Africa's New Hegemon

Hu Jintao, president of China, has just completed an eight-nation tour of Africa--a visit that comes on the heels of a meeting in Beijing attended by some 40 African heads of state. Both the recent visit and the Beijing summit on China-Africa cooperation in November reflect China's determination to establish itself as the benevolent, non-Western continental hegemon, concerned about the plight of historically impoverished and exploited African lands. Through patient diplomatic, military, and especially economic overtures, a resource-hungry China with an eye on Africa's oil has been extending its reach across the continent.

Thus, wherever he went, Hu doled out gifts: $100 million in grants and "soft loans" to Cameroon, a sports stadium for Zambia, a military hospital for Guinea-Bissau. Many of the grants come with no obvious strings attached. The day before Hu left for Africa, the Chinese Commerce Ministry announced it would write off 33 African countries' debts to China.

Trade is booming. Last year, China's trade with Africa increased 40 percent, having already quadrupled since 2001. It reached $45 billion in the first ten months of 2006. China recently surpassed Britain as the continent's third-largest trading partner, after the United States and France. China--unburdened at home by opposition parties, human rights watchdogs, or a free press--asks no questions about its trading partners' domestic repression. Instead, its "mutual noninterference policy" makes it the ideal partner for despotic African states.

With all of the money China throws at Africa for infrastructure and general economic aid, its more modest military backing for African dictators is the least-noticed aspect of its involvement in the continent. Yet it is also the most unsettling, considering where this assistance has been directed.

China was an early supporter of Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwean African National Union (ZANU) during the struggle against white rule in what was still Rhodesia in the 1970s. Indeed, China helped fuel something of an intra-revolutionary proxy war between ZANU and the Russian-backed Zimbabwean African People's Union (ZAPU). Since Mugabe took control of the country in 1980, China--along with, to its shame, democratic South Africa--has been his leading military supplier.

In December, the Chinese ambassador to Zimbabwe paid a visit to the annual meeting of Mugabe's party, the thuggish organization through which he has ruled the country uninterrupted for 27 years. In 2004, the Zimbabwean government bought $240 million worth of military equipment from China. In May of last year, the Chinese donated $1.5 million worth of machinery to Zimbabwe's military. And last August, Zimbabwe purchased six fighter jets from China. The Chinese have also sent the Zimbabweans riot control gear and have trained senior military officers, both of which must have helped Mugabe last week as he violently suppressed opposition protests outside Harare.

Similarly, the Chinese have exacerbated at every turn what is now the gravest military and humanitarian crisis in Africa, the four-year slaughter in Darfur. At the Beijing summit, Sudanese president Omar Hassan al-Bashir thanked the Chinese government for blocking a U.S.-sponsored resolution in the United Nations Security Council that called for an international peacekeeping force to be deployed in Darfur, where Khartoum has abetted a genocide that has taken hundreds of thousands of lives. And that's not all al-Bashir has to be grateful for: His country's economy is expected to grow by a whopping 13 percent this year thanks in no small part to Chinese trade and infrastructure assistance. "Unless the international community--in particular China, host of the 2008 Olympics--finds the will to confront Khartoum over its intransigence, a savage genocide by attrition will continue indefinitely," Eric Reeves, an American Darfur expert, recently told Reuters.

China also supplies arms to Khartoum in violation of the letter of a U.N. arms embargo and the spirit of countless U.N. resolutions calling on international actors to refrain from inflaming the crisis. The Chinese are unapologetic: In January the Chinese assistant foreign minister said, "With Sudan, we have cooperation in many aspects, including military cooperation. In this, we have nothing to hide."