own domestic economic growth, one should not overlook its political objectives. China is aiming at forging an alliance with African states to combat perceived western hegemony, especially in the United Nations and other multilateral organisations, and to restrict Taiwan’s diplomatic space in Africa. FOCAC, which was set up by China in October 2000, has provided the institutional expression of a strategic China-Africa partnership in economic and political affairs (Konings 2007b). This chapter attempts to show that the African response to China’s growing engagement with the continent has been ambivalent. On the one hand, governments and business elites in Africa are seeing new opportunities in China for trade and investment, and ways to bolster regime stability and strategically important partnerships (Alden 2005). What is particularly appealing to many African rulers is that China seems to provide an alternative to the ‘painful’ neoliberal economic and political reforms espoused [18.217.220.114] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 20:37 GMT) 179 Chapter 8: China and Cameroon in the era of neoliberal globalisation by the West and typified by the ‘Washington Consensus’ of the IMF and the World Bank. They were quick to embrace the various tenets of the development paradigm propagated by China, which was defined by Joshua Cooper Ramo (2004...