From The Boston Globe:
China is transforming Africa, for good and ill. The United States and other traditional trading and aid partners of Africa need to help Africans craft policies that welcome Chinese investment and trade but condemn the taking of African jobs and the destruction of African industries. Africa and the West also need to dissuade China from supporting Africa’s most reviled dictatorships.
China has become the largest new investor, trader, buyer, and aid donor in a raft of African countries and a major new economic force in sub-Saharan Africa . Chinese trade with Africa is growing at 50 percent a year. Already, that trade has jumped in value from $10 billion in 2000 to $25 billion last year. (US trade with sub-Saharan Africa in 2005 totaled nearly $61 billion.) China is building roads, railways, harbors, petrochemical installations, and military barracks; it is pumping oil, farming, taking trees, supplying laborers, and offering physicians. A number of African nations now depend critically on Chinese cash and initiative. [Full Text]
Robert I. Rotberg is director of the Kennedy School of Government’s Program on Intrastate Conflict and president of the World Peace Foundation.
