Ethiopia’s light rail system was built mainly with Chinese money. Photograph: Solan Kolli/EPA
Addis Ababa has a surprise in store for those who haven’t visited in two years. Cutting through the heart of this booming city, where construction cranes are the most persistent feature of the skyline, is the Addis Ababa Light Rapid Transit (AALRT) network. It rears up suddenly at Meskel Square, which until 2013 gazed out onto an expanse of chaotic traffic. The traffic now bustles beneath the shadow of what is only the second metro ever built south of the Sahara.
On the back of the green and white trains that trundle up and down the line are not one, but two logos: the Ethiopian Railways Corporation, and, next to it, the logo of the giant state-owned China Railway Group (CREC).
How did China get involved in developing an African metropolis that westerners tend to associate with famine and death? And this is just one project among many across the continent. In 2014 alone, China signed more than £56bn in construction contracts across Africa. Since the turn of the century, Chinese firms have built stadiums, highways, airports, schools, hospitals and, in Angola, an entire city that still stands empty. China has pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into African governments and infrastructure. In return, it has reaped hundreds of billions in commodities.
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The Light Railway goes some way to answering these questions. The project dates back to December 2011 when the idea for a 34.25km electrified light railway secured funds from Exim Bank of China. Construction for the 39-station project began in 2013 and the metro opened in September 2015, well ahead of schedule.
The metro moves about 15,000 people per line per day and costs about six birr (10p) a ride. But describing it as an outright success would be a stretch. The construction often looks slapdash – a standard complaint about Chinese construction projects across the continent.
At St Estfanos station, an empty USAID wheat sack serves as a garbage bag. This serves as a neat analogy of the competing interests in Ethiopia, and also of the different approaches. For the West, the country has always been a basket case, or alternatively, a bulwark against Islamist extremism. For the Chinese, it represents a vast, untapped market: a country of almost 100 million people, 90 percent of whom are unbanked, primed to roar through the remainder of the century as a force in Africa, and beyond.
The beginning of a ‘win-win’ relationship?
In 1971, during the Cultural Revolution, a young Chinese man called Gau “Victor” Hau had just finished a two-year stretch in an agricultural re-education camp. His first assignment from the Chinese Communist Party was in Tanzania as a translator on the most sizeable and important project ever undertaken by the Middle Kingdom on foreign soil.
Now Gau is a career railway adviser for the massive state owned entity, China Railway Construction Corporation Limited (CRCC). But in 1971 his ability to speak English was crucial to a huge railway project planned between Tanzania and Zambia. In the late 1960s, Chairman Mao and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had entered into an agreement with Tanzanian liberation hero Julius Nyerere and his Zambian contemporary Kenneth Kaunda. They would build a railway line from the Tanzanian port city of Dar es Salaam to Kapiri Mposhi, located in Zambia’s copper belt. For Kuanda, the railway was an existential necessity: surrounded by white supremacist regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa, there was no way for him to export his primary resource to the sea. Hence, the Uhuru (Kiswahili for “freedom”) Railway.
For the CCP, the project was no less vital. Prior to rapprochement with the Nixon administration in 1972, and during Mao’s lengthy enmity with the Soviet Union, China was subject to diplomatic purdah. To secure enough votes to become reinstated on the UN Security Council Beijing required allies, and hoped to find the necessary support in Africa. The Tanzania-Zambia Railway Authority (Tazara) line, to be paid for in full by the Chinese, was the beginning of what Beijing promised would be a “win-win relationship”, a kinship based on mutual need to fend off shared antagonisms.
Tazara crossing bridge in Zambia. The line was paid for in full by the Chinese. Photograph: Richard Stupart
But there was a second, perhaps even more pragmatic, reason to build the railway. “We have to rely on importing natural resources from other countries,” Gau said, seated behind a desk in his large Beijing office. “If China was to keep up sustainable development for many years, China has to secure a supply of natural resources and minerals to feed our industries.”
Tazara, with a $400m price tag, was blindingly expensive, especially for a country mired in poverty and still reeling from the chaos of Chairman Mao’s revolutionary exertions. Gau says the railway’s real cost was likely $1bn (at least $6bn in today’s money), with a further $1bn in maintenance over the years. It was an immensely difficult engineering challenge. The track cut through 1,860km of bush and mountain ranges, with more than 300 bridges, 22 tunnels, 96 stations, and about 400,000 sq m of support structures. Almost 50,000 Chinese engineers, translators, project managers and labourers were contracted to the project, with a further 100,000 Zambian and Tanzanians filling out the workforce. All of this was funded by China with an interest free loan, to be paid back over 30 years, with a 10-year grace period.
But if the project wasn’t a dazzling leap forward for east Africa’s economy, it was brilliant geopolitics. “At that time China was mainly concerned with the political significance of the railway,” says Gau. “Without Tazara, China would not be so easily rehabilitated with a UN seat.”
If Tazara represented the first and most significant attempt to forge a lasting south-south engagement, it remained for almost three decades an isolated and anomalous project, its lustre fading as soon as the inaugural trip had been undertaken.
This was mainly a result of China deciding to double down on development at home – the recovery from the Cultural Revolution precluded any further costly adventures abroad. But as the 1970s melted into the 1980s, and gave way to a resurgent 1990s under Deng Xiaoping’s mandate of “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, when “some would get rich first”, the single greatest push for growth in the country demanded strong international partnerships if it were to succeed.
In order to properly hit the diplomatic reset button, in October 2000 the Chinese hosted the first Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC). Four African heads of state made the trip to Beijing, at the invitation of the Chinese, who hoped to build an extensive and lasting multilateral partnership with the continent. By the time of the third FOCAC, six years later, 44 African leaders attended. Billions of dollars of development money was promised, and a new age had begun.
Chinese priorities change: from politics to minerals
Over the course of the commodities super-cycle, the boom market for natural resources such as oil, steel, gold, manganite and platinum, lasting roughly from the turn of the century to 2013, China and sub-Saharan Africa’s economies were effectively coupled: when graphed, they mirrored each other. China purchased raw materials to fuel development at home, while massive state-owned organisations entered the African market, alongside Chinese-made goods and half a million Chinese migrants.
Did this epochal encounter between 1.3 billion Chinese, and 1.1 billion Africans – nearly a third of the planet’s population – maintain any of the coherent strands of “win-win” friendship that ballasted the Tazara project? Was the relationship still guided from above by bureaucrats in Beijing’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs who knew exactly what they wanted, and could easily benchmark the outcomes?
Not at all. Since Tazara, the Sino-African phenomenon has become much more sophisticated and highly fragmented and is no longer stage-managed by governments. Nowhere is this better shown than by a project announced in Johannesburg in 2013. That year, the South African press began reporting on a vast £4.8bn real estate development in Modderfontein, north-east of the city, continually citing that fact that it would be financed and constructed by “the Chinese”.
The press was never clear on what was meant by “the Chinese”. The details were surprising: the Modderfontein New City endeavour was headed by Zendai Group, a Hong Kong-listed company run by an eccentric, goateed entrepreneur named Dai Zhikang. Most of the group’s more successful projects were undertaken in Shanghai. The plan was that the South African community, stretching over tens of thousands of hectares, would include “all the functions of a city, such as finance, trade, logistics, commerce, technology, education, health care and housing”. Modderfontein New City, the company’s website insisted, would become “the New York of Africa,” with twisty postmodern skyscrapers and gigantic retail outlets, all operating on a green grid.
Was this a nothing more than an old-school land grab, orchestrated by Beijing in a tidy neo-colonial manoeuvre? That was certainly the implication of the earliest news coverage. But on closer inspection, Modderfontein was just an ambitious real estate play that required big injections of private equity from South Africans. Zendai purchased an initial 1,600 hectares of land for about £57m, and put another £22m into infrastructure. The idea was to attract partnerships and other dealmakers, who would in turn attract others – a growth strategy based largely on the same real estate agent spin encountered anywhere in the world.
Why aren’t we designing cities that work for women, not just men? Andrew Fleming and Anja Tranovich
This is the way of things in these latter days of the Sino-African encounter. Without question, the Chinese are major players, engaged in hundreds of projects across a continent that desperately needs infrastructure and development. But not all of these projects are government-driven: some are worth only a few thousand pounds, and are negotiated between Africans and Chinese migrants in distant desert communities in remote Chad or Niger.
Nonetheless, as American and British populists prepare to close their doors to the outside world, and as Western influence dims across the continent, China may well be the catalyst Africa has required to leap forward into the future. But with the pros come some serious, unanticipated cons.
Addis Ababa’s light railway, while it hasn’t quite made beaten up Lada taxis obsolete, has so thoroughly transformed the city that it counts as a work of urban alchemy. But the social cost may yet prove immense: as Addis expands and explodes, the city’s borders push into land belonging to the Oromo people, causing social ruptures and violence. Ethiopia is facing its own muted version of the Arab Spring.
The fall of the regime in Ethiopia seems unlikely, but 2016 has taught us the limits of unlikelihood. Would a new government be as amenable to the Chinese, who were themselves so amenable to the previous oppressors? These questions abound in Africa, as certain regimes teeter, others tumble, and still others harden into lengthy runs at the helm. If the Chinese were once hoping for a comprehensive, mandated south-south axis, they have ended up with something more and less than that: an economic, cultural and social encounter that is changing the world, one railway line at a time.
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Sorry Guardian, how is this "neo-colonialism"? I don't see any Chinese military invading anyone in Africa, forcing governments to submit to them or just stealing entire countries, just businessmen and governments cutting deals, both good and bad ...
..YET...
I guess you can't conceive of the idea of anyone doing business in Africa without guns and/or condescension (vis. Europe). How sad.
How did Britain gain control of India? The West also often just wanted to 'do business' with other states (see the Opium Wars). But business means profit, profit means 'interests', and interests need to be protected. The colonial West wasn't uniquely evil, just used its advantages in economic wealth and military power to protect and develop its global interests, as the US does today, and as the Chinese will do in future. It's 'just business'.
If our experience in Kenya is anything to go by, then the Chinese are a far more useful force for good than any Western country or coloniser was. Today, if I want to drive from Nairobi to Thika, a distance of 40km, I can on a 10-lane highway. Nairobi's infamous traffic jams are easing, thanks to superb (lets drop the lie, the Chinese are really first-class engineers!) Chinese-built by-passes and over-passes. If I want to watch a game of football, I'll do so at the Chinese built Nyayo or Kasarani national stadiums in Nairobi. If I get sick, I could be treated at the Chinese-built and equipped Mama Lucy Hospital in the east of Nairobi.
I could go and on and on. Bu at the end of it all I'll ask, what are the infrastructural developments that the West has helped us build over the last 60 years? True, its not the role of Britain, Canada and others to build our infrastructure, but listening to many here it is as if the rapacious West was the best thing that happened to Africa. In fact, it's probably the worst thing. The Chinese build roads, railways, airports etc etc without much fuss; the West gives a few million dollars with endless conditions, including employment of their own overpaid expatriates and crazily loop-sided economic partnerships.
It is a lie to say that most Africans think they are being recolonised by the Chinese. In fact, we welcome them, but politely ask them to leave our animals alone. It is because of their engagement that Africa has grown at an average 5-6 per cent since 2000. How fast was it growing before that, when our old lords held sway?
Bwana, the west is in terminal decline. By the time the planning permission to build a 200 m bicycle path gets through the bureaucracy of any western city council, the Chinese will have built an airport or housing for 70000 people. There is so much procrastination and bureaucracy in the west that it makes the old soviet countries look productive at times.. It is a mentality thing which will not change easily.
The real Colonialists never invested anything into the African continent. Thats why history doesnt really say nice things about them.
Would Eritrea be an example? It's now a hellhole and anyone with any sense of history knows it was better run as an Italian colony.
Maybe you should go and make that arguement to the Eritrians.
The west leave Africa in ruin, and scowl when the Chinese come and brought prosperity in short time. Sure there are flaws, nobody is perfect. The west spent billions of dollars of so called "aid" mainly on their own so called "aid workers" who live like a king in Africa. While the Chinese spent billions of dollars on developing the infrastructure, while Chinese managers and engineers are living in spartan life. All so the Africans can get the best bangs for the bucks.
This is total and utter BS.
When the Portuguese left in 1975, there were no Universities in Angola, not a single one. When students finished secondary school they could either go straight into the workforce or travel to Portugal to pursue higher education, only the white Angolans and their decendants could afford to do that. Blacks were lucky to even finish secondary education.
Today there are over 30 higher education establishments (universities and polytechnics). Some are still lacking in quality but they are there and most were built by the chinese.
After almost 30 years of a brutal civil war (lets not mention CIA, KGB, MI6, DGSE involvement) the country had no infrastructure, the very little infrastructure the portuguese had left in 1975 was completely obliterated.
in 14 years of peace, with a little help from the chinese, the country has built brand new highways, bridges, schools, hospitals, hydroelectric power plants, rebuilt the railway system, airports and so on. Most of the "WEST" stood there pontificating and finger wagging.
The deals were most probably shady with lots of kickbacks and hefty commissions (see Sam Pa and the 88 Queensway Group) but things got done.
Whrever a chinese company signs a contract, the following firms have a bad business day:
KBR; Cerberus Capital Management; Washington Group International; IAP Worldwide Services; Environmental Chemical Corporation; L-3 Communications Holdings; Fluor Corporation; Perini Corporation; Orascom Construction Industries; Parsons Corporation; Blackwater USA; Tetra Tech; AMEC; Laguna Pueblo (Laguna Construction); AECOM Technology; Toltest; Lockheed Martin; Weston Solutions; Red Star Enterprises etc. etc.
The chinese ventured into Africa and are reaping the benefits.
African nations have to develop into a relationship where know how is left behind so they can maintain the big infrastructure projects.
And why exactly would the Chinese want to do that? If they're just in Africa to make money by doing business, surely it is in their interest to keep Africans dependent on China for as long as possible?
No. The Chinese see the huge potential in a market of 1 billion African souls. To make that market for Chinese goods really come alive they need to help develop Africa and seed a middle class.
"surely it is in their interest to keep Africans dependent on China for as long as possible?"
You're just projecting. As the above poster has already stated, new market connections are being forged, unleashing a dynamic entrepreneurialism in many rural areas of Africa.
How about letting China in if they promise to commit to resolve the poaching issue !
Some win, some lose.
Governments in less developed nations have the ability to tip the balance in favour of more people winning; however not all of them choose to do so.
The current relationship between African societies and China cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be described as "colonialist." On the contrary, the peoples of Africa and the people of China are working closely together to develop their respective economies through contractual relationships that are of mutual benefit to both parties. To argue that the Chinese are colonizing Africans is to imply that the Chinese are stealing African resources--including African material resources and African labour--on the basis of oppressive infrastructure that they have imposed on African societies. This is not what is happening. Rather, African societies are exchanging their abundant resources for infrastructure and skills originating from China that they need in order for them to modernize enough to be in a position to compete for the world's resources with other parts of the world on a co-equal basis. The former colonial powers did not provide African societies with the opportunity to even begin to dream of "development" in that regard.
In fact, I would go so far as to urge African societies to strengthen their relationships with China (without necessarily undermining their relationships with other parts of the world--since the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive with respect to Africa) in order for them to reap the benefits of the partnerships most fully. One means by which they could achieve that objective would be for them to take advantage of the contracts for projects that they sign with Chinese companies to ensure that the skills that the Chinese transfer to African societies through those projects are marshaled and deployed accordingly. For example, they could require that an important aspect of every one of those contracts should include training of sizable numbers of interns drawn from their colleges and universities through appropriately formulated coursework. If such schemes are properly conceptualized and undertaken, they could constitute an interesting avenue through which the skills that African societies so desperately require will be transferred from China to Africa and utilized to develop African societies in the future.
China is clearly a force for good in Africa at the moment, but it's important not to be naive. If the Chinese are just in it for their business and economic interests, what happens when Africans one day decide too much of their land, resources and infrastructure is owned or controlled by faceless Chinese businessmen? Will China just abandon its economic interests peacefully and hand them back to Africans?
It's really quite amazing how the 'evil' capitalist West that only cared about the interests and profits of its corporations is now being contrasted with a benevolent 'socialist' China that 'just wants to do business'.
You seem to be missing the point. The West never believed in Africa's future. Western corporations never really believed it worth investing $billions in enormous infrastructure to kick start African economists so as to create a vast market for Western goods. The Chinese do. It is as you say entirely selfish, and so to is Africa preferring Chinese infrastructure to Western aid and loans all contracted to return direct to Western corporations in GM seeds (creating a monopoly as those seeds cannot be re-planted after harvest, more have to be bought) and the world's most expensive medicine.
Japan deserves some credit for inventing this model. They early on believed in China's potential and also loaned billions for infrastructure development in China. The West's efforts were miniscule in Africa by comparison.
Sorry, that should say economies, not economists.
"If the Chinese are just in it for their business and economic interests, what happens when Africans one day decide too much of their land, resources and infrastructure is owned or controlled by faceless Chinese businessmen?"
Renegotiate the business arrangement? After all the Chinese have paid for every piece of property they hold in Africa, instead of taking out their guns and demanding that everything be given to them for free.
"That year, the South African press began reporting on a vast £4.8bn real estate development in Modderfontein, north-east of the city, continually citing that fact that it would be financed and constructed by “the Chinese”.
This is all too familiar in my country with mostly whites and their media apprehensive against anything non western, including the current nuclear deal being negotiated with the Russians, or the South African government's relationship with the AU or Cuba.
China is about business, and not spreading communism or proselytising any form of religion or ideology.
China is offering Africa a business deal. A deal that might very well favour the Chinese more than Africa but nonetheless a business deal. The West offers Africa a feudalistic deal. Indeed, the economic policies of many African governments are no more than policies written for them by the IMF and World Bank. The result has been debt slavery and poverty.
With the Chinese writing new rules of loans for resources, the consequence is that Africans have already learned to bargain better, loan interest rates have fallen and terms eased. The imposition of Washington Consensus terms on governance have also been shown to be folly.
It's up to Africa to practice good governance, and promote her best and brightest to negotiate with the Chinese. Oh, the Chinese do not patronise Africans.
How long before the US starts reducing these infrastructure projects to rubble and steals natural resources from the defenceless victims to pay US corporations to rebuild the buggers?
AFRICOM- here we come!
Libya which provided massively to the infrastructural development of African institutions has been reduced to rubble. China is building bridges..and making friends, while the US are burning them in a scorched earth manner and making enemies, and referring to everything as weapons, and using the language of war to describe trade.
The AU has rejected a permanent military base on the continent, but the US is using chicanery by bribing the supine strongman of Africa in the military, in the same way she did in the Americas. The US military footprint has grown in the continent under the disguise of fighting terrorism, but this is in effect to counter China's growing economic influence and keep Africans in western servitude.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46076.htm
China is currently about making money, morals and ethics will be pushed aside. That still leaves them ahead of much of the west that want far more than just money for their 'help'.
Morals and ethics which the west has never lived by.
This is ridiculous. You talk about morals and ethics in the West... don't make me laugh. Who is the biggest exporter of arms to conflict zones? Who have supported most despotic regimes in the world and overthrow of governments they did not like? Who invaded Iraq with fake evidence?Who colonized half the world and supported apartheid regime in South Africa? I could write a book.
Stop deluding your self, perhaps you are reading too much Guardian that blinkered your brain!!!
Poplak writes: "Under Mao ... China was in diplomatic purdah. To secure enough votes [presumably he means at the UN General Assembly] to become reinstated on the UN Security Council, Beijing required allies, and hoped to find the necessary support in Africa".
This is an inaccurate presentation of the issue. China has been a member of the UN since the founding of the organisation in 1945? Under the Nationalist government at that time, being considered among the victors in WWII, China was given one of the 5 permanent seats on the UN Security Council. It was therefore not a question of Beijing being "reinstated on the UN Security Council" but of deciding which China (ROC on Taiwan, or PRC on the mainland) had the right to represent China at the UN. For 20 years, the USA, its Western allies, and those other countries whose arms they twisted, defeated annual resolutions at the General Assembly calling for the mainland Chinese government (in place since 1949) to take its seat as the country's legal representative at the UN. This was achieved when the General Assembly adopted a resolution in this sense on 25 October 1971, shortly before Nixon's encounter with Mao in Beijing.
A remarkably mean spirited article even for The Guardian. "The construction often looks slapdash – a standard complaint about Chinese construction projects across the continent. At St Estfanos station, an empty USAID wheat sack serves as a garbage bag".
The example of 'slapdash' construction is the use of wheat sacks as garbage bags? Something the contractor had no control over?
If the West stands back at this juncture where so many African countries are trying to turn to real democracy, it will be as guilty as was of its own colonisation and subjugation and rape of Africa. The reason China is suddenly such a desired partner is because it is not really concerned about democracy; on the contrary. So China is fresh wind in the sails of the old die-hard dinosaurs, like the evil Mugabe, for instance. Whereas British colonialism was unashamed exploitation of the Continent, the Chinese's is much more insidious because now the so-called leaders of the downtrodden consider it fair play, i.e. feathering their own pockets at the expense of developing the country. I am NO fan of Trump, but perhaps it's time the world has someone in the White House who's not going to pussyfoot around and kowtow to China's bullying. Apart from everything else, China is also the main market for illicit rhino-horn trade and, as such, they're in cahoots with most of the power- and money-hungry banana presidents in poaching rhinos and other wildlife into extinction because they're too useless to get a hard-on.
Apologies, key word missing in the first sentence: ... as guilty as Britain was...
"The reason China is suddenly such a desired partner is because it is not really concerned about democracy;"
The Chinese are partners of choice because they do not patronise Africans and apply a selective morality which excuses despotic vassal countries like Saudi Arabia and Uganda, but berates independent despotic countries such as Zimbabwe and Sudan.
When western interests are threatened, democracy is not an option. History is a good teacher.
The Chinese are consistent in their non interference in the domestic politics of their trading partners. They also understand that social development trumps democracy every time.
I really dislike these kind of patronising articles. It is like Africans are children. What the Chinese and Africans see is opportunities to work with each other. The west is t too obsessed with the past. They see themselves like African guardians, like the Africans should seek their approval for whatever they do. The Chinese come as equals. They see people not children. They see potential not poverty. They see hope and not pity. They look into the future and not the past and they do not come with ill conceived and half baked ideas like what the IMF did destroying whatever welfare for the poor there was in 1980s with their structural adjustment programmes.
The legacy of the west in Africa is exploitation, supporting dictatorships and cladestine murder like that of Patrice Lumumba by the CIA and Thomas Sankara by the French. Leave them alone and show some respect.
"The Chinese come as equals. "
Yes, and i have a bridge to sell you.
Sounds about like the new banana Republic president-elect in the US to the American people. A nut job who is going to provoke WWIII.
Is it because they trade in someone else then weapons? I think they got that from the French. They were the ones who invented the infrastructure style of neocolonialism.
It's called progress and it starts with infrastructure. It happens with every country just as the industrial revolution caused massive upheaval in this country.
Good to see so many defending the Chinese in Africa. Yes, there are problems with increased indebtedness to China and local traders often lose out because of cheaper Chinese imports. But the infrastructure building will long term benefit Africans. What are Africans supposed to do - wait for Russia, Europe and the US to fund the infrastructure projects amounting to tens of billions of dollars? Not going to happen. Western countries need to stop whining about this.
I wonder what is best for Africans, a bag of Maize/wheat/Rice or Slapdash infrastructure!!
The two are not mutually exclusive. African societies are pursuing both ideas. Here is an example:
http://www.mediamaxnetwork.co.ke/people-daily/170678/trans-nzoia-has-acquired-maize-driers-ahead-of-el-nino-rains/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3_HFq9Ri8Q