Travel to almost any African capital and even before you make it from the airport to downtown there is a very high likelihood you will pass a Chinese construction project along the way.  From the new terminal at Jomo Kenyatta Airport in Nairobi to the main road connecting Kinshasa’s N’Djili Airport to the city center, the Chinese construction boom is immediately evident.

Simply put, the magnitude of China’s construction drive in Africa is so vast that only the rapid industrialization of the Chinese economy itself and the U.S.-funded Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe after World War II can compare in scale.

All this construction is a central component of Beijing’s foreign policy agenda where it builds roads, dams, hospitals and other badly needed infrastructure in developing countries in exchange for vital natural resources.  On the surface, this arrangement has all the hallmarks of pure mercantilism but to leave it at that overlooks critical subtleties that are now beginning to sway the balance of international influence across the continent.

In a recent article for the Asian affairs website “The Diplomat,” military affairs journalist David Axe details how Chinese construction projects are opening a new front in Beijing’s increasingly ambitious global soft power agenda.    China, he writes, is simultaneously competing for influence with the established foreign powers in Africa while copying Western diplomatic tactics.

“Where the U.S. sends soldiers, the Chinese build roads.  Their approach [to soft power diplomacy] could not be farther apart.” – Military Affairs Journalist, David Axe

Earlier this year, Axe spent two months in the Democratic Republic of the Congo where he covered a U.S. military joint training operation with the Congolese armed forces.  To get from his hotel to the training grounds, Axe and the U.S. troops drove along Boulevard 30 Juin, Kinshasa’s main thoroughfare that was recently re-paved and widened by the Chinese.  That road, Axe realized, had come to represent the stark differences in how Beijing is engaging with countries like the DRC and Washington’s growing reliance on its military:

“That China and the United States are in a race to gain sway over countries possessing vital natural resources, not only in Africa but across the developing world, is hardly news. But the scene in Kinshasa—US troops speeding down a Chinese-built road—underscores the differing strategies Washington and Beijing have tended to pursue. While it has fallen on the US military to lead the country’s forays into Congo and other mineral-rich nations, most notably Iraq and Afghanistan, China has traditionally preferred underwriting infrastructure projects.”

In addition to the public perception benefits associated with building infrastructure in many of the world’s poorest countries, Beijing is also turning to its military forces as another tool in its soft power diplomacy kit, according to Axe.  The deployment of Chinese naval forces off the coast of East Africa to take part in multi-national anti-piracy operations along with the launch of the new hospital ship “866″ are two recent examples that Axe highlights to demonstrate how the Peoples Liberation Army (and navy — the PLAN) are playing an important role to shape African perceptions of the Chinese.

While media outlets like Xinhua and CCTV along with educational organizations such as the Confucius Institutes have traditionally been the centerpiece of China’s public diplomacy initiatives in Africa, it appears that Beijing may have a much broader soft power agenda that also includes all of those roads and bridges as well.

The interview with David Axe and other ‘China in Africa’ podcasts are all available on iTunes.  Click here for more information.

By any measure, the DRC is one of the most difficult places on earth to do business.

Let’s put aside for now the problems associated with the war in the east as that’s not really the issue here.

instead, we’re going to focus on  what it actually takes to get business done in a place where there’s only a hint of a functioning government.  And what little government there is is corrupt beyond your wildest imagination.

Take the figures from Transparency International’s 2009 Corruptions Perception Index that puts the DRC close to the bottom of the list, just shy of Afghanistan and Somalia.

So in a place where there’s essentially no rule of law and ubiquitous corruption, how do the Chinese the manage their multi-billion dollar investments in the country?

For some insights, I turned to Swedish researcher Johanna Jasson who co-authored a report for the Centre for Chinese Studies at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa and the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative.  She’s now pursuing her Phd in Denmark.

Jassen spent a considerable amount of time last year researching Chinese corporate activity in both Katanga and Lubumbashi, especially that huge 6 billion dollar Sicomines deal.

Hopefully advocates of greater transparency will apply the same enthusiasm they do for criticizing Chinese aid and investment initiatives in Africa to the bloated, inefficient procurement system that protects an indefensible level of Western corruption.

Under intense pressure to increase “transparency,” construction firms bidding on major infrastructure projects in the region have increasingly been required to submit “open bids.”  Before “open bidding,” governments and international organizations evaluated proposals using various criteria beyond just price (e.g. quality of materials, labor sourcing, etc…).  Yet as the transparency drive forced open the bidding process, price naturally became the dominant issue.  And as we know, when it comes to price, the Chinese are hard to beat. While there is ample evidence in Chinese construction and manufacturing industries to illustrate how Chinese companies employ  substandard labor practices and production methods to keep their costs as low as possible, there is an important alternative perspective that should be considered as well.  The Chinese construction firms in places like the DRC work harder, longer and cheaper than their Western counterparts:

• Do Chinese construction executives stay in five star accommodations like Kinshasa’s Hotel Memling at a cost to international taxpayers of $500-$600 per night?  No.
• Do Chinese project managers live in expensive expatriate communities with security details, chauffeur driven cars and consume imported food as their Western counterparts do? No.
• Do Chinese construction projects operate only five days a week, forcing the project to take longer to build and ultimately cost more? No.

Hopefully advocates of greater transparency will apply the same enthusiasm for criticizing Chinese aid and investment initiatives in Africa to the bloated, inefficient procurement system that protects an indefensible level of Western corruption.  After all, the UN and the World Bank’s funds are all of our tax money, so if Chinese companies can offer a comparable service at half the price, well, that’s capitalism, right?

Footnote: this is by no means a new issue.  The Chinese began under bidding projects in Africa as early as 2005, prompting louder calls for improved transparency in the infrastructure procurement process.

In this edition of the China Talking Points “China in Africa” podcast, host Eric Olander speaks with Kinshasa-native and veteran Congolese television producer Tunga “Mimi” Mbia about the remarkable growth of the city’s Chinese community.  Just five years ago, the Chinese presence in Kinshasa was insignificant. Today, tens of thousands of new immigrants reside in the capital where they have opened small businesses, work on the major construction projects and are assimilating themselves into daily Congolese life with unprecedented speed.  Yet despite their impressive numbers, the Chinese are now part of a complex matrix of Kinois race relations that offers both promise and peril.

Mbia says it’s still early going for the Chinese in Kinshasa and “so far so good” but problems will arise quickly if the Chinese are perceived as untrustworthy.

When I lived in Kinshasa, I asked a Congolese colleague of mine about what he thought would happen after the Chinese have finished their infrastructure projects and eventually go home.  He paused, smiled wryly and said “they’re not leaving.  They’re putting down roots to stay.”  He is absolutely right.  When one examines the socio-economic background of the Chinese immigrants coming to Kinshasa, and across Africa, it becomes quickly apparent these new migrants have no intention of returning to China.  In many cases they are as poor as their new Kinois neighbors and will simply not have the means to return even if they did want to go back.   Moreover, it is worth noting that the volume and speed with which the Chinese are immigrating to Africa’s largest cities are unprecedented.  According to statistics in the book “China Safari,”  in 2008 there were an estimated 750,000 Chinese living in Africa, more than the French ever had even at their colonial reign.   With online Chinese bulletin boards like “Chinese in Africa” advertising jobs and labor migration agencies, there is no indication the flow of Chinese immigrants will slow anytime soon.

Simply put, the Chinese migration to Africa will have a transformational impact on the economy, politics and culture of African societies across the continent.

About Tunga “Mimi” Mbia

Mimi is the former Executive Producer of the popular Congolese dramatic television series “Rien que la Verité” (Nothing but the Truth).   She’s worked behind the camera, as a documentary director (Miseducating the World: The Misrepresentation of Africans in the Media), and a production assistant for Spike Lee’s production company 40 Acres and a Mule. She’s also worked in front of the camera, as a presenter for Imagine Afrika, a pan-African reality show, and as a VJ for MTV Europe.

The Dutch-based new media organization Couscous Global recently posted an interesting little gem of a video on You Tube that asks young South Africans to express how they feel about the country’s Chinese population. It opens with a young Chinese guy asking the question in English and then turns to a racially diverse group of South African teenagers for their responses.  On the surface, it just sounds like kids giggling and fumbling through their answers.  Yet there were some very interesting, and extremely important, points they used to explain why they get along quite well with Chinese immigrants.

• LANGUAGE: The first young person to answers explains how when she goes to the market in Soweto and notices the Chinese butchers working there speak the local dialect.     I saw this phenomenon myself in Kinshasa where Chinese immigrants regularly spoke Lingala.  The ability to speak the local dialect is a critical advantage that Chinese immigrants in Africa have over their Western counterparts.  This may seem obvious, but when two people can communicate in the same language, so many differences are radically shrunk, e.g. culture, class, race.  It should be noted that in my time in the DR Congo I never met a single Westerner who could speak Lingala.  For the most part, Westerners retain an outmoded expectation that everyone should speak their rather than how the Chinese are going about it and learning local dialects in the communities they live and work.

• SEPARATION: The first young woman to speak remarked how the Chinese “don’t separate themselves.”  This is another important distinction between how the Chinese live in Africa compared to Westerners.  For the most, and of course there are exceptions, the overwhelming majority of European and American residents in Africa live behind high walls with security guards, barbed wire and an equal sense of “us and them.”   They tend to avoid the local markets in favor of expensive supermarkets stocked with imported food; they avoid public transportation as they commute in bulky 4×4 SUVs and the few relationships they have with locals is either with their domestic staffs or a privileged few that work as their subordinates in Western NGOs or companies.   In contrast, the Chinese approach is entirely different. Generally they do not live in Chinese ghettos, or so-called Chinatowns.  Instead, the overwhelming majority of Chinese immigrants to Africa live in the same, vast neighborhoods right alongside Africans themselves.  They eat the same food, shop at the same stores and squeeze in to the same crowded mini-vans that everyone else takes to get around.  When considering the living standards of Chinese immigrants compared to Africans, it is important to remember that unlike wealthy Westerners, most of the Chinese are at the same socio-economic level as their African counterparts.  Simply put, the class difference is often quite minimal.

The subtleties of this video are what make it meaningful.  The fact that Chinese immigrants are able to form this impression of themselves is an important soft-power tool that will no doubt have a broad impact on overall Sino-African ties.  I received an almost identical response from Congolese who I questioned about their views on the growing number of Chinese immigres. One Kinois resident best summarized popular opinion when said “the Chinese, they are not afraid of us.  White people fear us and hide behind the walls.  The Chinese do not.”

Does China Help or Hurt? Over at “The China Beat” blog writer, Angilee Shah posts another in a wave of reviews of Deborah Brautigam’s new book on the Chinese in Africa,  ”The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa.” Shah raises a few good points in her post about the important fact that is overlooked by most Western diplomats here in the Congo and elsewhere that China itself is a developing country with specialized expertise in working in under-developed conditions similar to what is available across Africa.  That specialization in low-cost, effective development offers tremendous potential especially when compared to American and European aid efforts that are seemingly obsessed with process and paperwork over results.

Do the Chinese hire locals? Speaking of Professor Brautigam, her excellent blog “China in Africa: The Real Story” links to a You Tube video from one DR Congo’s TV stations that confirms my own observations here in Kinshasa that the Chinese use a blend of Chinese and local labor for their massive construction projects.  From what I have seen here, each construction crew has dozens of Kinois who work under the supervision of a handful of Chinese foremen.  This is among the most sensitive issues both here in the DRC and elsewhere in the region where political leaders are expressing their frustration with the Chinese over the use of too many imported Chinese laborers at the expense of local hires.  Furthermore, several sources have told me that in other Congolese provinces, Chinese employers are regarded to be “overbearing” and are often embroiled in disputes over pay with local employees.  This is definitely an issue to watch as Chinese investment here continues to grow.

Scan the headlines about the Chinese in Africa and the predominant theme focuses almost exclusively on the infrastructure-for-natural resource deals.  The Chinese are signing multi-billion dollar oil and mineral deals up and down the continent while spending a comparable fortune building desperately needed infrastructure in many of the least developed countries on earth.  Here in Kinshasa, evidence of China’s foreign and trade policies is everywhere.  New roads, hospitals, parliament buildings are all being built at record speeds by Chinese construction conglomerates.  Yet not far away from the heavy earth moving trucks and the billion dollar mineral deals, a separate, yet equally transformative revolution is underway.  Quietly, tens of thousands, possibly even  hundreds of thousands of Chinese immigrants are moving in to neighborhoods across Kinshasa and dozens of African cities.  While there is no reliable data available to estimate just how many emigres have come here, there is no doubt the Chinese population is rising quickly.

When I first heard that Kinshasa was now home to thousands of Chinese immigrants, I naturally assumed there would some sort of “Chinatown” with a population cluster just as there is in Paris, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires and even Asian cities like Kuala Lumpur.  It just made sense that the first wave of Chinese arrivals would huddle together as immigrants have done the world over for generations.  ”So where is the Chinese community?” I asked a several of our local staff.  Puzzled, they responded “what do you mean? There is no Chinese community here, they live with us.”  Time and again I received the same answer.  The Chinese immigrants in Kinshasa are skipping an entire phase of assimilation by moving directly to the sprawling neighborhoods and shantytowns that is home to the capital’s 8-10 million residents.  By any standard, this is a remarkable phenomenon as there are few more seemingly divergent cultures than Chinese and Congolese.  Yet despite overwhelming differences in language, race and culture, the Chinese are adapting in ways that Westerners could never begin to imagine.

Mister Chen is one of those thousands of new arrivals to Kinshasa.  He and his family moved from China’s southern Fuzhou province three years ago to come to Africa.  When he first learned of the opportunity to come to the DRC he admitted that he knew nothing about the country as was made clear by their decision to settle in the eastern Congolese city of Kivu.  Traveling over land from the Rwandan capital of Kigali, they arrived in Kivu unaware that it is the epicenter of Congo’s violent 10-year war.  Hundreds of thousands of people, possibly millions, have died in the region surrounding Kivu and after three weeks he packed up his family to move west across the country to the relative safety of Kinshasa.  Upon arrival here he was introduced to a “Chinese association” that would provide him the logistical and financial support for him to open a small shop in one of Kinshasa’s vast, densely populated neighborhoods.  These associations are critical to understanding the success of the Chinese, both here in Kinshasa and the world over.  Just as Chinese immigrant associations in San Francisco and New York, the Chinese associations in the DRC provide what is essentially a micro-loan to new immigrants and the necessary logistical support to open a small business.  The association handles the legal paperwork, ensures the necessary bribes are paid to relevant neighborhood police and government authorities; connects the shop owner with a distribution network of Chinese importers to supply their business.  Mister Chen said he arrived from China with “only a few dollars” but was able to get his start through the help of the association.  In turn, as his business develops, he re-pays the association back in small increments until the loan is fully paid.  The association also plays another critical role that insulates the shop owner from the volatility of daily life in Kinshasa.  When the police or some other government authority comes to his store for bribes or extortion, he simply calls the association who then quickly respond to handle the situation.  This rapid response and protection from the association is an immensely important aspect of the Chinese entrepreneurial success here as it offers a level of reliability largely unavailable in a society as unstable as Kinshasa.

Mister Chen’s store has the feel of an inner-city American liquor store where all of the products are on display behind a think glass window.  He largely sells cheap, low quality Chinese-made knick-knacks that range from one-dollar headphones to shoes to plastic tableware.  Although business in his 1,500 square foot (estimate) shop was brisk during my 45-minute mid-day visit, not once did I see him sell a single product.  Instead, locals would approach the counter, throw down a $20 or $50 US bill and he or one of his local staff members would hurl a wad of Congolese francs and dollars back at the customer.   In addition to selling low-cost Chinese imports, shop owners like Mister Chen have also established themselves as among the most reliable money changers in the city.  ”I trust the Chinese more than I do Congolese,” one customer explained when I asked why he changed his money with Mister Chen and not at one of the countless money changers on the street.  ”They give us a fair price and don’t cheat us.”  By selling low-cost products along with doing a brisk currency trading business, Mister Chen said he is able to squeeze out a small profit.  ”It’s not a lot because the Congolese are very poor but I earn more here than what I was making back in Fuzhou,” he said.

When you consider the hundreds of billions of dollars Western governments and NGOs have spent in Africa to help build civil society programs none seem anywhere near as effective as what Mister Chen is doing.  His small business is simultaneously providing jobs, goods and services that are vital in a region desperate for this kind of economic activity.   Mister Chen does not think of his business as anything other than a means to earn a meager living.  What he may not realize is that what he and his family are doing is part of a larger, more powerful trend that will re-shape Africa in a far more profound way than any of the roads and hospitals Beijing is building here.

The Chinese have completely ripped up Kinshasa’s main road “Boulevard 30 Juin.”  Ironically, this was essentially the city’s only functioning road so why the Congolese and Chinese governments thought it would be necessary to re-do this particular street remains a mystery to everyone.

Before they decided to “improve” 30 Juin, it was a truly wonderful boulevard.  Today, it’s a barren, dust filled desert whereas until 2007 it had huge trees that lined both sides of the road and there was a center divider that did an excellent job of slowing traffic and giving pedestrians sufficient guidance as to where to cross.  Now the situation couldn’t be more different.  The whole city center along the boulevard is not considerably hotter than it was before due to the tree removal.  Sadly, several different locals have told me that due to the Chinese “renovation” there are now one to two deaths per day on this street.  Notice how they have not laid down a single drop of paint on the road for either cars or pedestrians.  It’s a very dangerous road for everyone.  We are all hoping that the Chinese are eventually going to make this boulevard safer by adding traffic lanes and crosswalks.  No one is too optimistic though.

In this particular instance, a small number of Chinese foremen and construction engineers are overseeing local Congolese crews.  The Chinese have also imported tens of thousands of their laborers to work on projects like this so it is not unusual to see construction teams that are almost entirely Chinese doing the exact same work.  It should also be noted that the temperature at 10:30 in the morning when these pictures were taken was somewhere in the low-90s already.  This is back-breaking work under very difficult conditions.

A Chinese construction engineer (below) supervises the operation.  A fellow observer of this morning’s construction operation noted that on an early Sunday morning the Chinese are working in the hot sun paving roads.  Can you imagine an American doing this same work, speaking the local dialect and being part of a basic infrastructure project?  Americans used to do this kind of work, but it seems far fetched to think that they can rival the Chinese in this endeavor.

The China Railway Seventh Group is one of several multinational State Owned Enterprises (SOE) that are operating here in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  Equipment like this from other SOEs can be seen everywhere around town as the Chinese work furiously on a number of high profile projects in Kinshasa ahead of next year’s presidential elections.  The objective here, as it is in most African countries, is that the Chinese build out the infrastructure and incumbent politicians claim credit for their work just in time for national elections.   The situation in Kinshasa is no different where the President Joseph Kabila is reportedly pressuring the China Railway Seventh Group to speed up the pace of construction on Boulevard 30 Juin.

It is important to remember that none of the construction equipment the Chinese are using in the DRC was acquired locally.  Everything — that is every truck, crane, shovel, you name it — was brought in by sea and air.  It’s even funnier to walk up to the trucks and see what Chinese province they come from.  So far I have recorded heavy equipment with Henan, Jiangsu and Guangdong license plates.

• Chinese contractors in the Sicomines mining consortium are reported to have paid a $350 million dollar entry fee that includes some $50 million in signing bonuses given out to varies Congolese entities.
• $23 million of that $50 million is now reported to be “missing” or “unaccounted for,” according to Africa-Asia Confidential.
• The $350 million dollars was a small part of a $6 billion ore-for-infrastructure contract between Chinese state-owned companies and the Congolese mining giant Gecamines (other Congolese companies are also reported to be included in this deal).

Read the full report “Kinshasa’s Missing Millions” from Africa-Asia Confidential here…

The lack of accountability and transparency in China’s natural resource deals in both the DR Congo and across Africa are now starting to show signs that it may ultimately weaken China’s position on the continent.   Here in Kinshasa, President Joseph Kabila is making some of his first public remarks on his growing impatience with the Chinese.  It’s worth noting that Kabila’s comments are worth taking with a huge chunk of salt as he is likely posturing to pressure the Chinese to finish their infrastructure projects so he can claim credit ahead of next year’s presidential elections.  Furthermore, there is widespread speculation that Kabila himself may be among the beneficiaries of some of those “missing Kinshasa millions.”  Nonetheless, that he feels sufficiently embolden to begin using public pressure against the Chinese is noteworthy.

Kabila may in fact be following the lead of Zambian opposition leader Michael Sata who came within a hair’s breadth of winning the October 2008 presidential elections.  Sata ran his campaign on a platform opposing Chinese investment in Zambia, calling the nature of the deals unfair and “colonial.”  Sata, and potentially now Kabila, may be the first indications of growing unease over the speed, scope and scale of Chinese investments in the region.  Their main criticism: labor.  Unlike the waves of foreign investment by former colonial powers, the Chinese have added a distinctive twist to their investments.  Rather than rely on local labor to implement the huge number of infrastructure projects across the country, tens of thousands, possibly even hundreds of thousands of Chinese peasant laborers have been imported to build the ports, roads, mines and telecommunications infrastructure projects Beijing promised in return for access to the host country’s natural resources.  Before anyone else in Africa complained, Sata was a vocal critic of these deals.  If elected, he promised to re-negotiate the labor contracts to make them more equitable for Zambia by reducing the presence of Chinese workers.  Sata’s threats were heard in Beijing with the government there threatening to end its investment program in Zambia if the opposition leader was elected.  Sata lost by a very small margin.

The DR Congo and Zambia are not alone in their gnawing frustration over the use of imported Chinese labor.  In Southeast Asia, the New York Times reports growing resentment in Vietnam and other nations over the presence of Chinese workers at the expense of local labor.  So the key question now is how will Beijing react to what appears to be a small, yet discernible trend opposing their overseas labor policy:

1. Will they ignore the criticism and continue to employ the aggressive natural resource-for-infrastructure deals?
2. The Chinese are extremely sensitive to public opinion at home and have become quite adept at responding to shifting political winds.  Will they apply that same dexterity with their natural resource-driven foreign policy?
3. Will they offer a few minor face-saving public gestures to satisfy their overseas critics that provide sufficient political cover to continue their operations minus a small percentage of imported Chinese labor?

It would be unwise to bet against the Chinese.  I have done it numerous times in the past and I have regretted it later.  That said, the Chinese are in a totally new space here and they are operating without precedent in international relations.  No country has expanded its natural resource extraction footprint as quickly, aggressively and with as much man power as the Chinese have.  So Beijing must learn as it goes.  For the rest of us, this will be among the most important foreign policy lessons of our generation.

Eric landed in Kinshasa a few days back for a one week visit to the Congo in preparation for his new job that will start in January.

In the past we’ve touched upon China’s quest for natural resources and this trip provided us the opportunity to gain an on the ground view of the full court press China is orchestrating to win and implement these major projects.

In this week’s podcast, Eric shares insight into the nature of the growing population of Chinese in Kinshasa (+20,000), their not-so-surprising ability to assimilate linguistically, and the lingering impression that the West is being out maneuvered.  Have a listen:

CTP Podcast – China and the Congo

]]> http://www.chinatalkingpoints.com/ctp-podcast-china-and-the-congo/feed/ 0 Africa,Congo,Kinshasa (http://www.chinatalkingpoints.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/6a00d8354c5f6569e20120a65ab5cd970b-295x300.jpg) Eric landed in Kinshasa a few days back for a one week visit to the Congo in preparation for his new job that will start in January. In the past we've touched upon China's quest for natural resources and this trip provided us the opportunity to gain an on the ground view of the full court press China is orchestrating to win and implement these major projects. In this week's podcast, Eric shares insight into the nature of the growing population of Chinese in Kinshasa (+20,000), their not-so-surprising ability to assimilate linguistically, and the lingering impression that the West is being out maneuvered.  Have a listen: CTP Podcast - China and the Congo (http://thomascroston.typepad.com/files/ctp-podcast---china-and-the-congo.mp3) ChinaTalkingPoints.com no