Lightening it up a bit with some casual commentary on Chinese investments in Africa …

9 Chinese workers were killed the other day in Sudan.

This isn’t the first time it’s happened. I believe it was 17 that were killed in Sudan at some point while I was in China.

I asked a few people there at the time what this might mean in the long term, since China claims to have a principle that no state should interfere in the internal affairs of other states. This principle may largely stem from their desire that other nations should feel no right to interfere in China`s internal affairs. To them this means, more or less, “stay out of our face about Tibet and Taiwan.” (They consider Taiwan to be a lost brother who should be reunited with the family).

Around the time there was a spread, on a number of Chinese sites, of an incredibly poor translation into Chinese, of a sarcastic posting I made on an internet forum where I insinuated that China’s interests in Africa were more or less neo-colonial. (They missed or skipped the evident sarcasm, preferring to state that I, a foreigner, believed that much like the US, Chinese interests were not remotely neo-colonial).

Back to the main story though … I expressed to a few people that I thought that the killings in Sudan would negatively impact China’s stated support for non-interference in the internal workings of African countries, thinking that as Chinese investment became more pervasive, popular sentiment would turn against them, forcing China to take some activist role in protecting their investments.

This is notably the case because most Chinese investments in Africa are carried out by teams of Chinese workers. Non-interference indeed! There’s practically no chance that the countries receiving these investments are going to be able to participate in any significant exchange of knowledge in the process. Hence, locals getting pissed off, since they don’t see the jobs.

I’m not sure whether the responses were a reflection of a wise disinterest in being critical of the CCP, the governing Party, or a reflection of naïve optimism of their government’s interest in developing a profitable yet benevolent relationship with states in Africa, but there seemed to be a consistent faith that the Chinese government was in Africa to support domestic interests, yes, but also with a benevolent interest in supporting development in Africa.

Even when I mentioned that China seemed to be doing its best to prevent the spread of Chinese expertise, it seemed to be an article of faith that there would be an eventual and significant transfer of skills. China ensured that such a transfer of skills accompanied early investments at home, and in my opinion, seem to be doing a pretty thorough job of ensuring that it doesn’t happen when they invest in African ventures. As far as those opinions in China were concerned, I noted this as an unfortunate indicator of a lack of any significant domestic pressures for the Chinese government to improve the transfer of technological knowhow towards African.

China does have a number of electoral structures, notably at the village level and among the 5000 elites who convene to approve five-year plans. Outside of China, there tends to be significant doubt that the citizens have influence on public policy. Perhaps true for most individuals, but I do think that public opinion itself can be a manner of democratic expression if the government is responsive to it, even in a country that doesn’t hold elections. I developed, in its basic form, a formal theory about this principle, to affirm a very nominal degree of democratic practice for a handful of Eastern European countries before the fall of the Soviet Union. I supposed (with an armful of citations that supported the theory) that even autocratic leaders have to respond to public opinion, since they don’t want to give people too much incentive to engage in destabilizing dissent.

The main point for that digression about democracy in China … ? Simply, that if public opinion were critical of the nature of Chinese investments in Africa, then there would be at the very least a token response by ensuring a somewhat greater transfer of technology resulting from Chinese investments in Africa. In any case, such public opinion does not appear to exist with respect to this topic.

There is a school of thought among international aid experts that conditional aid (where the recipient country must meet conditions such as buying products from the donor, or engage in some sort of reforms) is a bad thing, since it interferes in that country’s independent institutional development, while building debt to import what all too often turns out to be weapons.

The result in this case is that China can inform the world that they don’t engage in any of this conditionality crap, amounting to evidence of how generous they are with their investments in Africa. This can be tied to their support of the principle that there should be no interference in the internal workings of sovereign states. The common critique, in response, is that Chinese investments in Africa help prop up corrupt regimes and dictators in Africa.

Meanwhile, it’s plain as day that access to primary resources as inputs for the manufacturing machine at home is the main reason that China is sending so many workers to carry out projects in Africa. To be fair, they’re building lots of roads and other infrastructure while they’re there, but one has to wonder if it’s somewhat in order to make life easier for themselves, even though it is formally part of the bargain with most countries receiving investment from China. Altogether, it looks much like a classically colonial setup. Since domestic governance is maintained, it can be called neo-colonialism.


As for this claim of no conditionality … even if we were to suppose that it’s a better way of doing aid, can this claim be truly believed?

I was talking with a professor at Laval today, where I’m presently taking some courses in preparation to get rolling with my master’s in economics, who offered some interesting insight on the matter. Sylvain Dessey’s claim should, in fact, already have been plain as day, given a wee little difference between law regarding contracts in China compared to, say, Canada. I’ll explain that before getting to his point.

For starters, there are no laws which legally uphold contracts in China. Well … there sort of are, but not really. Complying with contracts there is optional, although people who break contracts may find it hard to do business in pretty short order. Word gets around. As I said, just a wee little difference.

Given a lifetime of experience making contractual agreements where the formal details on paper were far less important than the actual implicit agreement of how things would work, it can hardly be doubted that there is some degree of conditionality when Chinese investments are brought to a country. This is my own claim of support for the prof’s statement that there is, in fact, conditionality. I should mention that his remark was somewhat in passing (I would never like to put words into someone’s mouth), but was said with what I thought was a great degree of certainty. While it’s not my main area of research interest, it deals with two regions that have direct links to my main research interest, and there’s a strong possibility that further analysis of this issue may provide some insight on how the relations between these regions contains the seeds of potential solutions relating to said interest (which I’ll surely outline in a paragraph or two at some point in time in the future). So, I could say that the realization, certainly not realized on my own, that there is almost certainly some degree of conditionality imposed by the Chinese involved in these investments, could prove to be quite important.

In any case, the question of conditionality of Chinese capital inflows into Africa isn’t central to what I’m getting at here. I just thought that it’s interesting that one of the stated qualities of Chinese investments in Africa, through use of a very small bit of intuition (and there may also be evidence, but surely not in the formal contracts), can be said to be false. I’m not really pointing fingers all that negatively here. There are whole libraries worth of similar critiques levelled against the US, UK, or a number of other countries with significant economic means.

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So the big question that came back to mind when I read the unfortunate news that more Chinese oil workers were killed in Sudan is this – What will be the nature of the relationship that China cultivates with its African trade partners over the next ten or twenty years?

Will these investments continue to be between elites? Will China start to take a greater interest in making investments that more directly support increased opportunities for average people where they are carrying out projects? Will they continue to use almost exclusively Chinese labour for their projects? Will the heavy element of mercantilism in trade and development strategy, bound to lead to a) high inflation and/or significant appreciation of the Yuan or b) rapidly growing international resentment, in the long term, continue to be one of the central planks of Chinese development?

Who knows? But the central question that guides these corollary questions will be very important for those who would like to know what the nature of geopolitical alignments will look like in 50 years time, with an eye to ensuring that our multipolar future will be compatible with a dynamic security that may result, as did among European powers from Napoleon’s demise until the Crimean War, when shifting alliances prevented excessive hegemonic capacity of any major power.


As a balance, I should mention that a number of property transfer and foreign press freedoms were announced last week in China. I have a whole lot to say about these recent changes, but might not get around to them for a while. China is has rapidly embraced modernity over the last 30 years. Let’s keep in mind that the Chinese trajectory towards “mature democracy” as they call it, may very well take a course that could offer insights to us.

I really see that as a strong possibility. The exchange of knowledge is rarely a one-way street. However, the present Chinese investment strategy being carried out in Africa is an unfortunate exception to such a perspective.