The Chinese are everywhere, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), and they mean business:
About a third of China’s oil imports come from Africa, which—along with the precious metals to be found in many African countries—means they have arrived, and will stay. European and American oil companies and big multinationals are still far more heavily involved in Africa, but China is quickly catching up. For example, in Liberia it is seeking iron ore, in the DRC and Zambia it’s mining copper and, also in the DRC, cobalt. It has already helped develop the Kenyan port of Mombasa and is now embarking on much larger projects just as Kenya’s oil assets are beginning to become commercially viable.
China’s state-owned China Road and Bridge Corporation is building a $ 14 billion railroad project to connect Mombasa to the capital city of Nairobi. Analysts say the time taken for goods to travel between the two cities will be reduced from thirty-six hours to eight hours, with a corresponding cut of 60 percent in transport costs. There are even plans to link Nairobi up to South Sudan, and across to Uganda and Rwanda. Kenya intends, with Chinese help, to be the economic powerhouse of the Eastern Seaboard.
Over the southern border, Tanzania is trying a rival bid to become East Africa’s leader and has concluded billions of dollars’ worth of deals with the Chinese on infrastructure projects.
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China’s presence also stretches into Niger, with their National Petroleum Corporation investing in the small oil field in the Ténéré fields in the center of the country. And Chinese investment in Angola over the past decade exceeds $ 8 billion and is growing every year. The China Railway Engineering Corporation (CREC) has already spent almost $ 2 billion modernizing the Benguela railroad line, which links the DRC to the Angolan port of Lobito on the Atlantic coast eight hundred miles away. In this way travel the cobalt, copper, and manganese with which Katanga Province in the DRC is cursed and blessed.
In Luanda, the CREC is constructing a new international airport, and around the capital huge apartment buildings built to the Chinese model have sprung up to house some of the estimated 150,000 to 200,000 Chinese workers now in the country. Thousands of these workers are also trained in military skills and could provide a ready-made militia if China so required.
What Beijing wants in Angola is what it wants everywhere: the materials with which to make its products, and political stability to ensure the flow of those materials and products.
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Beijing and the big Chinese companies don’t ask difficult questions about human rights, and they don’t demand economic reform or even suggest that certain African leaders stop stealing their countries’ wealth, as the IMF or World Bank might.
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South Africa is China’s largest trading partner in Africa. The two countries have a long political and economic history and are well placed to work together. Hundreds of Chinese companies, both state-owned and private, now operate in Durban, Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town, and Port Elizabeth.