Is China good for Africa? China's interests in the once-forgotten continent are obvious. China needs to secure oil for its fast-growing economy and Africa, with its established and new oil fields, and its relative openness to foreign investment is an obvious place to do business.
The same goes for other resources. Chinese manufacturers rely hugely on imported raw materials. So Zambia's abundant supplies of copper are alluring, as are Congo's cobalt and other precious metals. And land tempts too. Only in Africa (think of the fertile highlands of Angola long cut off by war, or the once booming farms in Zimbabwe) can you find under-used tracts of rich and well-watered farmland, where productivity would soar with better investment.
Africa, too, is a small but useful safety valve for China's large population. Where Lebanese or Indian merchants long prospered in Africa, Chinese migrant traders are increasingly cornering the markets. From Cape Verde to Madagascar, in the smallest settlement or in thumping Lagos and Kinshasa, Chinatowns are popping up, packed with cheap imported goods from China—plastic buckets, shoes, clothes, household wares. And when Chinese investors build roads and bridges in oil-rich countries, while dishing out big loans, the labour is mostly imported. Such tied foreign aid helps to employ young Chinese abroad.
And Africa is politically useful to China. The continent's 50 or so countries represent a big group of votes at the UN General Assembly, and a voice of the world's poor at global summits, for example on climate change. China, which still presents itself as a poor country, is anxious to build alliances which could be useful, for example in any future row over Taiwan.
What does Africa get in return? Some gains are plain. Booming trade with China, the export of raw materials, help African economies to grow and thus poverty to fall. The past decade has been good for Africa's economies: the continent does well when commodity prices are high, for which thank China. Cheap imported goods are a huge boon to poor African consumers. And African governments like China's big, soft loans with few strings attached much more than loans from the IMF or World Bank. And it helps that Chinese attention on Africa is resuscitating others' interest in the continent, bringing back investors and traders who had long neglected it.
But there are problems. The more that African economies are geared to exporting unprocessed goods (as in colonial days) the less likely that other sorts of industry—services or manufacturing—will flourish. And those abundant cheap imports have encouraged the collapse of Africa's textile industry, factories and local manufacturing.
Then there is democracy. Africa has made some progress in the past 20 years, with more elections, more freedom of speech and more political freedom in more countries. So it is a worry that a huge, non-democratic, economic power becomes more influential, happily teaming up with nasty regimes in Sudan, for example.
It matters in business, too. Western companies, for all their many faults, including corrupt behaviour, have in recent years come under much greater pressure from consumers, NGOs, domestic laws on bribery, intrusive journalists, than Chinese ones. Gradually firms in the oil industry and the mining industry are developing better standards of corporate responsibility in Africa. No more should diamond companies do deals with rebel armies. No more should oil firms pollute the local environment. Pay bribes in Africa and you risk being arrested back home in America or Britain. Will Chinese companies come under similar pressure?
So, on balance, is China's growing interest a good thing for Africa or not? The goal of this debate is to weigh up the pros and cons of China's closer engagement, whether economic, political, social or cultural. It should be a lively one.
