Supervisor Elham AbolFateh
Editor in Chief Mohamed Wadie

Beyond the Chinese Presence in Africa


Sun 06 Oct 2019 | 04:17 PM
opinion .

For years, Chinese President Xi Jinping is building new silk roads. The adventure of the first silk road with Marco Polo began about 1,000 years ago. Over time, this massive investment program in infrastructure became the state's major policy.

The Chinese giant program is changing the global economic map at all levels. The Beijing ambitious project consists of a land section - the construction and financing of intercontinental railways and a maritime section - of investments in dozens of ports around the world to facilitate Chinese trade.

These Chinese moves are of concern to everyone, including Japan. A few days ago, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe delivered a speech at the press conference that concluded the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD). The conference brought together more than 50 countries from this continent in Yokohama, a suburb of the Japanese capital.

Abe said in his speech that foreign investors in Africa should be careful not to sink the host countries into debt, a clear reference to China's huge projects.

China followed the example of Japan at its conference on African development. China is now outperforming Japan in the amount allocated and the penetrating presence in the African economy by financing projects in these countries and transferring some bio-technologies to maintain its position and strengthen it by signing other economic and investment contracts covering various fields.

With this policy, China is trying to revitalize its economy and make it grow faster and stronger. The United States and Europe, complaining about the Asian "soft power" which have replaced them in the continent, have been closed.

According to a study by the US MacKenzie Agency, more than 1000 Chinese companies are currently working in Africa. Some sources talk about 2500 companies, 90 percent of which are private companies.

Strategic reports predict that China will earn $ 440 billion in Africa by 2025, an increase of 144 percent. South Africa and Ethiopia are among the top countries in terms of Chinese investment, while Zambia and Angola come at the bottom.

To add insult to injury, China is buying vast farmland in African countries to invest to feed its population of more than 1.5 billion people by 2025.

Besides the economic dossier, China's "soft power" is manifested in such areas as media and culture, where it has embarked on Building many cultural centers to teach Chinese language and culture.

It is no secret that strategic observers have a military presence in Africa; in July, China sent two naval ships to the Horn of Africa, specifically to Djibouti, where it has a military and logistics base. More than 400 military personnel are deployed at this base to secure shipping routes in the Horn of Africa at the level of the Gulf of Aden and the Horn of Africa, as well as the safety of Chinese soldiers contributing to peacekeeping forces in several African countries.

I believe that this policy of China, behind its one goal, is that America does not remain the only control of navigation routes because this can oppose its interests and impede the delivery of primary resources and surveillance. But with China's new military posture, Beijing has broken one of its most important constants: non-military intervention in other countries' affairs and maintaining a balance in its foreign policy.

Contributed by Ahmad El-Assasy