China’s New Role in African Politics

From Non-Intervention towards Stabilization?

Christof Hartmann, Nele Noesselt, Christof Hartmann, Nele Noesselt, Christof Hartmann, Nele Noesselt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429748837
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

China's rise to global power status in recent decades has been accompanied by deepening economic relationships with Africa, with the New Silk Road's extension to Sub-Saharan Africa as the latest step, leading to much academic debate about the influence of Chinese business in the continent. However, China's engagement with African states at the political and diplomatic level has received less attention in the literature. This book investigates the impact of Chinese policies on African politics, asking how China deals with political instability in Africa and in turn how Africans perceive China to be helping or hindering political stability.

While China officially operates with a foreign policy strategy which conceives of Africa as one integrated monolithic area (with the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) the flagship of inter-continental cooperation), this book highlights the plurality of context-specific interaction patterns between China and African elites, demonstrating how China's role and relevance has differently evolved according to whether African countries are resource-rich and geostrategically important from the Chinese perspective or not. By looking comparatively at a range of different country cases, the book aims to promote a more thorough understanding of how China reacts to political stability and instability, and in which ways the country contributes to domestic political dynamics and stability within African states.

China's New Role in African Politics will be of interest to researchers from across Political Science, International Relations, International Law and Economy, Security Studies, and African and Chinese Studies.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-ND) 4.0 license.

1 China’s new role in African politics

From non-intervention towards stabilization?

Christof Hartmann and Nele Noesselt

‘A continent of hope and promise’ – these were the terms used for praising Africa when Xi Jinping, as then newly appointed state president of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), visited Tanzania and offered win–win cooperation as opposed to policy-based development lending offered by the ‘West.’ Five years later, in July 2018, Xi went again on a presidential trip to Senegal and Rwanda – before attending the Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa (BRICS) summit in Johannesburg (South Africa). Between 2013 and 2018, the PRC’s Africa approach had witnessed a tremendous deepening of cooperation in terms of scale and scope: it is not only investing in major infrastructure projects, but has also silently started to adjust its position on issues of stability and security in other world regions. For the first time in Chinese history, the country provided ‘combat troops’ for peacekeeping operations in Mali. Chinese mediators diplomatically intervened in a civil war in South Sudan; and, finally, Beijing is seeking to strengthen its ties with the African Union and expresses its hopes that the Union might become a major stabilizing regional security player. Beijing’s Africa strategy is clearly driven by a complex economy–security nexus: Due to the going global campaign, further added by the Chinese New Silk Road initiative (also known as One Belt, One Road (OBOR) or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) ), Chinese companies, banks, and financial institutions have expanded to the African market and opened local overseas branches. Furthermore, major Chinese state companies are the main architects of connectivity projects (transportation, electrification, communication) spanning the African continent. At the same time, the transcontinental and transregional dimensions of China’s New Silk Road increase the vulnerability of the Chinese economy resulting from local conflicts and security dilemmas in Africa. Xi Jinping’s speech at the BRICS Business Forum in July 2018 highlighted the potential of cooperation in fields of green and inclusive development – hence indirectly presenting the Chinese modernization path as a blueprint for the emerging economies:

Africa has more development potential than any other region in the world. We should strengthen cooperation with Africa, support its development and make BRICS-Africa cooperation a model for South-South cooperation. We should actively carry out cooperation with African countries in such areas as poverty reduction, food security, innovation, infrastructure development and industrialization in a way compatible with their national conditions. We should help African countries develop their economic structure, contribute to the implementation of Agenda 2063 of the African Union and thus enable Africa, an ancient continent, to gain strong vitality.

(Xi 2018)

The PRC is constantly ‘learning’ and adapting its foreign strategy. It maintains bilateral ties with African countries and pays special attention to those states that it identifies as strategic gateways to African subregions or specific groups of states or networks (such as the Arabic communities in Africa). At the same time, it supports regional organizations that follow an agenda compatible with Chinese interests. The call for multilateralism and criticism of unilateral intervention – referred to as violation of ‘collectively adopted international rules’ – responded to the reorientation of the US before the backdrop of Trump’s ‘America first’ strategy. Beijing’s statements at the BRICS Summit 2018 are hence in line with Xi Jinping’s earlier statement that China would insist on global free trade, warning against the negative effects the US new strategy might have for emerging and catching-up economies.

While most analyses of the relationship between Africa and China have focused on Beijing’s strategy (as opposed to the Washington Consensus and conditionality-based development cooperation), African agency has only very recently become the object of research. African interest in stronger economic relationships with China is often taken for granted, but African opposition parties or non-governmental advocacy organizations might have more mixed assessments of the growing political and security role of China, and also a more varied set of strategies to deal with it. Given the existing cleavages and tensions inside the BRICS – especially between China and India – as well as between the PRC and the US, some African states can certainly make strategic choices and pursue a strategic triangular approach to avoid falling in the next debt and dependency trap. This edited volume seeks to sketch the emerging plurality and diversity of Beijing’s Africa strategy and to assess the strategic actions and responses by African actors.

The growing complexity of academic debates

Following the visible rise of China to global power status, research on the PRC’s foreign relations has been dominated by the tantalizing question whether the PRC would act as an assertive game changer or as a responsible great power complying with international norms and standards. Given the PRC’s thirst for raw materials and energy imports, the deepening relationship between China and Africa has raised concern among international observers. This has resulted in an ever-growing number of publications on trade relations between China and the African continent. In the past few years, the PRC has started to adjust its foreign strategy and to professionalize its foreign diplomacy. Simultaneously, the perception of China’s international role and its activities in Africa has changed tremendously. With the more important role that the PRC has assumed in many African states, new questions and puzzles regarding geopolitical and security cooperation and their political implications have emerged that have not been sufficiently explored so far in the literature and require both further theoretical reflection and empirical analysis.

Within research on the PRC’s African policies, emphasis has been put on tracing changes in the perception and strategies vis-à-vis the African continent as a whole. This is also true for the increasing research on Chinese contributions to peace and security on the continent. While there is a growing number of edited volumes exclusively dedicated to the analysis of Sino-African relations (inter alia Rotberg 2008; Men and Barton 2011; Adem 2013; Li 2013; Alden and Large 2018), recently published textbooks on Chinese foreign policy do often not pay too much attention to the African case(s). These studies primarily concentrate on the changing patterns of Sino-US and Sino-Russian relations or deal with basic structures and instruments of Chinese foreign relations as such (Ross and Bekkevold 2016; Zheng 2016). Studies on China’s foreign strategy display a strong focus on the assumed struggle for hegemony between China and the US, one of the few exceptions being the conference volume edited by Kitissou on Africa’s role in China’s global strategy (Kitissou 2007, cf. also Xu 2017). Many scholars have argued that leadership changes do not impact on the PRC’s foreign behavior as they are orchestrated as a smooth passing of the baton from one leadership generation to the other (Noesselt 2015; see also the special issue of Journal of Chinese Political Science on China’s Leadership Transition and Chinese Foreign Policy, volume 20, issue 1, March 2015). Nevertheless, China’s foreign strategy is dynamically evolving: The PRC’s One Belt, One Road initiative launched in 2013 that seeks to build a transregional transportation network – a ‘New Silk Road’ – constructs ‘Africa’ as one nodal point of Beijing’s new global network. The integration of Africa into China’s global strategy is a quite recent event and thus has not yet been systematically examined. The PRC’s official White Papers on the country’s relations with the continent neither reflect the variety of the political regime types in Africa nor discuss the plurality of actors involved in China’s interactions with Africa (i.e., ministries; banks; state-owned and private companies).

Within research on China’s foreign policy the relationships to Sub-Saharan Africa are an excellent arena to analyze the tensions between the self-perception of China as a non-colonial ‘Southern’ power, respecting the principles of non-intervention into the domestic affairs of other sovereign states, and growing African perceptions of China as a rather hegemonic power, major investor, and dominant trade partner. If the ‘Going Global Strategy’ leads to a heavier Chinese footprint in the economies and politics of African states, does this imply a questioning of the ‘Beijing Consensus’ in the long run? Discrepancies and tensions between role claims and role articulations by China and competing role ascriptions by African states might vary across the continent depending on the specific context of China’s economic and political involvement. There is an obvious gap between the PRC’s self-proclaimed role identity as a developing country and advocate of the ‘Global South’ and the roles attributed to China by Beijing’s strategic cooperation partners on the African continent (on China’s national role conflicts, see also Noesselt 2014). The analysis of role identities and conflicts is still an under-researched domain of International Relations that we want to address in the volume through contributions by African, European and Chinese scholars. Furthermore, the analysis of selected relationships between China and African states allows insights into the hidden processes of role contestation occurring inside the Chinese Communist Party as well as among Chinese academic elites.

While China officially operates with a foreign policy strategy, which conceives of Africa as one integrated monolithic area (the Forum on China–Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) being the flagship of inter-continental cooperation) in practice it seems rather perceiving Sub-Saharan Africa as a ‘fragmented’ continent with specific contexts, and with different Chinese actors having different relevance in these settings. Competition between Chinese ministries and banks for market access in Africa has increased and stands in sharp contrast to the PRC’s ‘unified’ Africa strategy (Corkin 2011). Chinese politics vis-à-vis resource-rich countries (Angola, Zambia, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Nigeria) and in geostrategic important countries (Djibouti) differ from the strategies coined for relations with those African states without strategic resources – but the PRC’s stability and security concerns might be similar. China has engaged itself also in countries such as Rwanda, Zimbabwe, or Mali, which are neither resource-rich nor geostrategically particularly important. These partner countries, however, have different regime trajectories and also displayed huge differences in political and regime stability. One of the book’s core objectives is thus to investigate to what extent these differences in political stability, understood both as stability of state apparatus and regime/government stability, across the continent are taken into account at the strategic level and in the evolving bilateral relationships between China and African states, how the evolving ‘pluralism’ of Chinese foreign policy actors is strategically coordinated in such contexts, and which practical relevance China attributes to non-state actors.

The discussion of China’s impact on African politics and economies has been so far dominated by similarly sweeping assumptions about equal partnership, neocolonialism, or the emulation of the Beijing model – i.e., operating with stereotype assumptions regarding the global ambitions of ‘socialist’ great powers. Over the last decade, there has been a growing body of literature dealing with the general developmental aspects of Sino-African relations, with Alden et al. (2008), Bräutigam (2009), Taylor (2009), and Sun (2014) as – very different – attempts of major synthesis. The edited volumes by Ampiah and Naidu (2008) and by Cheru and Obi (2010) brought together many prominent African scholars with several important case studies analyzing the bilateral African–Chinese relationships, but these volumes cannot reflect the developments of the last decade (for recent more case-specific contributions Benabdallah 2016, Kamwengo 2017). More recently, the genuine political and security role of China on the African continent has started to feature in academic publications, whether in case studies (Cabestan 2018), or from a more general perspective, such as Benabdallah and Large (2018) or Alden et al. (2018), who combine case studies of peacekeeping with a broader reflection about changing Chinese security strategies on the Africa continent.

A third strand of academic literature deals with the role of international factors for the domestic regime dynamics and state formation in Africa. This literature has traditionally focused on the formative role of the international system and colonial powers in the creation of the African state system (Clapham 1996) and specific state structures (Fatton 1992; Mamdani 1996). Much research has continued to perceive African states and domestic political dynamics as shaped by a variety of external actors and factors, by the leverage of global powers (Whitaker 2010), the liberal peacebuilding approach of the United Nations, international diffusion and linkage (Levitsky and Way 2010) as well as the growing importance of regional and continental actors and norms (Hartmann 2016). Bayart (1989) framed the concept of ‘extraversion’ to describe the active role played by transnational networks of African actors in mobilizing international support for domestic political competition. This legacy has been carried on with the heavy influence of economic and political conditionalities and the resulting quite limited policy space (Mkandawire and Soludo 1999; Englebert and Peiffer 2012). France’s direct role in the governance of many former colonies has been thoroughly criticized and analyzed (Chafer 2002). From such a perspective China’s emergence as a major power on the continent is not only a welcomed alternative to policy-based development lending by Western donors. It might be also more than an alternative model of governance (Beijing Consensus), which is emulated by the more authoritarian regimes on the continent (Fourie 2015). Despite all intentions to keep out of domestic politics, Chinese companies, banks, and ambassadors are drawn into the domestic power game. They might become the target of populist campaigns, are perceived to support incumbent parties in electoral campaigns, or to assist illegitimate governments to quell ‘legitimate’ domestic grievances. Some recent publications have started to highlight the diverse some African reactions to this growing Chinese presence. While the edited volume by Gadzala (2015) discusses the role of a variety of non-state actors in shaping and reacting to Chinese presence in their countries, the monograph by Aidoo and Hess (2015) is an analysis of how domestic political dynamics influences different forms of anti-Chinese popular protest.

The book’s agenda

Political stability has been defined in the literature in a variety of ways. It might be equated with the absence of violence, with the existence of a legitimate constitutional order, with the duration of a given government, or with the absence of revolution or structural changes, meaning a capacity to maintain its basic structural arrangements against external and internal pressures (Hurwitz 1973). Social scientists might agree that the absence of violence is the least plausible definition, because the stability of a system would rest on whether it can cope with violent events, and not on the frequency of their occurrence (Dowding and Kimber 1983, 230). Yet it seems that Chinese understandings of (African) instability are mostly based on the occurence of different types of violence, which endanger the physical security of Chinese residents and the continued operation of economic activities. Such violence might indeed also be an indicator of broader systemic failure to cope with challenges to the state monopoly of violence.

If we turn to those definitions of stability that share the idea of some form of enduring, continuous, or persistent order, this might refer to the stability of a government, or those of the regime, broader settlement, or authority patterns at national level. In the non-democratic states of Africa, both types of instability converge, as governments (or presidential terms of rule) do not end in line with constitutional provisions. Only in the more democratic states it might be relevant to look at governmental instability and electoral cycles.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• 1 China’s new role in African politics. From non-intervention towards stabilization?
• PART I: Patterns, discourses, and practices
• PART II: Case studies
• Index