In January 2023, the secretary of the treasury of the United States, Janet Yellen, visited Senegal, South Africa and Zambia during a 10-day visit to the African continent.
The trip is in connection with the US-Africa Leaders Summit which is being held from December 13 to 15, 2022 in Washington, DC. Delegates from 49 invited African countries and the African Union, together with members of civil society and the private sector, attended the summit.
One thing Yellen can’t say is China’s role in Africa’s economy. It was visited when he visited Zambia, a country with a history, if you check, of relations with China.
It is in Zambia, perhaps more than in any other country on the African continent, that China’s presence in Africa is a topic of discussion. Zambia’s enormous external debt, with a large part of it from China, has become the narrative of the debt trap. Yellen described China as an obstacle to Zambia’s debt situation – which “has taken too long to resolve”.
Is diplomacy a debt trap? What are the motives and implications of Western (read American) interest in debt trap diplomacy? What is the justification for China’s debt in Africa?
In January 2017, Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research came up with the idea of debt trap diplomacy. He said that through the $1 trillion ‘one belt, one road’ initiative, China strategically supports infrastructure projects in developing countries, often by providing large loans to their governments. As a result, countries are ensnared in a debt trap that leads to China’s influence.
Acknowledging that paying off debt for infrastructure is not bad, but Chellaney said that “projects supported by China are often intended not to support the local economy, but to facilitate China’s access to natural resources, or to open markets at low cost and poor export goods” .
Six years after Chellaney pioneered the Project Syndicate, the narrative of debt trap diplomacy has taken on a life of its own and has its strongest supporters in the US. Institutions such as the International Republican Institute have dedicated entire reports to warning developing countries of China’s “malign influence”. The implication is that, through the debt trap, developing countries will not only be colonized by China but will also import some of China’s traits that the West considers bad. The above is the pith of what has come to be known as debt trap diplomacy. It has gathered so much momentum, it has been discussed so extensively that many people don’t even know who Brahma Chellaney is.
What then are the motives and implications of Western interest in debt trap diplomacy? His motive seems clear. Since the end of World War II, the US has enjoyed an unrivaled position at the pinnacle of the international system. This is in many areas such as economy, military, security, knowledge production and technology. The Soviet Union could not compete in that matter, except for some ideological adherence to the developing countries and China. Thus, in many indices of international dominance, the Soviet Union did not come close to rivaling the US.
China, on the other hand, presents a greater challenge. Its economy has grown at a rate of 10% for three decades until the early 2010s. Still in terms of the economy, the US and China are very much married, with trade between them of $ 690.6 billion in 2022. This impressive amount appears on the back of the broken relationship between the most important global economies, characterized by a trade war that began in 2018 .
Since coming to power, Xi Jinping has made pronouncements about bolstering China’s military profile and raising an army that can not only fight, but win, war. This will come as a huge relief after the United States shot down a Chinese balloon flying over the US, claiming it was being used for spying. Unsurprisingly, Beijing denied the allegations.
In terms of technology, Chinese leviathans such as Huawei are making headway in developing countries, with Africa being a strategic one. The continent is teeming with young people who are passionate about technology. Only 3% of Africans are over 65. Thus, US President Joe Biden is right when he says that Africa will shape not only the future of Africans, but also the world and “Africa’s success is the world’s success”. The World Economic Forum asserts that “Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region that will continue to grow at the end of the century”.
Thus, any country with plans to speak in the 21st century and beyond must master and export technology – with Africa as the partner of choice. As a country that until now has enjoyed dominance in this regard, how can one expect the US to greet China that is elbowing its way in this important arena?
Most important to China’s rise, and to the US’s dismay, is China’s sheer force of numbers. With more than 1.4 billion people, China has a population larger than the entire African continent and has more than four times the population of the US.
This shows that even if the US does not stop at the terminal, it will be defeated by China in important aspects. How, once again, will we expect the US to estimate the reality of the impossibility? It appears that the US motive is to maintain America’s preeminence in world affairs by relentlessly campaigning to reduce China’s attractiveness. This is driven by many factors – one being what Henry Kissinger described as the “missionary” instinct in US foreign policy. It is an instinct that believes in the universality of American values.
China presents a variety of political and cultural values that seem to have a relativistic orientation. Therefore, there is concern that a growing China could turn developing countries into China’s orbit – whether forced to borrow heavily, as Chellaney says, or simply by an appreciation of China’s rise and how it can become an archetype for the country. which had the same situation as China before the take-off. The US motive, therefore, is to maintain its pole position in world affairs.
What, then, about the second part of the second question – the implications of Western warnings about debt trap diplomacy? Whether there is a Republican or Democratic administration in the US, keeping China out of global affairs seems immutable. Successive secretaries of state, from Hillary Clinton and Rex Tillerson to Antony Blinken have weighed in on what can be characterized as the baneful presence of China and its many influences in Africa.
Mike Pence, the former US vice president under Donald Trump, and William Barr, the attorney general under presidents George Bush and Trump, also made references to China’s alleged malevolence in developing countries. Yellen is just the latest in a long list of important Americans to immediately urge Africa to be wary of its relationship with China. There are undertones to this pontification that America seems oblivious. To provide a more complete context of why the US may be losing the argument, one must look at US-Africa relations from a historical perspective.
During the Cold War, Africa was only important to Western powers in the fight against the spread of socialism. To ensure this, the US is ready to humor apartheid South Africa and the rebel regime of Ian Smith in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) based only on the fact that they are capitalist systems. The same is true of support for the corrupt and repressive regime of Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and the Unita rebel movement in Angola. One cannot quantify the damage done to the African continent from subversive, immoral and, yes, racist choices.
Thus, while there may be merit in some American statements, the taint of history seems to color the African reception of these sentiments. Second, the indirect message that the US sends, and which generally draws a noncommittal response in Africa, is the implication that the continent, left alone, cannot decide with whom it has relations and on what terms. An apocryphal quote attributed to an unnamed Kenyan official sums up the way Africa engages with the West and China: “Every time China visits, we get a hospital; every time England visits, we get a lecture. England, in this sense, can be taken to represent public relations West with Africa.
The West, and the US in particular, has an opportunity for meaningful and respectful engagement with Africa and China. Treating Africa as a childlike player, without rational choice, will only drive Africa away from the West. If Africa is entangled in debt to China, who is responsible? Africa is not a passive party to international agreements and obligations. Zambia, the country from which Yellen made some of her comments, has shown great agency in its relations with China – almost bordering on outright xenophobia.
With its shortcomings, China’s surprising characteristic seems to be reticence about foreign policy announcements – it tends to be understood and recognized rather than to export its values or, to use Barr’s words, “to make the world safe for dictatorship”. When forced to choose between two potential partners – one bearing a tome of instruction and the other seeking a strictly-business approach – which African will be more comfortable with? Thus, even if there are some defensible aspects for the US danger, they are diluted by an attitude that ignores the assertiveness of Africa and the capacity to calculate what relations are beneficial for the continent.
Finally, what is the validity of the debt trap diplomacy claim? Deborah Brautigam, the Bernard L Schwartz professor of international political economy at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, and Meg Rithmire, who is the F Warren McFarlan professor at Harvard Business School, conclude that debt trap diplomacy is a “lie”. , and the powerful”.
The China Africa Research Initiative (CARI) at Johns Hopkins, of which Brautigam is the founding director, has been tracking China’s lending to Africa. The institute is an authority on the matter and its findings refute accusations of debt trap diplomacy. A report by CARI found that “between 2000 and 2019, China … canceled at least $3.4 billion in debt to Africa”. At the same time China has restructured or refinancing about $15 billion of debt in Africa. There are no asset seizures, and China is not using legal means to force repayment.
In the final analysis, this can be changed according to the amount of debt that some bankrupt African countries can contract and then fail to repay. But, as it happens, the US’s warning about the debt trap is seen as a protest against power, desperate to maintain its dominance. There are ways the West can avoid inadvertently pushing Africa into deeper ties with China. The first is to calculate and keep in mind the different types of debt that Africa owes to national and private players, and their terms.
The second is to take as given the fact that Africa has a tangible facility to calculate international relations and obligations and that sounds preachy most continents need.
Third, the West can try to explore opportunities for cooperation with China in Africa. Indeed, from cooperation can arise opportunities for positive influence. An inflexible attitude towards China could have negative effects on the West and its global presence. It’s the US choice.
Emmanuel Matambo is a researcher from the Center for Africa-China Studies (CACS), University of Johannesburg.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect official policy or position Mail & Guardians.