China Returns to Africa

IN 1405, the famous Chinese Admiral Zheng He led an impressive armada of warships and merchantmen in the first of seven naval expeditions, through the South China Sea and the Straits of Malacca, and then into the Indian Ocean. Later expeditions sailed right across to the eastern shores of Africa.

After bestowing gifts upon allies, punishing those who refused to acknowledge the Chinese emperor, and negotiating treaties of peace and commerce, Zheng He returned home from these expeditions with his ships bulging with ivory, gold and even tropical animals, including a few giraffes. Comprising hundreds of ships and thousands of men, these fleets were greater in size and power than the Spanish Armada.

Had China decided to head further westward, around South Africa, it would have discovered Europe before Portuguese exploring ships discovered Africa and Asia or Christopher Columbus discovered America.

How different world history might have been. Yet, as we shall note below, China was not to return to Africa in a serious way until very recently. For, a short while after these ventures, the Ming Dynasty banned the construction and use of masted, seagoing craft. The memory of these extraordinary voyages was to be obliterated. China’s overseas ventures were over. But why?

One reason given for such an extraordinary decision was the need to concentrate the empire’s manpower and material resources on the defence of its long northern border, seriously threatened by Manchu invasion forces.

But many scholars of the period contend that there was an equally important motive running through the minds of the mandarin elite who advised the imperial court. They argue that these traditional elites were frightened at the prospect of losing control over their coastal provinces — sea borne expansion would permit Chinese traders and sailors to escape the regime’s laws and taxes, and might also lead to the importation of dangerous foreign habits. Besides, the 'middle kingdom' of China, the centre of the world, was self-sufficient and had no need of foreign products. You could take away your giraffes, thank you.

Thus, the Chinese Empire turned inward, for almost 600 years. When, some four centuries after Zheng He’s voyages, a major British delegation under Lord MacArtney arrived at the Ch’ing Dynasty emperor’s court in 1792, seeking a commercial treaty and bringing with it samples of Western manufacture. The visitors were told to go away. East was East, and West was West, and never the twain shall meet.

Were Zheng He and the Ch’ing emperor to be aroused today from their respective ancestral graves and have China’s current economic strategy toward Africa — that is, its treaty, trade and investment policies — described to them, the first would surely be exhilarated, the second much dismayed.

What examples do we have of those recent policies? Consider, for example, the around-the-world trip of China’s President Hu Jintao this April — thus, a journey made not by an admiral or a plenipotentiary, but by the Chinese leader himself. His visits to Boeing and Microsoft on the United States’ West Coast were enormously important, symbolically and commercially; these are companies China does great and growing business with, and thus much respects. The subsequent visit to the White House was perfunctory by comparison, as if Hu and US President George Bush had agreed that they had little to say to each other.

Of much more importance, surely, was Hu’s next port of call — Africa. Flanked by senior Chinese officials and businessmen, Hu paid his respects to the governments of Morocco, Nigeria and Kenya, signing trade and friendship treaties here and there. He had been preceded, at the beginning of the year, by his foreign minister, Li Zhaoxing, who had visited five other African nations. And just a short while ago, in late June, the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, undertook a whirlwind visit to Egypt, Ghana, Congo Republic, Angola, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda. That is 15 countries, in less than six months.

What is going on here? China did poke its nose into Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, but that was to aid rebel movements and to discomfort the Americans and Soviets alike; it was a short-term tactic, which produced no benefits and was soon abandoned. This time, argues David White (the Africa editor of the Financial Times and one of the few people paying attention), the motives are very different, and abundantly clear.

China’s massive industrial and commercial growth over the past three decades has turned it into the world’s most ravenous consumer of raw materials, whether oil or copper, hardwoods or gold — just no giraffes. To satisfy the needs of 1.3 billion consumers and, of course, the requirements of its booming export trades, China needs to import much more, year after year. And Africa, even more than Russia or South America, is the earth’s greatest depository of raw materials.

In five to 10 years’ time, hundreds of Chinese merchant vessels may be steaming in and out of African ports, just as they have steamed in and out of Long Beach and Seattle over the past quarter-century.

Will it be a major player there? Surely, the answer is yes. Here we can see, embryonically, a new axis in world politics forming, alongside the many other bilateral relationships that have developed in this post-Cold War, post ‘unipolar moment’ world of ours.

Is the White House ready for this? Is the international human-rights community ready for a China that is willing, through the use of its Security Council veto, to protect its commercial partners in Africa from external pressures to amend any domestic atrocities? And when will politicians in the West, baying at our current high energy costs, come to realise that the prices for raw materials and oil are unlikely to go down much, if at all, given the sheer size of demand in China and rest of Asia.

Barring some miracle, or global trade collapse, the era of cheap basic materials is over. More generally, the international trading field is becoming much more a multi-player event in which the West holds fewer bargaining cards. Apart from British Prime Minister Tony Blair, with his call for the G-8 to be replaced by a G-13 (adding China, India, Brazil, South Africa and Mexico), so few of them have woken up to the need for institutional change to meet the new global realities.

Let us conclude with two further thoughts. The first is almost a truism: that we live in such a complex, multi-layered and confused world that it is hard to guess which of the many events of our day will be regarded by later historians as more significant than others. But it could be that the Chinese premier’s call upon seven African states in June 2006 may seem more important to future commentators than will the sad tale of Guantanamo Bay, the rise and fall of the US neo-cons, or the Israeli military operations in Gaza and Lebanon. Who knows?

Secondly, even our remark above about China today not desiring giraffes may have to be recast. As social and economic historians have pointed out, one of the common features of the rise of Western bourgeois societies in the 19th century was the creation of public arenas like theatres, libraries, parks and zoos, from Berlin to London to Brooklyn. Gross domestic product per capita had to rise to a certain level before that happened. If China’s economic growth can continue without severe setbacks, it, too, will likely reach such a stage.

In that event, all bets are off. If, say, 500 menageries and zoos are established all across a future China, then the trade in giraffes could also be substantial. This would truly be a world-historical irony.