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), 28 entries in the bibliography, 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 andpolitical influence on the continent. But China is not the new coloniser. It is anexpanding 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 China's Premier announced theaim to increase the trade volume to $ 100 bn in 2010 (Hui, 2006). These figuresrepresent China's growing engagement in Africa. But it is not quite clear ifChina's impact on Africa is positive or not. One point of view, of which the quotepresented above is a part, is that China's engagement has the potential to increaseAfrica's importance in the global economy and to significantly reduce poverty onthe continent. Whereas others heavily criticize Beijing's approach towards the Africancountries and claim that China is nothing but a new coloniser.The purpose of this study is to conduct a descriptive analysis of China's impact onAfrica. We therefore first describe China's economic and strategic interests in Africa.After this, we are going to present negative and positive effects of China'sengagement in Africa and try to reveal a general tendency in the nature of China'simpact on Africa. Before giving some concluding remarks, we will compareChina's approach towards development aid, the so-called Beijing Consensus, withthe Washington Consensus, which can be characterized as the approach of thewestern world, because this is an increasing ideological conflict with importantconsequences for Africa (Sautman, 2007: 21).As this is a descriptive analysis rather than an empirical study, we are not going topresent any hypothesis.