China looking to Africa for political, economic gains
June 18, 2006 (CAIRO) — China is making inroads into Africa with huge investment projects – filling the void left by U.S. and European businesses – as it looks to reaping not only financial profits, but political ones as well.
On Sunday, Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao wrapped up a two-day visit to Cairo, the first stop on a regional tour, after signing 10 agreements in the fields of oil, natural gas, telecommunications and industry.
After meeting with President Hosni Mubarak earlier in the day, Wen said China was ready to increase investment in Egypt – particularly in the energy and communications sectors.
China also agreed to give Egypt a US$50 million ( 39.52 million) loan and a US$10 million ( 7.9 million) grant to build a center to facilitate investment in an industrial area northwest of the Gulf of Suez.
And on the political front, Mubarak assured Wen of Egypt’s policy of recognizing one China, spokesman Suleiman Awwad said, alluding to Taiwan’s bid for independence. Other African countries have also yielded to Chinese pressure to shun Taiwan.
Trade between Egypt and China topped $2 billion in 2005 – a fourfold increase since 2002. And it has 186 projects in Egypt, with a total investment of $220 million.
On Saturday night, Wen and his Egyptian counterpart, Ahmed Nazif, attended celebrations at the Great Pyramids to mark the 50th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries.
In 1956, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser recognized China – making Egypt the first Arab or African nation to do so, in defiance of U.S. efforts to discourage other countries from dealing with the communist state. The United States established diplomatic ties with China after 29 years on January 1, 1979.
Wen is expected to sign additional economic agreements during the other stops on his tour.
While critics contend that China’s headway into the continent unjustly rewards nations with poor human rights records, an analyst suggests that other factors have greater prominence in Beijing’s calculations.
“This is not its concern. Business is,” said Khalil al-Anani, a political analyst with al-Siyassah al-Dawliyah, a politics quarterly published by the semiofficial Al-Ahram daily newspaper. Al-Anani also noted that China’s investments in African countries are mostly in state-run infrastructure projects.
“These are long-term investments into which Western businesses probably do not want to venture,” he said.
Other critics have said China’s arms exports to some war-torn African nations have helped fuel conflicts, including that in Darfur, Sudan, which has claimed at least 180,000 lives and forced more than 2 million people from their homes over the past three years.
But Chinese officials defend their expanding relations with the African countries as “mutually beneficial.”
China’s Assistant Foreign Minister He Yafei said Friday, a day before Wen started his African tour, that Sino-African relations help to improve those nations’ human rights records.
In Cairo, Wen also faced accusations that his country was doing little or nothing to support the Arabs in the conflict with Israel.
“We think that the key solution is to implement the United Nations resolutions and the road map peace plan and to encourage both sides to pursue a peaceful settlement on the basis of ‘land for peace,”‘ he said.
Yafei described his country’s relations with the Jewish state as “good and normal and important to both peoples as well as for the Arab world, because these relations help China to work with both parties to achieve peace.”
After Wen’s two-day visit to Egypt, he left Sunday for Ghana, on the tour that will also take him to Angola, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda.
Wen said China’s his country has offered Africa more than $44 billion in aid over the past 50 years, to finance 900 infrastructure projects.
He said China would encourage companies to invest more in Africa, and that it would offer additional opportunities for financial aid and training at the Afro-Chinese forum, to be held in Beijing in November.
Wen denied that China wanted to improve relations with Africa to control energy resources, saying oil deals with African nations were open and transparent.
China, the world’s fastest growing economy and most populous nation, has lavished attention on resource-rich Africa for decades, sending its foreign minister and other high-ranking officials on annual visits. Wen’s trip comes less than two months after President Hu Jintao visited Nigeria, Morocco and Kenya.
(ST/AP)