Friends and Interests: China's Distinctive Links with Africa

The "Beijing Consensus" as a Competing Framework

While there actually is no clear "consensus" on the exact components of the "Beijing Consensus" (Leonard 2006), the phrase was coined by Joshua Ramo, a former Time magazine foreign affairs editor and Goldman Sachs China advisor, now managing director of Kissinger Associates. The term describes PRC investments, aid, and trade that are carried on without oversight by Western states and international institutions. While the WC/PWC paradigm has more than a two-decade history in Africa (Sandbrook 2005), the BC is now seen as competing with WC/PWC instruments that were set up by the E.U., U.S. and South Africa around the year 2000.16

The Cotonou Agreement of 2000, the E.U. framework established with seventy-seven African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) states, is based on free trade (including WTO compliance and subcontinental regionalism), private enterprise, export production, FDI, austerity measures, and conditioned aid. It gives a leading role to the European Commission and individual political, rather than group and socioeconomic, rights. Poverty reduction is seen as a by-product of trade and capital liberalization and FDI secured by compliant labor. Quintennial conferences serve to renegotiate the E.U.-ACP relationship, which also includes bilateral and regional freetrade Economic Partnership Agreements. According to many, these pacts, like those negotiated by the United States, have the effect of weakening solidarity among developing states in the WTO (Nunn 8c Price 2004; Hurt 2003; Bensah 2003).

The U.S. African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) of 2000 provides that states may receive trade preferences if they marketize, liberalize, privatize, desubsidize, deregulate, and do not undermine U.S. foreign policy interests. Some thirty-seven African countries, many of them authoritarian, have been declared eligible. U.S. and African ministers meet every two years in an AGO A Forum. AGO A trade concessions exceed the U.S. General System of Preferences only slightly, in part because oil and minerals make up more than 80 percent of the value of African exports to the U.S. Only a few countries have gained under AGO A, mainly by exporting agricultural products, such as cut flowers, that are not plentiful in the U.S. Most other African products remain barred by competition from subsidized U.S. agriculture and nontariff health and safety barriers, even though Asian firms produce many of the goods entering the U.S. from Africa. AGO A is also a platform for FTAs between the U.S. and African regional entities (UNCTAD 2003:1-2; Rice 2004; Melber 2005; Lall 2005). Its appeal for African rulers lies not so much in the benefits that it offers directly, as in closer political ties to the U.S., which result in aid, including military training useful in quelling opposition (Hallinan 2006).

Since 2001, neoliberal principles also have been embodied in the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD). Based on the idea that integration into the world market is the single antidote to poverty, NEPAD has been endorsed by the African Union and is backed by businesses in South Africa and around the world. China, in fact, voices support for NEPAD and says it implements its principles through FOCAC (Liu 2004). But there is no doubt that NEPAD is mostly identified with Western interests. U.S. firms in Africa act as a link between AGOA and NEPAD (Hayes 2002), and E.U. endorsements of NEPAD link it to the Cotonou Agreement (Lake 2003). U.S. leaders praise NEPAD as "extend[ing] democracy and free markets and transparency across the continent" (USWH 2003), while critics compare it to IMF/World Bank SAPs (Lesufi 2004; Adesina 2004, 2006; Bond 2005), claiming that its self-representation as "by Africans for Africans" masks the degree to which it is another mechanism for implementing developed countries' WC/PWC frameworks. In the global South there is a sense of grievance against the policies of neoliberalism embodied in the E.U., U.S. and NEPAD mechanisms, which are seen as promoting an aggravated form of worldwide unequal exchange. At the 2000 FOCAC opening ceremony, Zambia's president stated that developed countries