The Dragon's Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa

the world beyond the headlines lecture series is a collaborative project of the University of Chicago center for international studies and the International House Global voices program our nationally recognized programming is made possible with support from listeners like you secure the future of world beyond the headlines programming by making your gift online at alumni services. chicago.edu giving please specify World beyond the headlines as the area of giving the world beyond the headlines lecture series is supported by the McCormack Foundation the Norman weight Harris fund and generous contributions from listeners like you thank you for joining us this evening to discuss the expanding role of China through the African throughout the African continent we're pleased to have DEA Bram here to lend her expertise on the current situation and look forward to hearing her assessments of the risks and opportunities on this controversial subject deer Bram is associate professor in the School of International Service at America University concentrating on development policy governance and democracy she has been a faculty member at Columbia University in New York at silorn University in Thailand and was also a visiting fellow at the University of Liberia in Monrovia the University of macius and the fora Bay College in Sierra Leon broing Ham's research focuses on foreign aid the political economy of development and the politics of economic policy she has served as a consultant for the United Nations the World Bank and the US agency for International Development in Cambodia Sri Lanka Egypt and various subsaharan African countries she is the author of Chinese Aid and African development exporting Green Revolution and Aid dependence and governance her latest book The Dragon's gift the real story of China in Africa will be available for purchase and signing after the program bringham earned her ba from Ohio Wesleyan University and her M and PhD from TU University please join me in welcome Deborah bringham to World Behind the headlines thank [Applause] you thank you very much um and it's a pleasure to be here thank you for bringing me out to Chicago um beautiful campus that you have here and I'm glad to be so close to my home state of Wisconsin which is a little bit further north and a little further a little bit colder than here so um it's also very nice to be in a room where people can't find seats so I appreciate that as a speaker so thanks a lot for coming I want to start out with a story and the story starts Once Upon a Time so once upon a time there was a large very poor but resourcer country just emerging from a period of intense conflict and they decided to focus on development we need to modernize our infrastructure they said we need to build Railways we need to import new technologies we need to develop our minds soon they had a visit from a large wealthy Asian country that had already become a major consumer of their oil and this Asian country offered them a bargain we will give you a line of credit worth $1 billion and you can use this line of credit to import Technologies from us you can pay our companies to develop your minds with high technologies that you don't have or develop your ports and you can repay us with your oil many in this poor country were intensely suspicious of this large Asian country but they agreed to the bargain and the work began so which two countries do you think I'm talking about okay I'm hearing yeah lots of different possibilities there but clearly one of the countries was China China was a large poor country with oil and the other country was Japan and the time was 30 years ago when China was just emerging from the cultural revolution and when D sha ping first proposed this in China in 1975 mid-70s it was intense ly controversial Japan is not a traditional friend of China foreign Technologies were something the PRC felt that it could do without or many people thought they could so it was very controversial but nevertheless they did this and China went on to prosper and this relationship helped in the beginning and I think it still does so there are several points here that relate to China's engagement in Africa and the first is that this was not altruism on Japan's part this was not foreign aid the10 billion doll was not concessional later on there were concessional loans but the first one was not but most importantly and second is that China's leaders saw this as an opportunity they saw that they could use their natural resources as a foundation for their own development they could do a bargain our resources for your technology and your Advanced Construction Services and skills and Japan was pleased to get access to China's oil and coal and sell them advanced technology so the rest is history as they say so I hope you were surprised by the story and from the guesses that were going about which countries it was I imagine that you were it's one of many surprises I think you'll find in this book China is offering the same bargain to many African countries today it's a very cleare eyed bargain uh it's not altruism it's not foreign aid leverage what you have and what we want leverage oil if you're Congo brazaville leverage cocoa if you're Ghana leverage Sesame if you're Ethiopia leverage these resources to build the telecoms projects the power plants the railways that you believe to be necessary for your country's development on hearing of one major deal along these lines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo an editor at Financial Times said Beijing has thrown down the most direct challenge yet to the West's architecture for aiding African development and I think he was right the book that I'm talking about today um is about Chinese Aid and state sponsored economic engagement in Africa these two things get mixed up so much and so I spend some time in the book pulling them apart separating them out and then showing how they sometimes come back together again and at the beginning I had a more academic title I'm a professor after all and I'm used to giving academic titles to my books I was going to call it uh Chinese strategic engagement in Africa and my editor at Oxford had already decided this would be what they call a crossover book that you know an academic book that goes into the um into a larger uh audience and while I was off doing fieldwork in Sierra Leon Tanzania and Zambia and I wasn't on the internet she put the proposal forward to the board with a different title and she was calling it Rogue donor with a question mark the real story of China and Africa and when I heard about this I I I said whoa you know we can't use that title that's and then I looked at my contract and I saw that Oxford has the last word on the title something you don't necessarily know but uh they have the last word on the title the book cover all of those things so did negotiate on it and uh I got the title changed to something else that was still catchy but not so alarming and she got to keep the subtitle so that's why we have that um but then the book was released in November in the UK and my editor was very annoyed because she said to me look a week ago Sarah Palin's Memoir was released going rogue and if we had called your book Rogue donor going rogue we could have had some tie-in promotions you said we lost a great opportunities so but seriously I wrote this book out of a mixture of alarm and scholarly curiosity and the alarm comes from what I saw being portrayed in the media and this was on both sides in the Chinese media the move into Africa is presented in wholly positive terms uh China is a sincere friend China uh is helping its African Brothers um China is uh uh a good partner uh the tanam railway the famous Railway built during the 1970s in Tanzania and Zambia to enable um Zambia to export its copper without having to go through apartate South Africa is regularly Tred out in the Chinese press as an example of China's sincere intentions of Brotherhood toward the continent and there's very rarely a mention of all of the problems of Chinese companies getting down and dirty in the mud along with companies from all over the world in Africa's very problematic environment um all the Kickbacks the labor problems the environmental problems Etc you don't read about those on the other hand in the west that's all you read about you read about um that China is the new colonialist in Africa you read that Chinese Aid is toxic that they're making poverty worse that China gives billions in Aid to prop up Sudan and Zimbabwe and prior regimes that China is leading the charge to grab huge swads of land across Africa that they bring in all their own labor and they don't hire Africans and much of this is in fact not true so I first went to China 30 years ago as a language student and then I went to Africa uh to do my first book which was on Chinese Aid in Africa so I I do cross over these two um big regions and I know from all this experience it's not easy to do this kind of research it it involves a lot of um a lot of interviews a lot of archival work a lot of intense um consideration of documents both on the internet and not uh and multiple trips uh both to China and to many countries in Africa and uh for the research I went to some of the more difficult places I went to Zimbabwe I went to Nigeria I'll tell you some of those stories and I also went to some of the easier places ious and Tanzania Zambia mosm Beek South Africa Sierra Leon um and in earlier research on this I had gone to Liberia and The Gambia and after the book was finished I went to Egypt so there are a lot of different countries represented in in the book in particular and when I was writing this book I sometimes felt like Akira Kurosawa the Japanese film director of the famous film rashan and this is a film that many of you I hope have seen you know you're here at the University of Chicago and uh this is an area of high culture if you haven't seen it you really have to it's a film in which uh an event takes place in the woods and you see it first and you think you know what happened and then you see it from another perspective and it looks entirely different and a third perspective and it looks different yet again and so that's why I felt a little bit like Akira Kurosawa not that I'm a great film director but I was trying to portray what the conventional wisdom from another perspective and another perspective and I do this throughout the book I present what we think we know and then I show another picture and maybe a third picture and so um I construct much of the conventional wisdom I only have time tonight for a few of these myths and realities and so I'm going to talk to you about three or possibly four and the first one is that China is a new donor in afria Africa now everyone in this room is probably aware that that's not the case that China's been there for 50 years or longer and they've been giving aid for 50 years but why does this matter it matters because the Chinese have learned from their experience they had a lot of failures with their aid projects and when you look at the Chinese documents the Chinese writing on this they're always trying to figure out how can we do this differently how can we do this better because we're not doing a very good job and so a lot of what they're doing today comes out of that examination of what they had done in the past and they've come up with a different model of Engagement one that doesn't actually involve much foreign aid it's much more about business it's about creating incentives for Chinese companies to work together uh with Africans on some of the things that African governments want to do we'll return to this but China's long history also gives them a lot of credibility I often hear that China came amongst people who know that China wasn't in Africa a while ago they say Okay China came they built the tanam railway a few stadiums and then they left and they only came back when they hunger for oil increased but that's not actually the case uh because I was there in the 80s and 90s doing research on this and I saw there were Chinese doing projects in the various countries where I was and they were very quiet they were out of the way they didn't have Billboards up to announce uh where they were that's changing they're definitely putting the Billboards up now and there's a whole discussion in the ministry of Commerce about just how to promote their their aid through these Billboards they even had a tender about how to what to have logos for the aid program which is so so new and different for them but um we weren't looking most of us weren't looking and they scaled back in the 80s and 90s as they focused on their development at home but they remained and this gives them not only credibility but experience and so the first three chapters of the book focus on the history uh how this relationship built up how it changed and how the Chinese experimented how they were crossing the river by feeling the stones as uh chenyun said which D sha ping later picked up on um we all think that that dun sha ping was the originator of that um but they are also as uh Bashi li who was the former minister of Commerce said they're crossing the ocean by feeling the stones so these are experimental things that they're still doing in Africa today so myth number two Chinese Aid is huge that's a myth Chinese economic engagement is pretty large and I'll give you some of the dimensions of that but the aid is not that big and it's probably the single most repeated error on this I'll just give you two examples out of many that that I document in the book um a world Bank study on China's infrastructure um involvement in Africa which is a good study um but they picked up on one report that was in uh Dow Jones newswire that Chinese premier wja had said that China had given $44 billion in Aid to Africa since 1960 and when I saw that I thought this is way way more than it should be and I wonder what the real figure is so I looked around and I found a Chinese uh report of the same visit that uh wjab BAU had been on when he made that statement to he was in North Africa and that Source said it was 44 billion renman be in the Chinese currency which is about $5.6 billion it's a very different order of magnitude so it gives you a little bit of a flavor and there are other examples uh for example the New York Times um I think it was 2007 they had an oped in which um they reported that China was thought to have given n billion dollar to just one project in Nigeria and when I looked into this I found out that although there was a there was a $500 million preferential export credit on the table that might have been applied to this there wasn't actually any Chinese financing attached to that project at all at the time that they were writing um and so there was nothing like a n billion doll Aid project going on there so Chinese trade is huge China's if you look at the graphs on trade it goes like up like that uh it's an an enormous increase in the year 2000 Chinese trade to the continent of Africa was $10 billion do Imports exports combined and in um 2008 that had gone up to $106 billion so you can see huge increase a lot of that in 2008 was due to the high price of oil and other minerals that year um Chinese investment is also large but far smaller than the West's investment in Africa and uh the figures that we have for investment are not so good from China according to the figures that they have it's $7.8 billion accumulated stocks of investment but each year it's usually under a billion dollars so these are not very large figures China's official development assistance each year is about U according to my figures which are in chapter six of the book it's about an average of 1.9 billion over um the last three years that's an average and it's probably been going up so lower to higher but overall 1.9 billion and this is far lower um than from the West uh the United States for example official development assistance to Africa in 2007 was over7 billion and these both figures all include debt relief so China's smaller than most of the major donors Germany and a number of others there but Chinese companies are getting a huge number of contracts and I'll talk about that in just a minute because I'm going to go into the the third myth the third myth is that Chinese Aid and state sponsored economic engagement in Africa is solely about oil and natural resources now that's a myth I hear over and over again that Chinese Aid is is out there to in order to enable China to get more resources in in the huge picture um I don't think you can even say that surely China is very very interested in oil and resources in Africa just as Japan was interested in oil and and coal in China but Japan had a lot of other interests as well and so does China and we can see this when we look at the data trade for example the United States trade with Africa in 2008 was about $120 billion with the continent and of that about 100 billion dollar was exports from Africa to the United States and most of that was oil and we exported only about 20 billion dollar to Africa now with the Chinese it's almost half and half so it's about uh 53 billion or so around that for Chinese uh for African exports to China and around the same figure for Chinese exports to Africa so Chinese trade uh and Africa as a market is hugely important um for them so that's one one thing that's very clear from the data and the second thing that's clear uh from the data is that Chinese Aid we don't have good figures on it but we have an idea because we know which countries get Aid and we have a rough idea of how much they get it's spread across the continent so every single country in Africa with the exception of swasiland has received aid from China not just the resourcer countries um and that is because Aid is mainly given for political reasons and it's given to countries that recognize Beijing instead of uh taib as the rightful China and so it's countries that have diplomatic relations now in the west we tend to have donor favorites we tend uh the frankophone countries tend to get their aid from France the anglophone countries tend to get their aid from uh the United Kingdom and United States of course our biggest Aid recipient in Africa is Egypt and this is for political reasons as well because of our concern about the Middle East and Israel so uh China's much more even and that's because of the political rationale for Aid now you might ask what about these very large loans that we hear about we read about $4.5 billion and above for Angola up to9 Billion for the Democratic Republic of the Congo these are very large packages that have been uh talked about in the press and these are very real um isn't this Aid that's often described that way but in fact um these are loans that are on commercial rates so these are business transactions um and many of the reporters who were writing about these loans didn't understand some of the basic financial terms now when I tell you that the $4.5 billion to Angola was given uh liore plus 150 basis points would you understand what I'm talking about lior plus 150 basis points so that's the terms of the loan and let me explain what that means liore is the London interbank offered rate it's a basic uh Financial rate that Banks use to give loans to each other and it's also used as a basis for a variable rate loan so the loan that may change every three months or every six months or every year the interest rate will be adjusted a variable rate loan and so if your loan is given at lior that's not uh foreign aid because Banks don't give foreign aid to each other they give loans at commercial rates and lior plus 100 basis points is lior plus 1% or 1.5% and that's standard uh way in which these loans are structured and it's very similar to the loans structured by Standard Charter Bank for example in Angola which were lior plus 2.5% the Chinese were lior plus 1.5% so this wasn't foreign aid and the Chinese never describe it as foreign eight so finally uh oil and minerals are a huge part of Chinese interest in Africa and their companies are going into uh investments in these areas in a big way and they're trying to um expand um as much as they can in ways that make economic sense but the data that we have on infrastructure contracts that are signed by Chinese companies for Chinese companies to do this infrastructure work that I've been talking about are far larger than any of the investment figures that we have for example the ministry of Commerce last year in 2008 which is not more than last year but their figures which have just been released uh for the the contract signed by Chinese infrastructure companies in Africa is $40 billion just in one year and the revenues earned by Chinese companies in 2008 were reported at $20 billion just for one year and so these are very large figures and it shows this this um this interest in doing infrastructure and these infrastructure contracts are not most of these are not financed by the Chinese they're financed by African governments that have resources they're financed by the World Bank Chinese companies are winning a large number of World Bank projects they're financed by the African Development Bank more than half of all the contracts issued uh for infrastructure by that bank are won by Chinese companies in Africa and uh private firms in Africa that hire Chinese construction companies to build buildings and do work for them and then one last piece of of evidence on this is that China's single largest investment in Africa does anyone know what it is is the one completed signed deal that's actually happened one this one largest one now you're all going to hesitate to guess because I I tricked you last time with the Japan story um it's 20% of Standard Bank in South Africa so that was5 billion that's the single largest one investment um that's been signed sealed and delivered and this shows up in the the FDI data so um a Nigerian official said to me I interviewed him actually in Beijing he said to me um the West comes to Nigeria and it's oil oil oil but China comes here and they're interested in everything so what kind of impact is Chinese engagement having in Africa I address three areas in the book and I have to say that the to know about impact is um is very difficult to do at this point we don't have a lot of data we don't have um big data sets where we can do econometric analysis on Aid or or these flows from Chinese Banks because we don't have the figures and so much of this engagement is so recent that we haven't been able to see it play out for example many things were announced um many Chinese projects um initiatives experiments at the end of November in 2006 and those are just now not even complete they're still underway so we haven't seen the results of those for example the Chinese um promised to do seven special economic zones they call them economic and trade um trade and economic cooperation zones across Africa and these seven have been decided upon but none of them has opened up yet so um we haven't actually seen what will happen with that so I look at three areas I look at um manufacturing Agriculture and governance and I have two chapters on agriculture and two on manufacturing and then governance comes in at several points in the book mostly in chapter 11 but um in in agriculture I was particularly interested in this question uh because my first book had been on Chinese Aid in agriculture and so I had read as many of you probably have about Chinese big Chinese land deals and I just last week looked at the CBS um News website and they have a a new story out by um somebody Robert O'Brien or somebody like that and he reports that uh China has grabbed half of the arable land in the DRC well this kind of story gets repeated often and so to my surprise in looking at at each of the land deals that was rep reported in the Press they were all different or they were either different or they didn't exist for example this there is a deal in the DRC and the deal in the DRC is a curious one it involves a Chinese telecommunications company called ZTE and they have a concession for 100,000 hectares in the DRC to grow oil palm for fuel oil that exists uh you can find it on the website of the um the parliament because the project was approved by the parliament in the DRC it's also on the Chinese uh Embassy website in the DRC so it's a large project but it was reported in the press as three million hectares so these are very different um Figures it's a lot smaller than it actually uh was reported to be and nothing has happened on that project yet so I don't know if they will go forward I was um prepared to believe that there were a lot of projects like this across Africa because in fact Chinese companies are doing projects like this in Southeast Asia we know of uh land deals in the Philippines very large ones uh that one was ultimately thrown out we know of land deals in in Papa new guini and in Indonesia and uh there's one also in LA so these are ones that are true and we have evidence for it but in Africa I went to mosm Beek Zambia um I did research on Sagal Al though I didn't go there um and I went to Zimbabwe and these are all places where I'd heard about these large land deals and they didn't exist in any of these places and I was really surprised to see that because you know if you look on the internet or Google this you find lots and lots of what looks like evidence um but when you're on the ground um the evidence isn't there now this could change the land labor ratios in China and in Africa lead many Chinese to think that as I quote one person I interviewed in sier Leon he looked at me and he looked all around he said he said land is everywhere here and nobody's using it and um so there's this perception that land is is relatively unused in Africa that as I point out in the book that's an erroneous perception on the part of many Chinese because they use land so intensely but in many parts of Africa land is used on a shifting cultivation basis so they have to have a lot of phow periods and long areas big areas for that but um Chinese investors who have gone to Africa have come back and as one Chinese article on this reported investment in agriculture is not a good chew on the bones and I I wasn't sure what a good chew on the bones is but it sounds like juicy un favorable they don't think it's a very good thing to do so what about Manufacturing now what we hear about is that uh Chinese Imports of lowlevel goods cheap Goods into Africa particularly textiles have wiped out the manufacturing sector in Africa there is a lot of evidence that this is in fact true with regard to textiles the textile Industries have been suffering for a long time in Africa uh they've not gone through upgrading um they're using outmoded Machinery they're not competitive and Chinese um textiles have been smuggled in they using counterfeits of African textiles the lapas and the other prints so there's a lot of evidence that that supports this interpretation but there's another story too and that is that many uh several of the African countries that were exporting textiles have been competitive still with China even after the end of of the trade agreement called the multifiber arrangement the MFA that ended uh in 2005 they still remained competitive um and we can see I show the data on this in the book there are other um examples of this too so um in a a selection of about half the countries in Africa for the past five years manufacturing growth rates have been going up and others they've been going down but it's the story is not the same across the continent and that also reflects that um Africa is not just one place it's many different places many different kinds of governments and many different kinds of um sets of investors there so Chinese competition was supposed to be wiping this out across the continent um and this isn't uneven story now some of this new um growth in manufacturing is due to Chinese investment and um the single largest growing sector for Chinese exports to Africa is equipment and Machinery a lot of this is construction equipment for all of those projects but some of it is equipment and machinery for factories and um and some of it is factories that are being set up in these seven overseas special economic zones that are going up around arounda Africa now these are being set up by an uh an interesting model that shows what the Chinese learned about mixing Aid and business incentives it's not the Chinese government as saying you know the command economy we're going to build these things and we just go and set them up it's not working like that what they did is they've decided to build actually a lot of these around the world their the hope is to do eventually 50 of these overseas zones and 19 of them have been contracted out so far to Chinese compan compies and the process is this in Beijing in 2006 and 2007 the ministry of Commerce announced a tender to have Chinese companies bid on these zones and so Chinese companies 110 proposed made proposals and their proposals went to Beijing a smaller number were selected and they went before a panel of Chinese professors and Chinese um uh experts who had come from some of China's own special economic zones including shanan the famous one on the border with Hong Kong and they selected these um 19 proposals to get financial assistance from Beijing so they're getting uh help to set up these zones but the zones are supposed to be profitable for the companies to run and in Africa there are seven of these now um give Chinese companies incentives to invest in something that African governments want and people they want zones that were will set up manufacturing they want transfer of Technology they want employment and the zones that I've looked at and uh I've with a a Chinese colleague we've done research now on all of these zones and uh there's no requirement that they bring in Chinese labor um there's no requirement that only Chinese companies invest in these zones so these are are wide open uh in many with various kinds of restrictions for investment and in November last year at the The Forum on China Africa cooperation in Egypt uh the Chinese announced that they were setting up a$1 Billion fund for African small and medium Enterprises so they could invest more easily in these zones and then there are private African entrepreneurs who are engaging with Chinese Partners uh in Nigeria I visited innocent chuma he's um uh this swashbuckling it was described in one newspaper report before I went there is this swashbuckling entrepreneur he's really he's not so swashbuckling when you actually meet him but um I visited him uh at his Factory in anugu and then uh he sent me down to some of his other factories in a town called na where I've been doing research first for the World Bank in 1991 I've been back there it's my fourth visit to to Nai it's in what used to be called bafra in eastern Nigeria and it's not very far from the uh Niger Delta and it's actually not a very safe area and um he had had uh two Chinese Engineers that were working for him and setting up one of his factories kidnapped by armed robbers who held them for ransom and only one of them was ever returned and so when when I went down he supplied a car for me very kindly um and he supplied two policemen with AK-47s so one on each side of the car as we drove down to nawi uh and this was for armed robbers who tend to stop cars they they put glass in the highway and then the cars the wheels blow out and they stop them and Rob them um and so and then when I was in uh Navy it was difficult to go around I went around to all of the factories but it was hard to even at one point there was a meeting going on so I went out in the street to see if I could find some ground nuts because I was getting hungry and people were just absolutely panicked because I had walked out in the street and they thought you know that someone might come and kidnap me um and hold me for ransom so I told my husband about this when I got back he said I'm glad you waited till you got back to tell me these stories but I asked him as we walked around this huge plastics factory that he had set up in anugu more than a thousand Nigerian workers were in there and three Chinese technical people that had come uh Engineers that were working with him and I asked him how could he compete with Chinese Imports because I had read that uh Chinese Imports were wiping out the Plastics industry in Nigeria and he said to me he said well he said I have a a joint venture Factory actually in China that produces tires so I know what Chinese workers are making they're making the same as my workers here I pay the workers the same so that's the same he said I'm using Chinese equipment and Factory the Machinery is all new it comes from China it's the same machinery they're using and I get my raw materials here in Nigeria because it's oil that's what you make Plastics out of and I have a distribution system all around Nigeria and the neighboring countries so I'm exporting I'm servicing markets across the country he said why wouldn't I be competitive it's not that hard and so I thought well that's that's interesting we don't have that many more examples I did speak to other people in that area of Nigeria who were partnering with Chinese uh joint venture partners and these were all private sector kinds of things no no government involvement but it um at the very least it sheds some light on the possibilities for the future and these are things that are still unraveling many of the factories I looked at were being constructed now so they hadn't even gone into production yet and others were were up and running finally there's governance and many argue that with China Rising and uh accelerating its involvement in Africa that progress in human rights and democracy and good governance in Africa will be reversed um but I predict that the impact of Chinese engagement is likely to be more marginal than most people believe and why do I say that for three reasons first of all there's no evidence that China is particularly more comfortable with authoritarian or repressive governments um or seeks them out their engagement across Africa is spread across all of the places where they think they can make money and this is in uh some of Africa's best governed countries South Africa maius batswana are all all big sites for Chinese interest um financing of infrastructure uh investment in the case of Marias and then and South Africa surely and so they're they're also interested in badly governed countries they're making money in those as well and I'll get back to that which is a second point that China is not static they've really learned a lot um after the blowback on the darur issue in Sudan this tragic Rebellion that continues to unfold in Sudan and Zimbabwe's um wretched government of Robert mugabi they've got blowback on both of these issues and they changed and you can see this quite clearly in the case of Sudan uh the Chinese role has changed a lot uh part of this was due to the uh all of the advocacy around the Olympics I think that played a really constructive role although the Chinese are not happy with it at all but it got them moving and it got them to reconsider what non-interference and internal affairs I might actually mean um and so we can see the Chinese pushing uh carum to accept the joint un um African Union peacekeeping force that finally they agreed to um establish in darur and you have President Bush's special Envoy for darur um Andrew naos and President Obama's special Envoy for darur Scott gracian both saying that China's now part of the solution and applauding them for their ability to get cartoom uh to come to the peac making table and um I was really surprised when I was in Egypt I spoke to a lot of Africans there because uh most countries in Africa sent delegations to the Chinese um The Forum on China Africa cooperation in uh November last year and uh several people said to me why didn't the Chinese support the African Union on C on the uh international criminal court case against basher and what had happened was that um the Chinese could have the the security Council of the UN had to allow this case to go to the international criminal court and the Chinese could have vetoed that and they didn't and so the these people um were saying the African Union position on this was that we do not want bashier to go to the international criminal court and the Chinese should have supported us but they didn't and so I think this is another example of how the position is a lot U more nuanced than is presented usually and in my research in babwe I found that the Chinese were deeply frustrated with mugabi and the failure of their economic engagement there and according to all independent sources they had actually put very little money into the country the economic office in Zimbabwe at the Chinese Embassy spent a lot of time running to the Zimbabwe Ministry of Finance they were trying to drum up payments for contracted work that Chinese companies had done five six seven years ago and hadn't yet been repaid and if you look at the sinosure website which is the um expert Credit Insurance Company in Beijing uh Zimbabwe the bad loans to Zimbabwe are one of their um chunks uh in their annual report that they have to say we're we're now paying for these bad loans that the zimbabweans are not repaying one Chinese company tried for six years to finalize a contract um at the hangi um to do a power plant at the hangi coal area and last week uh Zimbabwe's Minister of Finance tendi BT was in Washington um he's a member of the opposition the MDC and I asked him about Chinese support for mugabi and he said before and after the inclusive government Chinese economic engagement was very minimal he also commented that press reports of huge new Chinese deals in Zimbabwe were all fiction and it seems to me that mugabi is a bit like The Wizard of Oz you know he's behind this curtain and he saying Great and Powerful and I have uh spoken and I'm looking East and uh I've got this extensive support from Beijing but in reality if you pull the curtain aside you see he doesn't have this support so on governance issues um I think it's very clear that Chinese companies um are prone to give Kickbacks they don't have a good reputation as far as corruption goes um and in authoritarian resourcer countries like Chad or Congo brazaville Equatorial Guinea where many Western companies are also operating they're going to do all the same things that Western companies have been been documented for doing all the things that uh were the reason why we have things like the extractive industries transparency initiative the publish what you pay campaign and other things to try to get Western companies to become more transparent and and which they've been resisting as well they're going to disrespect the environment and their labor standards and safety standards on their Investments are going to be far worse than those that we find from um companies from the west but um they actually employ a lot more locals than um most people believe and in in bad conditions which most people also believe and I agree with that but my third point on governance is that the large Chinese loans that I've been telling you about are less likely to be embezzled than loans that come from Western Banks or even than the policy loans from the World Bank or the structural adjustment or the E esaf funds they're called now from the IMF now why do I say that I say that because these resource backed infrastructure loans that um I started out telling you about while not foreign aid they actually provide an agency of restraint they work like this they um they're backed by the resource and um the funds from the resource go into an escrow account and then they repay the infrastructure Investments that happen first so the the infrastructure gets built um say $2 billion worth was the initial tranch in Angola and another $2 billion and then $500 million the infrastructure gets built um and this is infrastructure not just for doing mining or oil or something like that but it's schools it's Polytechnic institutes it's hospitals it's railroads uh it's repaving roads it's rebuilding Bridges it's setting up irrigation systems it's doing Water Systems there's a huge number of projects in Angola they're all listed on the ministry of finances website uh that's all in Portuguese but you can read that um if you want to see what exactly they're doing as I did so the money never comes into the country the African country it stays in Beijing and it's used uh to pay the Chinese companies to do this work now it's tied uh and that's not probably a good thing are the countries getting value for money on these projects that's a risk uh is there there's no International competitive tenders that's a problem they probably cost more we don't know but it's quite possible and um and there are other possible risks as well Kickbacks I mentioned earlier but as one African official said to me with China you never see that money and so these uh ideas that we have of large sums of cash going into African governments that they can then draw on and without any accountability are are not the case actually so in the west uh we've been importing oil from Angola for a long time and we we haven't been giving much Aid to Angola because um it was a a government that we didn't really care much much for um the mpla we were supporting in the United States we supported Unita uh which was fighting against the mpla and so but we continued to import oil it was an interesting relationship we had Western companies pumping the oil in Angola and we imported it and then we paid the government that we were also helping the oppos the rebels that were fighting against the government so that we paid for the oil and it went back into Angola and there was no it wasn't tied to anything uh it it got used to fight the war it went off to Swiss bank accounts who knows what happened to it but at least with the Chinese this this um locking some of these natural resource exports into infrastructure upfront guarantees that you can overcome even in a small and modest way some of the natural resource curse that many of these small resource or large resourcer countries are subject to so I'm going to conclude now but I want to say three things in conclusion Chinese Aid and engagement in Africa is very different from ours in the west and it's different for three reasons first of all China's core ideas about development are different than ours are um they are far less prescriptive than we are we in the west think we know what Africa needs to do to develop um but many of our ideas and our our of certainties change every few years the Chinese are much more simple about this at home they say to get rich build a road they say agriculture is the foundation industry is the Leading Edge and so that's what they go into in their aid they go into infrastructure roads they go into Agriculture and they've been fostering manufacturing and these are things that African governments and African people have been interested in getting um second China's experience as recipient of Aid and Loans particularly from Japan influenced the they're thinking about how countries should give Aid and how they can use Aid and other forms of economic engagement for Mutual benefit and they don't see this as problematic uh that it should be about Mutual benefit they're very upfront about it and we tend to hide it um there used to be on the usaid website there used to be information about how much of every dollar from American Aid came back to America and how much we were building up countries to Foster American exports that's been removed now but uh people used to attack usid and they've learned that they can't talk about Aid like that but that is uh how Aid is is often thought of on the hill in Washington and finally China is becoming an East Asian developmental State like Japan like Korea like Taiwan and we know what this looks like State intervention to promote economic Prosperity mostly at home but we just haven't seen a country working like this in Africa uh on this scale so the book is a window into a changing world it's a topic that I think has a lot of importance for Africa and the fact that so many people are are here suggest that you might agree and for those who care about development and we can see China's rise as a threat and in many ways there are a lot of things associated with it that that are threatening there's more competition for African Industries um there's less regard for the environment lower social standards safety standards on Chinese companies and it's neutral at best for governance it isn't doing anything to make governance improve at least not in the short term or we can see it as an opportunity um African countries are getting the infrastructure that they need need so badly um they're getting investment in manufacturing which we're not doing um and uh business engagement across the the continent but first and most importantly we do need to understand it better it's time to revise and move beyond the conventional wisdom and this will help us to engage more effectively with the Chinese in the west and I hope with Africans as well that's why I wrote the book and I hope you'll read it thank [Applause] you so I I guess um I'm Fielding the questions which is is fine with me yes knowing that US policies with antagonized China why did we sell arms to Taiwan and why are we inviting the L here to do this well that's um not quite on topic but I'll answer it anyway um because we have a a strong um belief that uh our our core interests are not only served by doing what China feels are in its core interests um we have when we switched relations from Tai Bay which we had until the end of 1978 we recognized Taiwan as China um and switched it over to Beijing um we sign we developed legislation on the hill uh the Taiwan Relations Act and in that act we guaranteed taiwan's defense and so that we would continue to supply arms to them and so it's required by our legislation that we Supply them with arms and that has never changed so uh we're actually legally required to contribute to their defense and I think the policy of the government has always been in support of that because um I think our government wants a peaceful solution to the Taiwan the Civil War which is still ongoing they want peaceful reunification but the time is not yet ripe for that um and I think that the government in Taiwan also is not proposing Independence so they also want peaceful reunification at least that's the kmt the Guang policy on that now what about meeting with the do Lama well why shouldn't our leader meet with the do Lama the Dal Lama is is a spiritual leader uh he's a leader in Exile of of a large population and um I really I was disappointed actually that he didn't meet with the Dal Lama I can understand that um in Beijing they feel this is interference in China's Internal Affairs they feel this very strongly they they um really sanctioned the French for meeting with the Dal Lama when sarosi met with them so I can understand beijing's perspective on it also but we we have our interest in um supporting um human rights and supporting um someone who's been peaceful a peaceful um leader for that population and then Beijing has its interest in making sure that um Tibet remains part of China which I think most people uh agree that it is so I think meeting with a do I went to see the do Lama when he came to Washington so uh I think and that's the second time I've seen him I think he's an amazing person so I'm glad Obama's had a chance to meet him yes uh since I also work in China and Africa but only more country times in I have to agree like I agree with everything you say on this topic however I think there's one dimension which hasn't been touched on enough and that's the social impact of Chinese coming into Africa and I can tell a very short story last September when I was going to Kayo inam there was a fight between one Chinese and one African and S father father at the end the African much stood up and left but before he left he said why did you uh come here why did you leave China just come here and sell roasted penis so this is an issue that I've noticed a lot in Tanzania there a lot of poor Chinese who come into the country and there's a lot of anxiety so this is a shifting Paradigm in Tanzania since they haven't had any zobic attacks in the past and I hope there's not going to be any into the future so then the question is under what condition can the partnership between African country and China be beneficial for to the people that's a really good question I actually discussed this very U not the fight but I discussed the Chinese um Traders selling peanuts at karaku in the book and also they're allegedly selling flowers on the sidewalk although I a lot of them yeah I went to karaku when I was in Dar Salam and I didn't actually see any of that so I didn't see I was want I looked to find them selling flowers and so that day that I was in karoku they weren't but but I'm sure at other points they were because I saw a lot of Chinese traders in Kaku with their stalls they were all over and then pulling the carts the hand carts around koku is a a small Crow was large crowded Market in daras Salam um this is a really it's a good question it's fundamental I do address these issues in the book because this cultural Clash of this um rapid expansion of Chinese people in Africa is um it's a problem for the Chinese and and it's perceived as a problem I think in most African countries well what are are all these people doing here now we don't have good numbers on how many Chinese have gone to Africa we do know that uh in 2008 there were 140,000 Chinese workers officially in Africa um and and the number of Chinese workers was going to be beyond that because those are the number that are reported by the ministry of Commerce um and every country you go to it's it's a a phenomenon that's quite visible now in the streets now there are a couple ways to look at this um one on the one hand um Chinese Traders and African traders who are going to China to buy goods are getting lowcost Goods that are enabling a lot of Africans to purchase things that they never were able to purchase before and in terms of the quality of many of these lowcost Goods is not very high um but as someone said to me in Zambia they said you can go um to kamwala which is the karaku of Zambia the the a market and you can buy something there from a Chinese shop and it might break after a day or two but then you can go to game which is a big department store and you can buy something from China in game and it will actually last because it's a lot more expensive so they they recognize that that you have to pay more for better quality but in terms of the the ethnic um tensions between these the people there I predict that um they're going to increase and it's uh because there are there's going to be a continued expansion of chines in African Marcus and it's for all the same reasons that that you've described there are people who have come over as as workers and they're going to stay or they've been imported um by Chinese business networks through family connections to work for them and then they traditionally when they've saved up enough money they'll go and start their own little business and so sometimes saving up enough money is like when you're not working for your Chinese relative you're there on the sidewalk selling peanuts and you're saving money however you can to get your own business going going so that's a kind of cultural uh trait which is um is going to continue to find more and more Chinese there and I think it it helps to understand that there are Chinese diasporas all over the world and some of them are very old you have a Chinatown here in Chicago and of course we do in Washington New York and and all around the United States we have chinatowns from Chinese diasporas in the past and what happened in 1949 when the uh PRC was founded is that the borders were closed and Chinese State home and so there's this pent up um diaspora essentially that wasn't even able to come out for decades and decades and so in part what you're seeing is kind of an explosion of this and people are moving out at a much faster rate and they're coming to Africa where they hadn't come in great numbers in the past there's some exceptions but uh they hadn't come in great numbers in the past one last thing on that which is that if these Chinese citizens uh if they stay and if they found form their businesses what we found is that they very quickly move out of those low-level kinds of things so they move up they buy little shops they move into bigger shops and then they start um becoming the wholesalers and then selling to the retailers and they might be selling to African retailers or new Chinese retailers or both and some of the interesting research that's been done on this is a woman Nina Sylvanas who's uh just finished her PhD at UCA on in part on this and she's monitored Chinese traders in the textile industry I think it's in benine and uh she's shown how this has changed just over the past five years you've seen transition out to up to the higher levels of the um chain of command in the markets and I think that's a phenomenon we'll see as well yes might question what kind of langu the chese speaka well it depends how long they've been there when they first come um most people don't speak a local language they often will speak some English or pick up some French but once they're there for a little while then they learn the the local Colonial language usually or Swahili so um these peanut sellers in karoku are they're calling out in Swahili uh to get people to come and buy peanuts so it's um they pick up local languages and they they've I mean this is a broad generalization but uh it's it's clear that the the first companies that come and the first uh Chinese that arrive don't usually speak the local language and they have translators but then after a while they do learn the local languages is there support system there schools hospitals not very much um in some countries I believe actually in Tanzania they either have set up a Chinese school or they're setting up a Chinese school but interestingly um one of these special economic zones that um the Chinese are setting up in Africa is going to be in mishas it's already being constructed in Marias and this is going to be much more service-based than manufacturing and one of the things they want to do there is set up a Chinese boarding school so that uh people that have their families in in the mainland of Africa can send their kids to mishas for boarding school and then not have to send them all the way back to China there's also another interesting thing that I learned which is that Chinese that are working in Africa I think for a period of two years can have more than one child without penalty yes I'm interested in your take on China in Ethiopia which is my speci what I can attest is that for a variety of reasons they arous a great deal of negative response in Feld they have Lees of land pushing side indigenous part and they have quite a few of them have operated businesses violation eans generally are sensitive about interventions and they have term finge which which is portive which they use years uh der from France and now instead of calling for ring they now say China China well quite a few people said that to for example to you to non-chinese to non Chinese to um else they have been accused of going to Market it's early in the morning buying up food and shipping it to to [Music] China I don't know how that is I doubt that I I rather doubt too but but what I'm talking about is a growing sense of discomfort and let me mention one or two more one is the uh is under a very impressivee right now and uh so I interested those are interesting observations I haven't been to Ethiopia so what I know about Ethiopia is is based just on digging into various stories um my research assistant went to Ethiopia for me and we looked into some of these um stories we we particularly were looking at the special economic zone which is being set up in in Ethiopia so that's um and there are manufacturing Ventures that Chinese companies are doing they're actually quite interested in in Ethiopia I'm not exactly sure why because the foreign exchange regime is quite problematic there but um Ethiopia is the one case where I've also heard rumors about these land grabs and I haven't been able to track down the realities of that so that's uh I would if you have evidence about that I would just love to have that because um I haven't been able to find it and I have heard stories about it as well so in terms of the Chinese are very engaged in the construction industry in Ethiopia they've also got a huge um telecommunications project there uh the Millennium telecommunications project is 1.5 billon million dollar and um and then the infrastructure projects are there's a line of credit for at least $500 million and and probably more there so there's a lot of Engagement in Ethiopia um it's along the lines again because I haven't been there I can't speak personally about this but I could understand um in many countries people are very um they're unhappy with Chinese business practices because as I mentioned they aren't uh at the standard that people come to expect from foreign investors in many instances they're U more similar to some of the local business practices and in many instances they can be worse um safety standards as I said and uh Labor Relations have been problematic across the continent what I would like to report is and this is quite Firm support that Chinese have install uh you know state of the um internet email from surveillance and that is widely understood to be Chinese and scary I will now second thing that is widely disapproved now and I'm surprised that uh over the years the roads have been fantastic but now I hear that the quality of the road construction is so poor the taxi drivers now generally curse the Chinese because they've been building roads that crumble after a year I don't know that's that's that's pretty um okay on those two points um that's interesting they say same thing in Zimbabwe about the internet monitoring equipment and I'm quite it's quite possible I mean I would they have it in China so it would probably be something they'd be willing to export if a government wanted it so I find that that quite plausible I have no evidence about it either but I do know people also make that case in Zimbabwe um in terms of the road quality you know these anecdotes that one hears um I've also heard anecdotes about Road quality being poor um and I've also heard anecdotes about Road quality being good so it's really hard to have any systematic um picture of this I know that um since Chinese companies are winning these contracts I would expect that they would have a track record and if Road quality was deteriorated after one year in the projects they had done in the past then they wouldn't most likely and under a um competitive bidding situation they wouldn't be getting contracts again certainly not with intern ational donors who would look at that track record so I imagine there are um mechanisms to uh weed out the poor quality and and um tend to expand the better quality construction firms and I know the Chinese government is very concerned about the quality of the construction particularly if it's an aid project because this reflects um Aid is done for political reasons and so it reflects badly on the political relationship and so they they would particularly want that quality to be high if it's an aid-funded project and they would be able to make sure that that happens most likely other kinds of funding they may not have the mechanisms to control that let's see someone on this side yes you talked about the years and pent up theas for repression because of the policies of PRC but of course during that period there were a lot of Chinese going to Africa from Hong Kong Taiwan had big development projects of its own supported by the usst and I assume also people from Singapore uh now that there's openness of V what is the relationship between the non PRC even the pre Union Hong Kong he as say in Marias and people coming from the PRC and particularly people spons by government that's interesting in some countries um as in maius there were two Chinese business associations um throughout the post 1949 period there was the The Business Association that supported one and the Business Association that supported the PRC so um and they you know they didn't get together very often today it's interesting because I actually have a sub project on Chinese business associations in Africa and so I did a lot of interviews on that and I found that the um Chinese have set up business associations in most of the in all the countries that I went to and I think most countries in in Africa this has been supported by the ministry of Commerce and what the business associations are supposed to do is to try to help socialize the Chinese businesses um to get them to improve their labor standards to get them to understand what the local laws are and to obey the local laws so that's what the business associations are supposed to do with their members but they can't require that all the Chinese companies join them or or or follow those laws and um in those business associations you find Chinese who come from Taiwan who come from other parts of the diaspora and um Chinese from the PRC so it's interesting that they tend to to find that they they have reasons to come together so that's about all I can say on that but I think it it is interesting and one more thing which is that there because Taiwan doesn't have diplomatic relations in but four countries in in Africa they have only in four countries um Chinese ambassadors have said that they are and ministries of Commerce have said that they are there to support Chinese in whether they're from the mainland or from Hong Kong or from Taiwan they're that's what they've said I don't know how much they actually go out of their way to help businesses from Taiwan politically it would be a good move to do that but um that's their sort of official position on it can I ask you when you analyze Chinese U trade policies in Africa or around the world what does it tell you about what the leadership the highest leadership of the Communist Party People's Republic of China what are their local Ambitions what does it tell you about what the point of all this is Martin Jack Martin Jack China rules the world um no no no I'm just thinking of that because uh he gave a talk at UCLA when I just a few weeks before me no it was at University of Southern California so everybody was like Martin Jack were it's it sounds like jacqu but I was told that he pronounces it Jack um there this is a book China rules the world that that's what I was referring to and he has a theory in there about what China's Ambitions are that's I was thinking when you made answer that question I don't know what the the Communist party's ultimate Ambitions are I can only say what they have uh what the state Council and then um ndrc the national uh development and Reform Commission China's sort of what's left of the planning um Ministries what they have said about their engagement in Africa um and worldwide in general that they want to promote a peaceful prosperous world so that they can basically do business and develop at home so that the more they can do that they can trade they can get people to buy their goods the more that they can invest overseas they have a whole policy called um that's been accelerated in the last decade called uh going global or walking out and that's about getting Chinese companies to become big multinationals to it's really following in the footsteps of Japan so if we if we look at Japan in the 1970s and 80s I think we can learn a lot about what China's doing today um in terms of their their Global Ambitions why why is CH I'm not sure did you get another question well it's a very brief okay why is it that China in the four the fall you you made the comment or the the U analogy about the Japanese movie her's movie about Russian which you have an event and you look at it from different points of view and from everybody's point of view it all looks it can all be interpreted in a different way but when the jei I believe that's their name in therefore go into Villages and rape and pillage and murder you could have a thousand C you could have four Camp it all looks the same there's only one interpretation of what's happened the Chinese are quite aware being there their diplomats are there their trade representatives are there I'm sure they have people who are sending them correspondence to the highest levels of the Chinese government about what has urage day after day month after month year after year and yet only only when there's blowback when there's bad publicity do they do anything about I think um in order to understand this one way to look at it is to say that they're just out there for their cold self-interest and they will resist anything that gets in the way of money or profit and that's one interpretation another way of looking at it would be that they have this very longstanding foreign policy principle which is not too interfere in the internal affairs of other countries and this is as I say in the book this is very convenient for Chinese businesses to have this kind of foreign policy as well and I also would just because you said this would be a short question I would raise the the um counterfactual what would the a world look like in which the Chinese government regularly did intervene in the internal affairs of other countries we know a little bit because our government does this regularly you know we actually invade other countries and it's um you know I'm given two choices about how to act in the world I certainly wish they were far more um uh Advocates of good governance and democracy I would like to see that um I don't think I don't think we are going to see that though yeah can I just take another question let me see in the back there yeah there's a big debate um about the rle for a and development in African comment on the China model versus West government going forign a gr versus China Investing in business and which you think is more effective or C benici I think the jury still out on the Chinese route all we can do again we can look at how Japan engaged um with this same model and they engaged in China and across southeast Asia and I think there's a lot of evidence that this thing about promoting Japanese business and infrastructure contracts and Japanese investment and tying Aid to all of that was actually beneficial for Southeast Asia after all we had an economic miracle in that part of the world um so we don't yet have evidence enough to know how China's this is very recent um how it's going to work on their part what we know about aid from the West in Africa is that it has African many African countries are poorer now than or or as poor as they were at Independence and others are not but um and they've been getting a all of that time so that's not to say that it's it's a you know a direct relationship but it hasn't been a relationship that's really raised Africa out of poverty and that's huge you know these are many many you can do you can spend your lifetime working on this topic um and not get the answers as to why that is the case but I don't think that Aid has they certainly haven't cracked the nut about how to develop Africa we haven't figured out how to do that in the west let me uh turn over to this side in the back the ago agreement is a trade agreement that we have it's a one of preferences for African countries um and they are allowed to bring uh manufactured goods and a lot of other Goods into the United States without Duty so dutyfree and um what this did was it's created incentives for investment in Africa United States companies didn't do much to invest in manufacturing it was disappointing from that perspective but there were Asian companies and some of them from China but more of them from Hong Kong Taiwan um even Malaysia have come to Africa to take advantage of these preferences and then exporting out and so what this does is it creates um what are in many instances temporary jobs it does create jobs um in industries that are very mobile and so um you find that they become fragile so these are not really sustainable robust um industrial sectors in the textile industry agoa is based on conditionalities and so if a country doesn't um meet certain kinds of requirements they can have their agoa preferences removed uh for example if a country has a coup um as they did in M Madagascar and I think this one of the difficulties of our good intentions what happened in Madagascar was there was a coup and the government was overthrown and so we removed the trade preferences that Madagascar had had and they had uh factories there that were exporting to America and there were something like 100,000 people working in those factories and they were immediately put out of work or at least this is what I've read on Bill easterly's website um Aid watch in which he criticized this so I haven't looked into this myself to find out that it's true but I think bil e is probably pretty reliable on that so it's it's an unfortunate side effect of our of our commitment to better governance that it has this result for all of these workers who lost their jobs as a result of that one question yes I just have a question about the you're talking about and may question I'm just wondering why companies like you know I wondered this myself and I've tried to find this out I haven't been able to find out um I suspect that it may have something to do there uh ZTE has a lot of um Telecom ation projects in the DRC and so this could be a kind of a security or a a financing mechanism a swap of some kind in order to secure um these loans or these Investments um ZTE the telecommunications company that has this 100,000 hectares in the DRC to grow oil palm which they aren't yet doing but they have it's been allocated to them and he ask why why are they doing that and I don't know either but I think certainly an interesting thing for someone to do research on this coming summer all right so who's gosh I can answer some questions afterwards so in the back have you come across instances where conflict is there conflict developed between neighboring countries when the Chinese are putting their infrastructur in place uh especially at Water where a river is going and we have to do something we use it for industry and the neighboring country is not a part of this I actually haven't seen anything like that that was quick sorry okay well thank you je the world beyond the headlines lecture series is a collaborative project of the University of Chicago center for international studies and the International House Global voices program the world beyond the headlines series aims to bring Scholars and journalists together to consider international news stories and how these stories are covered as a listener you've come to rely on this program for in-depth analysis of major issues facing our country and our world but we can only continue our nationally recognized coverage with support from you secure the future of world beyond the headlines programming by making your gift online at alumni services. chicago.edu SLG giving please specify World beyond the headlines as the area of giving the world beyond the headlines series is supported by the McCormack Foundation the Norman weight Harris fund and from generous contributions from listeners like you

Channel: CISSR at The University of Chicago

Views: 59,223

Keywords: Deborah Brautigam, China in Africa, The Dragon's Gift, World Beyond the Headlines, Center for East Asian Studies, CIS, Center for International Studies, UChicago, University of Chicago, Africa--China Relations, Africa (Continent)

Id: JNx5DvTIbQE

Length: 80min 41sec (4841 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 18 2013