#Focac: Johannesburg - This week’s summit of the Forum for China-Africa Co-operation (Focac) in Sandton will be a milestone on which to build on past achievements and herald the future of China-Africa relations, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi says.
And there are signs that this sixth meeting of the 15-year-old Focac – and the first at summit level in Africa – will mark a qualitative shift in relations between the People’s Republic of China and Africa.
Focac has been the institutional vehicle of those relations, politically, economically, culturally and otherwise.
As Wang pointed out at the Lanting Forum in Joburg last week, trade between Africa and China topped $220 billion (R3 trillion) last year – 22 times higher than where it stood in 2000, when Focac was launched. China accounted for 20.5 percent of Africa’s foreign trade, up from 3.82 percent in 2000. China’s investment stock in Africa now exceeds 230bn – 60 times more than it was in 2000.
There are more than 3 000 Chinese enterprises doing business in Africa, Wang said. Last year, more than 3.6 million mutual visits were made between China and Africa.
Of course, much of that trade and investment would have happened even without Focac. The first 15 years of Focac coincided with an immense surge in Chinese imports of African commodities to fuel its gigantic manufacturing machine. That helped boost African economic growth to an average of about 5 percent a year in the 21st century.
But perhaps the closer relationship with China forged through Focac persuaded China to buy African rather than other commodities.
Focac has also played an important role in channelling the demands of the African side about the need for China to help change the unbalanced economic relationship.
That had been – and largely remains – one where China mainly imports vast quantities of African commodities and exports vast quantities of manufactured goods to Africa.
That has created large trade surpluses for China with most African countries. It has also prompted some criticism that China’s economic relations with Africa were exploitative and neo-colonial – in fact even more so than Africa’s relations with its former colonial masters, which now often include a greater proportion of value-added exports compared to Africa’s exports to China.
As Ghulam Asmal, the director of New Partnership for Africa’s Development and international partnerships in the Department of International Relations and Co-operation, said at a recent briefing on Focac: “The most challenging aspect of the relationship for Africa was to convince our Chinese partners to create more industrial capacity on the continent, to have more beneficiation, and to make this a development relationship rather than one which is extractive of natural resources.”
Asmal acknowledged that the relationship had been beneficial to African economies. As Wang said, China had built or was building 5 675km of railway and 4 507km of roads in Africa. It had erected more than 200 schools and provided more than 7 000 government scholarships to Africans.
Added to that, Asmal said there had been some Chinese investment in beneficiation, particularly in Ethiopia. But more needed to be done.
Chris Alden and Yu-shan Wu of the South African Institute of International Affairs noted, in an article in The Star last year, that the joint agreement between the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) and China’s Hebei Iron and Steel Group to open a steel mill in Phalaborwa was an important sign of a possible shift in the nature of commerce between South Africa and China.
This project would boost manufacture and create jobs in South Africa instead of just exporting raw iron ore.
Wang’s speech to the Lanting Forum indicated that the first Focac summit would mark a significant shift towards the more balanced and equal economic relationship.
Asmal said: “Through major co-operation schemes in industrial and production capacity relocation, infrastructure development, human resources development, investment and trade facilitation, green development, financial services as well as peace and security, we will upgrade our practical co-operation, with the focus shifting from general trade to production capacity co-operation, from project contracting to investment-based operation, and from government assistance to independent development so as to achieve common development and prosperity.”
Wang said China’s shift in focus would address Africa’s two most urgent tasks: accelerating industrialisation and agricultural modernisation.
“We will support Africa to remove two major bottlenecks, namely backward infrastructure and inadequate professional and skilled personnel.
“We will focus on helping African countries build three major systems of industrialisation, food security, as well as public health and disease prevention and control, to resolve three major issues of employment, food supply and health of the African people,” said Wang.
Official sources are saying President Xi Jinping will this week announce a substantial amount of new Chinese investment in Africa and other assistance to the continent.
To those who might be alarmed at the slowdown of the Chinese economy, Wang gave the assurance that China expected to import goods worth more than $10 trillion, invest more than $500bn overseas and see more than 500 million Chinese tourists travel abroad over the next five years.
Through Focac, Africa has persuaded China – traditionally very non-interventionist – to increase its contribution to African peacekeeping efforts. - African News Agency
THE STAR