A Little Great-Power Competition Is Healthy for Africa
U.S.-China competition could benefit Africa by forcing each side to offer what it thinks it is best at.
By Howard W. French, a columnist at Foreign Policy.
From Algeria to Zimbabwe and countries in between, a weekly roundup of essential news and analysis from Africa.
AUGUST 10, 2022, 4:15 PM
During the Obama administration, when the United States belatedly began to stir itself over the issue of China’s by then already long-standing economic engagement with Africa, one of the most common warnings from Washington was that Beijing might seek to export its political model to the continent.
As then-U.S. secretary of state, Hillary Clinton admonished African leaders to beware of what they were getting themselves into, saying they had more to learn from the West and criticizing China for supposedly encouraging its new partners to eschew what is often fancied as Western-style democracy and adopt Beijing’s authoritarian methods of rule instead, especially through control of information and the internet.
Back then, China was highly sensitive to this kind of criticism and went to great lengths to deny that it was doing anything of the sort. Its official stance in engaging with the developing world, endlessly proclaimed as its unique virtue, was that contrary to the West, Beijing regarded the domestic politics of other countries as purely internal matters. In an interview I had during a visit to Zambia a decade ago, the Chinese ambassador to that country expressed pity for his U.S. counterpart for supposedly having little more than support for the training of election workers to boast of, whereas seemingly everywhere one looked, China was building tangible things.
This prompted me to ask one of those unplanned questions that during interviews can sometimes be the most productive: Instead of sticking to its ritualized and not always believable statements of noninterference, why didn’t China move beyond an approach to Africa heavily focused on infrastructure-building and begin offering other kinds of help, namely in improving its partners’ capacity for governance?
I couldn’t get the ambassador very far beyond his talking points, but he responded by saying that given existing anxieties about China’s rapid rise, any expansion of its engagement into a more openly political realm would arouse unwanted fears in many quarters. Looking back, I also suspect the diplomat was unprepared for the possibility, real in this case, that this question from a Western journalist was coming from a place of sincerity.
For me, there is no contradiction between a strong personal preference for democratic politics over their authoritarian alternatives and wishing to see China expand the range of its engagement with Africa. Having recently lived and worked as a journalist in China for six years, it was clear to me that China’s system had a considerable degree of proven bureaucratic competence, meaning an ability to conceive of and execute policies with a level of vigor and discipline far beyond the performance of most African states. It was also clear to me that for all its talk of capacity-building, the world of Western development assistance to the continent had a very mixed record of delivering impactful results.
A lot has transpired since that conversation in Lusaka, Zambia’s capital, and now in its own—at least initially—limited way, China has begun to step out of its own self-imposed box. It recently opened a political party school in Tanzania under the auspices of the Communist Party’s International Liaison Department that will train politicians from friendly African ruling parties in matters of governance, development, and ideology. And although this isn’t exactly what was envisioned by my decade-old question, I regard it as a positive development on this basis: If China and the West are going to compete in the so-called developing world, let their competition be an open one of ideas involving the entire range of what each side believes it has to offer.
I am not proposing that African countries constitute pro-Western and Eastern blocs, form exclusive alliances, or least of all engage in militarization and drift into conflict along these lines. The Cold War was most costly not for its leading protagonists, whose waste could be mostly measured in squandered dollars and rubles, but for countries in the so-called Third World, where the proxy wars the superpowers sponsored not only wreaked economic devastation and bolstered corrupt autocracies on both sides but also cost untold millions of lives.
Today, more open and direct competition between China and the West in an area of great need in Africa—governance—need not lead to any such outcomes. For starters, it might force the West into a position of greater and long overdue humility in its engagements with Africa, beginning with a recognition that the money it has lavished for years under the vague heading of “capacity-building” has been a boondoggle for nongovernmental organizations, nonprofits, and consultants in Washington and European capitals.
