China in Africa

I've talked about it before (see here and here and here), but China is actively scouring Africa for energy and mineral resources. The Asia Times has a good article today on this, and points out the Chinese Premier's visit to Africa this week is not a sightseeing trip.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao's extensive tour of Africa this week - part of Beijing's quest to secure future energy supplies and raw materials for the country's economy - is also being used as a platform to advance China's foreign-policy orientation on the continent and elsewhere in the developing world.

The official media have portrayed Wen's trip as an example of "win-win" diplomacy and emphasized China's features as a kinder and softer rising power that does not exploit others' resources in pursuit of economic gain or mix business with politics. Chinese diplomats have also publicly defended China's record on the continent, saying Beijing was "selfless" in its desire to provide help and serve as a development model for poor countries.

Wen's eight-day Africa tour, which began on Saturday, is taking him to Egypt, Ghana, the Republic of the Congo, Angola, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda. His trip comes less than two months after President Hu Jintao visited Morocco, Nigeria and Kenya and five months before a high-level China-Africa cooperation forum is to be held in China.

The flurry of diplomatic activity underscores China's hunger for energy and supplies that, critics say, has led it to cooperation with some unsavory regimes in Africa and beyond. This month, rights watchdog Amnesty International accused China of fueling conflicts and human-rights violations by selling arms to repressive regimes such as Sudan and Zimbabwe in exchange for oil and minerals (see How to curb China's arms trade, June 14).

The Jamestown Foundation adds this:

In the past few years, the demands from China and other developing economies for oil and natural gas have become the major factor, although not the only one, that has driven up world energy prices. Chinese energy companies' extensive activities in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Central Asia in search of oil and gas assets have created anxiety regarding the world's future supply of energy. Discussions of a new "great game"—a term traditionally associated with competition among major world powers for the control of Eurasian oil resources since the late nineteenth century—have become frequent among observers of energy security.

Today, Africa supplies China with nearly a third of its oil imports. Beijing's extensive engagement and its ascending status in Africa also raises important questions on the nature of China's involvement in the continent as well as Beijing's long-term objectives in the region. Critics charge that China has pursued mercantilist policies in the region for pure economic benefits without human rights or environmental concerns. Due to China's support, they argue, the Sudanese government has been able to continue its genocidal policy in the Darfur region, and the Mugabe regime has been able to survive and carry on its abuses of human rights in Zimbabwe.