The U.S. government has become obsessed with Africa. Not with fostering its strength, independence, health, or economic development, mind you. Instead, it is worried about why Africans don’t like us much. Recent polling in 29 African countries shows that African youth hold more favorable opinions of China than of the U.S. More than eight in 10 respondents see China’s influence in their country as both more prominent than that of the U.S. and more positive. Upbeat views of China are nearly unanimous in Nigeria, Malawi, and Uganda.

Separate data reveals that since 2015 the number of African students from English-speaking countries who gained admission to Chinese universities surpassed that of those who attend universities in the U.K. and the U.S.

This data shows a considerable shift in African perceptions of China, to the detriment of the dominant neocolonial powers.

After four centuries of the European/American slave trade, colonialism, and neocolonialism, followed by decades of neglect, the U.S. government in 2021 called Africa “the southern flank” of NATO. Large chunks of the massive annual $800 billion military budget fund the complex of military installations, intelligence networks, and interventionist political projects called AFRICOM.

In Political Affairs 15 years ago, Gerald Horne noted the U.S. government’s growing concern about China’s deepening relations with African countries. At the time, the Bush administration expressed frustration that they could not disrupt that relationship. They predicted that if China were allowed to continue in that manner, U.S. imperialist hegemony would wane. Time has proven this forecast correct.

This transformation in the global state of affairs has resulted from the rise of China, the developing independence of Global South countries, and a related decline of U.S. hegemony.

End AFRICOM

Given the diminishing U.S. ability to compete economically, it intends to create a position of force against African countries. By linking NATO and AFRICOM in a global military alliance against China, it plans to ratchet up dangerous U.S. interventions in that part of the world.

The U.S. sees Africa through a narrow, racist lens: a site of struggle for Western imperialist domination. Today’s Western interventions in Africa — historically rooted in the European slave trade, colonialism, and neocolonialism — “must be seen through a dependency perspective.” W. Alphaeus Hunton, in his groundbreaking study Decision in Africa, detailed the historical continuity between European colonialism and U.S.-led neocolonialism in Africa.

He showed that Western loans and foreign direct investment in Africa functioned primarily to 1) extract wealth (minerals, energy, and agricultural products); 2) bring this wealth to seaports in raw form for export to metropoles; 3) maintain comprador relations with state political forces; and 4) ensure internal security of the Western imperialist project. Those forms remain unchanged. The side-effects produced sharper inequalities, provided little traction for anti-poverty initiatives, negated autonomous capacity for development, and reduced political sovereignty.

Western-derived loans, grants, aid, or foreign direct investment (FDI) in developing countries have streamed toward dominant classes sympathetic to Western goals. Western-originated lending and investment favor the wealthiest, least financially risky sites. This situation produces an “excessive concentration of economic activity” around already successful, powerful actors. Those lending practices exclude those classes and sectors that need the most direct stimulation.

New plans for infrastructure projects projected as part of the Build Back a Better World initiative, which the Biden administration plans to help rebuild U.S. control over Africa, will no doubt function similarly.

The U.S. government has never tried to promote equal relations between itself and African countries. It cares little for that continent’s human rights issues, democracy, or economic development, except insofar as it can use these issues to impose its will.

What is the situation?

There is little space here to explore and document Africa’s full diversity and complexity, with 54 countries and 1.2 billion people, more than 1,000 languages, dozens of traditional and modern religious orientations, 3,000 ethnic groups, varied ecosystems, diverse political orientations, and complex histories. Still, the following data opens a tiny window into the developing China-Africa paradigm.

African agriculture makes up about one-third of the continent’s total GDP, employing about 60% of the African workforce. Even to this extent, African countries have not yet reached the continent’s “full potential in agriculture.” Researchers show that Chinese policymakers are carefully attending to the necessity of building on the agricultural sectoral as a base for “structural development economics.”

Forty-nine countries have established financial relations with China through loans and grants for seaport construction or expansion, hydroelectric dams, standard gauge railways, highways, roads, bridges, technical training facilities, medical support, and agricultural projects. Why infrastructure? One estimate shows that current infrastructure conditions restrain growth throughout Africa by at least 1% of annual GDP growth rates.

Between 2002 and 2012, China earned high praise from humanitarian watchers for delivering loans and grants with few political strings, regular low-interest rates, and generous repayment conditions. After the 2008 recession, the Chinese government canceled 168 African debts to enable a return to economic growth on the continent.

Since 2013, with the establishment of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), some growth in Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI) — separate from government-backed loans or grants—spurred the development of the number of Chinese-owned and operated businesses in Africa. Today, about 10,000 Chinese businesses operate in African countries, with at least 1 million Chinese citizens living on the continent.

Chinese-African trade totaled $200 billion in 2015, and China has become the continent’s single largest trading partner.

Chinese investments in infrastructure, FDI in the development of African energy and mining sectors, and material aid in the form of hundreds of medical and educational missions are premised on mutual benefit. In other words, the Chinese government regards international relations as a vehicle for stable political relations and trade.

On the one hand, trade provides each side with various products, labor resources, and earnings for private and public enterprises. On the other, they create new opportunities for technical and cultural development and the transfer of modernized agricultural and industrial capacity from China to African countries.

Up to 2019, Chinese investments in Africa drove an average 4% GDP growth rate. Only halted by the pandemic, average growth fell to 1.4% in 2021, mirroring global trends.

Conclusions and directions

A realistic assessment of the overall record reveals more successes than failures. The most significant risk to success for the China-Africa independent development project lies with the dangers of U.S. imperialism. By conflating Africa with U.S. imperialism, U.S. officials are threatening to open numerous proxy wars on that continent via renewed military occupations, political interventions, and economic sanctions regimes that could derail the China-Africa paradigm and return the continent to some of the worst depredations of the neocolonial era.

The struggle to end expanding U.S. military involvement in Africa and to challenge distorted and hypocritical U.S. propaganda about the China-Africa paradigm is vital to derailing that imperialist agenda. Structural development economics allows developing countries to establish the foundations for social, political, economic, and cultural autonomy denied under neocolonialism and neo-imperialism.

Editor: Zhong Yao、Zheng Yifan

From:https://www.cpusa.org/article/africa-china-and-u-s-imperialism/.（2022-7-8）