China's Scramble For The African Union

By Derek Henry Flood
June 9, 2011
Courtesy Of "Asia Times Online"

ADDIS ABABA - In the thin air of Ethiopia's low-slung, mostly ramshackle capital, a glittering tower complex is erupting from a warren of corrugated tin roof shacks that many locals call home. 

The China State Construction Engineering Corporation (CSCEC) is building a massive new complex in an expansion of the African Union's (AU) headquarters in Addis Ababa, Africa's "capital" akin, in theory, to Brussels being the capital or Europe. 

Though the CSCEC describes its efforts there as "aiding" the African Union, make no mistake, it is building the facility wholesale. 

Stern-faced Chinese foreman command ever-smiling Ethiopian laborers who are working round the clock to finish the project at breakneck speed for its planned January 2012 inauguration. Jean Ping, a half Chinese-half Gabonese former diplomat for the late Gabonese big man Omar Bongo, addressed the Chinese delegation at the fourth annual China-Africa Strategic Dialogue held in Addis on May 4 led by Zhai Jun, China's vice minister for foreign affairs. Ping described China as the AU's "good and reliable partner". 

In anticipation of a hoped-for visit to Addis Ababa by President Hu Jintao for the new AU's debut, Ping stated: "We cannot thank China and it's leaders enough for it ..." 

In an interview with Xinhua, China's state news agency, early on in the construction, Zeng Huacheng China's "special representative" on the grounds of East Africa's most noteworthy construction site, described the project as "a perfect embodiment of the friendship between China and Africa, as well as a major milestone marking the new Sino-African strategic partnership". 

As China scours the continent for resources virtually unchallenged, this "gift" to the people of Africa will certainly come with strings attached. In a recent meeting with a high-ranking CSCEC official, Erastus Mwencha, a seasoned Kenyan diplomat who holds the deputy chair of the African Union Commission that oversees the project, hailed it in a recent press statement as a "permanent signature on African soil". 

When Asia Times Online visited the present AU headquarters hugging hilly Roosevelt Street, a representative of its Conflict Management Division lamented the depth of Chinese involvement both in Ethiopia and across the entire region. Africa's sudden anti-democratic partner is engaged in a slew of road rehabilitation and construction endeavors in many parts of the country. 

When looking at maps of their vast nation with many of its roads in rural areas in a devastated condition, Ethiopians refer to "Italian asphalt". Following the 1928 Italo-Ethiopian Treaty of Friendship and Arbitration, Italian colonialists, who partially encircled the Ethiopian empire from their footholds in Eritrea and Italian Somaliland, sought to cement their Africa Orientale Italiana, first economically and then by an outright military invasion aimed at creating a new Roman empire centered on the export of Italy's particular brand of fascism. 



Benito Mussolini's colonial administration built a network of now decrepit roads during Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie's exile period that have been fit to rot ever since. They connected the once remote Addis to Asmara and Mogadishu, two cities from which modern Addis is cut off due to extreme hostility and perennial instability. 

China is now renovating many of these roads for the first time since the period of Italian fascist occupation and many Ethiopians are grateful for it. The Chinese are able to implement projects overnight that the government of Ethiopian Prime Minister Mele Zenawi has been unable to do 20 years after the fall of the Marxist junta he dedicated his life to defeating. 

Save for the five years of Italian occupation, Ethiopia has always prided itself on its fierce independence and the preservation of its ancient, lettered history and language, the only intact civilization of its kind in all of Africa. Yet Ethiopia's 20th-century rulers from monarchs to Marxists, did next to nothing to develop their nation's physical infrastructure. 

Current ruler Meles Zenawi, a former Tigrayan guerilla leader, has given Beijing a free hand to rush around with a plethora of massive development projects that will eventually give the Chinese fantastic leverage over this vast, diverse and immensely impoverished land. In official Chinese jargon related to its overwhelming economic embrace of the AU, it employs transparent terms like "friendship", "brotherhood" and "partnership" to describe this incredibly paternalistic seeming relationship. 

A local man running a cramped concession shack adjacent to the CSCEC's sprawling operation said that Ethiopians and other Africans had little choice but to accept the rapid Chinese entente into their societies because "the price was right ... free". 

Desperate to emancipate themselves from poverty and dilapidation without the luxury of worrying about future considerations when Beijing begins make less brotherly-like demands for natural resources, many Ethiopians were resigned to this adrenalin injection of Chinese progress into their relatively moribund economy. 

When asked whether this influx of foreign workers had an immediate economic benefit in the neighborhoods surrounding the construction, vendors said that their Chinese guests had almost no immediate interaction with Ethiopians other than those picked to work under their immediate direction. 

Perhaps the finished product will have the desired economic impact local businesses pined for? Or perhaps their makeshift stores will be deemed eyesores and bulldozed in the name of progress, making the surrounding area more appealing to visiting dignitaries of the "dictators' club", as some of the pan-African body's critics harshly deem the AU. 

On a second visit to the AU site, Asia Times Online was accosted by guards from a local security contracting firm after taking photos from the vantage of a public street of Chinese officials going to and from the site's personnel gate. 

A scrum ensued with more guards involving themselves with a crowd of passersby beginning to congregate out of curiosity. Speaking neither Amharic nor Mandarin, things quickly spiraled out of control. A CSCEC official with an uneven buzz cut and chinos stormed out onto the street, angrily furrowing his hardened brow, putting himself at the center of the fray. 

Crossing his forearms upright to form an "X", ie "no" and disapprovingly shouting "photo", the official tried to explain to a massive Ethiopian security man how to erase the memory card on a professional DLSR camera. Simply refusing to needlessly surrender the images, I had the neck strap wrapped around my wrist for dear life as the tug of war continued. 

Trying in vain to insist that the precious photos had been deleted in the scuffle, this correspondent was subsequently dragged through a temporary steel door spray painted with the CSCEC's Chinese-language logo. Once inside the buzzing site to which no outsider had seen, sans photographing, I was frog-marched past a group of chain-smoking men looking at an out of place Westerner traipsing through their secret world with suspicion. 

The zone was one of almost total Chinese self-sufficiency, thereby putting the imported East Asian workers in a less exotic context. Pick-up trucks carted in stacks of mattresses and box springs to provide shelter for newly arriving workers needing accommodation. While the Chinese government would surely describe this scenario as another "harmonious" entry in its ever-deepening relationship with Africa, the project appeared to be an effort of exclusion and commanded efficiency. It was the Chinese who were clearly in charge. 

I had been curious as to what kind of service economy had sprung up in the wake of the all-male Chinese arrival. Addis Ababa's Bole International Airport was bustling with all manner of Chinese engineers and laborers. The in-flight magazine for Ethiopian Airlines boasted of its increases in traffic to Beijing, Hong Kong, Guangzhou and now Hangzhou. 

The CSCEC men, however, lived a self-contained life for the duration of the project, leaving only to procure foodstuffs or eat at a touristy theme restaurant on a loose weekend evening. Otherwise, they live on the grounds of the new AU headquarters as backhoes and cranes ground along day and night. 

Chinese workers in knockoff tracksuits obliviously brushed by ethnic-Somali women in brilliant colored hijabs who performed domestic duties on-site. Chinese vehicle operators blazed across the grounds while gaunt Ethiopian workers in ill-fitting hardhats clung to the sides of the trundling heavy machinery. Eventually, we reached a cluster of neatly arranged trailers that served as the logistical and technical hub for the entire linguistically awkward arrangement. 

were worth an eventual resource of diplomacy-driven quid pro quo, he shrugged, "What choice do we have? We are a poor country." In the back of one such trailer, an English-speaking Ethiopian engineer ordered the guards in stern Amharic to let this correspondent go, explaining that Ethiopia was a sovereign country and its Chinese guests had no right to delegate the apprehension of a visiting third-country national observing from a public street.

Exiting the gate after this "misunderstanding" and hopping into the closest taxi, the driver sped off towards the city center. Looking at the AU tower in his cracked side view mirror emerging rather incongruously from a divot in his city's hilly topography, he reflected, "It [the new AU building] is what Africa can afford. The Chinese, they work fast ... and cheap." When asked if such deals 

While China has been involved in apolitical infrastructure and resource exploration projects in many of the African continent's disparate corners, including many parts of the Horn region, China's entrance into African politics at the supra-national level is certainly noteworthy. 

Much to the dismay of human-rights workers and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), Beijing's resource diplomacy has been mostly devoid of interfering in the internal political dynamics of wildly dysfunctional states from Sudan to Zimbabwe and Algeria to Angola. 

The AU is the successor body to the Organization of African Unity (OAU), whose post-war mandate was steeped in the anti-colonialism prevalent in the mid-Cold War era. The history of supra-nationalism had much to do with ridding the African continent of the then remaining minority ruled governments and shoring up individual states' newfound sovereignty backed by rhetoric of pan-African solidarity. 

Following the April 1974 "Carnation Revolution" coup in Lisbon, Portugal, that effectively brought an end to European colonialism in Africa by mid-1975, a core component of the OAU's anti-colonial raison d'etre had been eroded. As the Portuguese evacuated from Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Mozambique, the last European maritime empire had crumbled. 

Only South Africa, Namibia and Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) continued to exist as white-ruled pariah states. Despite the official end of British, French, Spanish, Belgian and Portuguese colonial administrations throughout Africa, all of these European powers, greatly weakened in the aftermath of World War II, continued to maintain heavily one-sided transactional and extraction-based relationships with their former colonies. A blatant example is the recurring instability in Cote d'Ivoire that has Paris very publicly ferrying out its large expatriate population at great expense from time to time when that country convulses in fits of anarchy. 

For its part, the AU welcomes this style of Asian economic intervention with open arms. China, along with South Korea, Malaysia and others, distinctly lacks the colonial baggage that still taints European-African relations. Non-European interlocutors are nothing especially new in Ethiopia. 

During the dreadful years of Marxist-inspired Derg rule led by Mengistu Haile Mariam, Soviet and Cuban advisors had been aplenty, sometimes on both sides of a conflict with regard to Eritrea and the Somali Ogaden region. According to Africa historian Martin Meredith, in 1984, Mengistu enlisted the North Koreans to festoon his capital in Eurasian-Marxist chic to celebrate the 10th anniversary of his overthrow of Hailie Selassie. 

One of China's greatest assets to the AU and its various and sundry constituent member states is precisely that it has no such baggage ... yet. On April 24, 2007, a huge contingent from the ethnic Somali irredentist group known as the Ogaden Liberation Front (ONLF) attacked a Chinese-run oil installation operated by a subsidiary of the state-owned China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation, also known as Sinopec. 

The ONLF claimed it had warned Beijing and Addis Ababa equally of encroaching on the territory it wished to control. Aside from killing dozens of Ethiopians, between seven and nine Chinese workers were killed in the assault. A London-based ONLF spokesman told the BBC at the time, "We have warned the Chinese government and the Ethiopian government that ... they don't have a right to drill there." 

Beginning principally during the Maoist period, China has been involved in the Horn of Africa region and other parts of the continent in the arms trade and the dispensation of agricultural and other technical expertise. China's traditional history of quietism in African affairs comes into question as the new AU begins to near completion. 

Beijing will no longer have the luxury of not appearing overt in its involvement in Africa. China describes Sino-African relations with terms like "peaceful coexistence" and "mutual respect", while simultaneously failing to resist taking jabs at Western Europe's oft abhorrent historical interactions there, an aspect that certain Sino-Africa literature seems to relish. 

The Forum on Cooperation between China and Africa (FOCAC), established in 2000 and occurring every three years, provides a mechanism for China's ever-increasing involvement in Africa, including charitable and development work. The inking of multi-billion dollar schemes at the FOCAC summits all go in one direction: from Beijing to various African states. 

African resources inevitably flow in the reverse. The Chinese Communist Party claims its stated position of non-interference in African politics is a paramount prism through which Sino-African relations are conducted. Yet China's AU gambit is its entry into the internal dynamics of the continent's writ regardless whether it perceives it so or not. 

The so-called Beijing Consensus iterates the raw primacy of necessary economic development over the human-rights-oriented or reform-driven foreign policy espoused in many Western capitals as of late. From the Chinese point of view, these rather condescending policies are an infringement on the sovereignty of Third World nation-states. 

Many Ethiopians are willing to entertain the shock of sudden Chinese investment in their ancient country, but decry that many of the Chinese projects have so far had a negligible impact on the lives of ordinary people. 

Ethiopia and wider Africa are not simply venues for Chinese foreign direct investment and loans. They have become emigration destinations for enterprising Chinese farmers and businessmen. With one of the lowest per capita incomes in the world, hovering around US$1,000 per person per annum, just north of Afghanistan and Somalia, some Ethiopians are already resentful that China is employing so many of its own nationals on infrastructure projects when so many local residents are desperate for work. 

China's "harmonious" economic adventurism in Africa may yet require more refining if it is to be a lasting partner in one of the poorest, most unstable regions in the world. 

Undoubtedly, the upper echelon of African politicos are thrilled with the prestige project throttling upward in downtown Addis Ababa at no up-front cost to them. For the next generation of African leaders, the indebtedness bequeathed by default with such hasty deal-making may stunt internal development further. This will happen as resources already committed for export to Asia possibly deprive struggling societies of natural resources from the start that could be used to develop local and regional economies if finally harnessed properly and the "resource curse" thrown off. 

China's "permanent signature in Africa" may indeed herald a new, less regrettable era in African history, albeit without a stated democratization stipulation wished for in the cash-strapped West. How this era will develop and who will guide this development remains to be seen. One thing is certain: China is in Africa to stay. 

Derek Henry Flood is a freelance journalist specializing in the Middle East and South and Central Asia. 

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