The Dragon’s Gift
The Real Story
of China in Africa by Deborah Brautigam
Oxford, 300 pp., $29.95
Anyone writing these days about the Chinese government’s global influence—and especially the role of Chinese foreign aid and investment—must read this book. It is one of the strongest works available about the practices of Chinese aid, decrypting various aid packages to African governments, and raising key questions about whether waves of Chinese aid and investment should really be the cause for concern as they are so often portrayed.
Deborah Brautigam, who has followed Chinese involvement in Africa for more than a decade, sets out to assess the nature and process of Chinese aid and economic cooperation in Africa, in part to ascertain the likelihood it will foster economic development and alleviate poverty. She succinctly introduces the key institutions of aid—the Ministry of Commerce, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the China Eximbank, which in 2007 became the world’s largest export credit agency, and the China Development Bank, whose assets are five times greater than the Eximbank’s—and explains their respective roles.
Most important, she explains what Chinese aid does—and does not—include, and compares that with standard Western policies, practices, and definitions. (Chinese aid does include subsidizing infrastructure, including rehabilitating former aid projects, direct finance to Chinese companies, and resource-backed infrastructure loans.) She is especially strong on picking apart Chinese loans or aid packages—many of them alleged to be massive, such as the $8 billion loan to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Again, anyone writing, even anecdotally, about how much Chinese money now sloshes around Africa must read the section on common mistakes in assessing aid, including misreading amounts reported in Chinese currency as dollars, reporting export credits as cash grants, and misunderstanding multiple announcements of the same loan as multiple loans.
One of the more entertaining sections dissects some of the claims about the magnitude of Chinese aid. In one example Brautigam describes how a figure inaccurately reported by the Economist was then repeated by the Boston Globe; that piece became the source for an article in Current History, which was then relied upon by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. She notes that the Chinese government is partly to blame for the confusion, and urges it to be more transparent; but the anecdotes are useful reminders to question figures that don’t appear to have been subject to more careful analysis.
The Dragon’s Gift is particularly strong on debunking the idea that Chinese aid to Africa is a recent phenomenon, tracing the origins of contemporary projects back to aid efforts in the 1960s. Some of the most memorable anecdotes help underscore another key point: Chinese aid has not suffered from the pendulum swings that Western aid has. Indeed, rather than lurch from investment in infrastructure to agriculture to public expenditure reform and other trendy aid topics, Beijing’s money has largely concentrated on efforts that would help foster Chinese business. She is particularly vigilant in reminding us of the Chinese government’s “going out” strategy—that one way of alleviating intensely competitive economic pressures inside China is to help Chinese companies and investors find opportunities abroad. By promoting business, particularly in a region seen as an opportunity for selling Chinese products, aid to Africa continues to be defensible inside China even as it continues to identify itself as a developing country.
Most important, Brautigam traces the origins of current Chinese aid practices that not only bewilder but alarm many observers, who find it difficult to discern aid from investment, or loans from export credits. She does not find the marriage of official Chinese aid and investment odd, and makes a compelling argument that Beijing has, in effect, refined the model of Japanese aid to China in the early years of the reform era. That model entailed creating more business opportunities for Japanese companies by providing training, equipment, and/or finance in exchange for natural resources.
“By the end of 1978,” she writes, “Chinese officials had signed 74 contracts with Japan to finance turnkey projects that would form the backbone of China’s modernization. All would be repaid in oil.”
Her ultimate conclusion is that Chinese aid to Africa is much less than thought or reported, but that China Eximbank export credits are far larger. She also concludes that much of the labor imported from China is for very specific (and short-term) purposes, and that, in part because other donors’ histories are less pristine or successful than is often thought, China should not be considered a “rogue donor.” In Brautigam’s view, the broader success of Chinese aid and investment in Africa will depend on whether skills or technology are genuinely transferred, and whether local industries are fostered as a result of Chinese investment.
I should mention that there is here a lack of critical discussion about the larger politics of Chinese involvement. Brautigam does talk about Beijing’s insistence that aid recipients express support for the one-China policy, offers some insights into Taiwanese competition for official recognition from African countries, and acknowledges instances in which Chinese aid or investment becomes a prominent topic of discussion—such as in the 2006 Zambian presidential elections, or in Sudan. But she mostly wants to treat the relationships between China and Africa as economic, objective, and apolitical.
At the very end, she lauds China’s own development but makes little reference to any of the brutal, ugly side of rampant growth. She resists articulating whether the Chinese government and companies should be in a position to serve as a model in terms other than economics. Is there “full and frank discussion” between Chinese experts and visiting Africans sent for training on some of the problems of forced evictions, or property expropriated without consultation or compensation? Did an increase in hybrid rice yields or sugar production bring unexpected or untoward social or political developments? Were there options available to the Chinese that might have been better for the local population that were not pursued?
I certainly share Brautigam’s frustrations with the sense of superiority in Western donors and corporations, who have carried out or subsidized wasteful and abusive efforts themselves, and the skepticism with which China’s re-entry into the world has been greeted. But if we are genuinely to grasp the “real story” of China in Africa, we need to know as much about whether Chinese aid or investment has profoundly altered the domestic political dynamics in Africa, and whether it has shut out critical voices, whether African people are better off. This discussion need not be one pitting China against the West.
Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, is the author of China, Cambodia, and the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence.