China in Africa

Michael Dynes

It has been called a second colonisation of Africa. In less than a decade a bewildering assortment of Chinese companies, many of them state-owned, have arrived on African shores - from the Cape to Cairo, and from Khartoum to Monrovia - promising economic development in exchange for access to oil and minerals

It has been an astonishing transition. In a few short years two-way trade between Africa and the Asian giant has exploded from virtually nothing at the beginning of the decade to an eye-watering $100 billion in 2008 - and it would have carried on expanding at an exponential rate were it not for the global credit crunch and subsequent economic slowdown.

But while the Western world is preoccupied with trying to assess the scale and depth of the recession it now faces, Chinese firms remain engaged in building African railways, roads, mines, power stations, dams, water treatment plants, hospitals, schools and houses in what has become one of the biggest sustained spurts of development in the continent's history.

Now Beijing has sent its navy to protect its far-flung interests in the first Chinese maritime deployment in the African region for 500 years. The Chinese fleet has not fired a single shot in anger anywhere near the African continent since Admiral Zheng, a Ming dynasty court eunuch, arrived there in the 15th century.

Then it was 400ft wooden junks. Now it is two state-of-the-art missile-armed destroyers, equipped with two attack helicopters and a support vessel, which set off on Boxing Day to protect Chinese merchant ships and their strategic cargo - mostly oil and minerals - from attack by the escalating scourge of Somali pirates in the waters around the Gulf of Aden.

Of the estimated 100 or so ship hijackings that have taken place off the Somali coast during the past year - earning the pirates an estimated $30 million - about seven have been directed at Chinese owned vessels. The threat to international shipping has grown in severity to the point where the United Nations issued a one-year mandate in December to all maritime nations granting them the authority to take action against the pirates on land or sea.

America, Russia, Britain and its European allies, and India were first to respond. Now China, whose investments in African infrastructure are believed to be in the region of $30 billion, has joined the international flotilla of forces gathering to wipe the scourge of piracy from the high seas - in what is also one of the key shipping lanes between Europe and Asia.

Beijing is renowned for its caution in international affairs. For decades it has adhered to the doctrine of non-interference in the affairs of others - not least because of its reluctance to invite interference in its own - especially in Tibet and Taiwan. But its interests in Africa have expanded to the point where they now outweigh such caution.

China is now prepared to defend those interests by force of arms. The immediate pretext is to help the international effort to stamp out piracy. But its strategic significance is to protect, and signal to the rest of the world its willingness to protect, its access to African resources and markets upon which its economy will rely for the next fifty years.