The Geopolitics of China—Africa Engagement

Abstract

Few aspects of China’s recent (re)engagement with Africa have attracted as much attention in recent years as what some observers refer to as China’s ‘oil diplomacy’. Many commentators have highlighted how China has used notionally unconditional aid, low-interest loans and technical cooperation agreements to cement bilateral deals over oil supply, engineering contracts and trade agreements. Beijing is then said to be using the central pillars of its foreign policy, notably unconditional respect for state sovereignty and its corollary, non-interference, in the pursuit of its interests, be they energy security, multipolarity or the ‘One China’ principle (Tull 2006). Some have even gone further in suggesting that to achieve these goals, Beijing ‘is prepared to defend autocratic regimes that commit human rights abuses and forestall democratic reforms for narrow ends of regime survival’ (Tull 2006: 476). Others have suggested that to quench its oil thirst, China will resort to any means to extract all available oil and gas resources, thereby destabilizing the regional and even global order. This assertion has been a regular feature of some of the popular geopolitical discourses mentioned in the introduction to this book. It is also quite closely related to the ‘rogue aid’ discourses and the notion that China is underwriting a world that is ‘more corrupt, chaotic and authoritarian’ (Naírn 2007: 95).