Raising the Red Lantern Part 2: Idan kidi ya chanza

'Idan kidi ya chanza, rawan ma zai chanza' 'When the music changes, so must the dance'

—Hausa proverb (West Africa)

The expansion of Chinese business and investment in Africa is akin to that of a bamboo plant: from modest beginnings, it has shot up at record speed. As with bamboo, that growth springs from long-established roots. Although the Chinese naval explorer Zheng He sailed to the east coast of Africa in the 15th century, China’s modern ties with Africa date back to the earliest years of African independence in the 1950s and 1960s, when leaders such as President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania turned to China to build “Third World solidarity.” One concrete expression of that early cooperation was China’s 1968–76 construction of the TanZam Railway, which linked landlocked Zambia with the Port of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. Britain, Japan, West Germany, and the United States, as well as the United Nations (UN) and the World Bank, had all declined to fund the project, deeming it financially unviable.3 Only China—at the time poorer than both Tanzania and Zambia—agreed to fund it, to the tune of $3 billion in today’s money. Mao told Nyerere, “To help you build the railway, we are willing to forsake building railways for ourselves.

Until now, the true extent of the Africa-China economic relationship has been poorly understood because the data in the field is patchy, at best, and often inaccurate. This information deficiency is consistent across every major area of global flows, including: Companies and investments. Previous data sets have tended to focus disproportionately on stateowned enterprises (SOEs) and on deals with public announcements. Although these investments tend to be some of the bigger ones by size, each is only a subset of the vast range of business activities occurring between China and Africa.

Loans. Despite announcements every few months about major bilateral loans, there is no reliable database about the true level of Chinese lending by African recipient country.

Aid. China’s lack of a central aid agency and its unique definition of aid—one that differs from standards set by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)—make comparisons with other countries’ aid flows difficult.

Migration. Existing information sets on global migration flows include the demonstrably wrong figures of zero Chinese living in Angola, as well as zero migrants from China to Tanzania and Côte d’Ivoire in 2013. These errors may be because global migration databases are built largely from country-level census data, many of which are incomplete and outdated, particularly with regard to information specifically about foreign migrants. Trends in international migrant stock: The 2015 revision, United Nations, December 2015.

Whether due to language barriers or the sheer speed at which AfricaChina relations have evolved over the past decade, statisticians and analysts have simply not been able to keep up. Existing studies tend to be based on small samples and focused on particular industries or countries, meaning there is no comprehensive picture of Chinese investment across the continent.

But China was also getting something concrete out of its friendships in Africa. For more than two decades after the Communist Party came into power in mainland China in 1949, the People’s Republic of China was not recognized by the UN. Instead, Taiwan held the coveted seat on the UN Security Council. When UN member states voted to return that seat to China in 1971, 26 of 76 votes came from African nations. By the 1990s, around 90 percent of African countries recognized the People’s Republic of China. Those relations created fertile ground for China’s “Going Out” policy, launched in 1999, which encouraged Chinese enterprises to invest abroad.

Now, China is poised to become Africa’s largest source of FDI.