China's distinctive links with Africa

“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 China’s Premier announced the
aim to increase the trade volume to $ 100 bn in 2010 (Hui, 2006). These figures
represent China’s growing engagement in Africa. But it is not quite clear if
China’s impact on Africa is positive or not. One point of view, of which the quote
presented above is a part, is that China’s engagement has the potential to increase
Africa’s 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 China’s impact on
Africa. 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’s
engagement in Africa and try to reveal a general tendency in the nature of China’s
impact on Africa. Before giving some concluding remarks, we will compare
China’s 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.