THE QUESTION
China's leader Hu Jintao just provided Sudan with an interest-free loan to build a presidential palace. Meanwhile, genocide continues in Darfur as Western sanctions prove ineffective.
Does China's willingness to invest in Africa without preconditions cause more harm than good? In the end, could Africa be re-colonized by China?
Posted by William Gumede on February 7, 2007 11:54 AM
FROM THE PANEL
Bashir Goth is a veteran journalist, freelance writer, the first Somali blogger and editor of a leading news website. He is also a regular contributor to major Middle Eastern and African newspapers and online journals.
Sure, products say "Made in China" but America is the one re-colonizing us quietly. I cannot extract juices from a small plant in my native village for medicine because an American pharmaceutical company owns the rights to it.
Andrew M. Mwenda is an editor at Uganda's Monitor newspaper. He is also a founding member of ACODE, a public policy research think tank in Kampala, Uganda. He was born in Fort Portal, Uganda and became a reporter with Monitor Newspaper in Kampala. In 1999, he won the British Chevening scholarship and did an MSc in Development Studies at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies. He is currently a John Knight Fellow at Stanford University.
Africa must stop looking outside of the continent for solutions. It needs internal reform before it can benefit from the rest of the world - regardless of what China or anyone else offers.
Annie Wang is a journalist, public speaker, and author who specializes women’s issue. She has published eight Chinese books and two English novels. Her English debut, Lili - A Novel of Tiananmen, (June 2001 Pantheon Books) published internationally to critical acclaims. A multi-layered novel, Lili, is a story of a "bad girl's" maturation and adventure in the Post-Mao Era leading up the Tiananmen Student Movement in 1989. Her most recent English novel, The People’s Republic of Desire (Harper Collins 2006) is a hilarious satire and an insightful portrait of China’s MTV generation, urban women, and cross-cultural relationships. It has been hailed as a cross between Sex and the City and Joy Luck Club. A child prodigy in her native China, Annie Wang studied mass communications at UC Berkeley and won the Berkeley Poetry Contest in 1996 with two poems, "Speaking to Mao Tse-tung, Tongue-in-cheek" and "A Woman from a Mountain Area". She has worked for high-tech companies in Silicon Valley, and then served in the Washington Post's Beijing bureau and the US State Department. In 2004, she returned to China and ran a fashion magazine in Shanghai. Currently, she lives with her husband and son and divides time between the U.S. and China.
Many Chinese women would never marry an African man. There is deep racism in the country. For the sake of business and politics, this must change.
William M. Gumede is Associate Editor at Africa Confidential. He is Research Fellow at the School of Public and Development Management, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He recently released the bestselling book Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC.
Most African countries export raw materials to China and import labor-intensive manufactured goods. If this continues, the African continent could be condemned to underdevelopment.
Lamis Andoni is a Middle East consultant for Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based news station. She has been covering the Middle East for 20 years. She has reported for the Christian Science Monitor, the Financial Times and the main newspapers in Jordan. She was a professor at the Graduate School in UC Berkeley.
Unlike America, China has some of the best experts in the Arab world who speak the language fluently and pay attention to local stories.
Dr. Ali Ettefagh serves as a director of Highmore Global Corporation, an investment company in emerging markets of Eastern Europe, CIS, and the Middle East. He is the co-author of several books on trade conflict, resolution of international trade disputes, conflicts in letters of credit, trade-related banking transactions, sovereign debt, arbitration and dispute resolutions and publications specific to the oil and gas, communication, aviation and finance sectors. Dr. Ettefagh is a member of the executive committee and the board of directors of The Development Foundation, an advisor to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, and an advisor to a number of European companies. Dr. Ettefagh speaks Persian (Farsi), English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic and Turkish.
Petty politics will eventually take care of itself. Violence will subside, and in its place we will see Africans shopping for Chinese products in Khartoum’s new Wal-Mart.
Former Washington-based columnist for The Hong Kong Standard, The New York Sun, and Insight on the News, an online weekly published by The Washington Times. Covered economic and political relations between the United States and East Asia, with an emphasis on China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Former chairman of the Hong Kong Journalists' Association. Currently a business executive at a Chinese-language newspaper in Hong Kong.
The Chinese waste no time with petite bourgeoisie concerns like human rights.
Helena Luczywo is the Managing Editor of Gazeta Wyborcza (Electoral Gazette), the first independent daily of a communist country founded in 1989 and now boasting the largest national daily readership in Poland.
Right now there is only one alternative to the Chinese "buying spree" in Africa. Developed countries must get the WTO trade negotiations within the Doha Development Agenda back on track.
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