Chinese activists looking to Africa

China's natural resource grab carries "disturbing echoes of the way the West dealt with Africa," worries Walden Bello, an activist academic from the Philippines who has long promoted closer links among developing countries. "There is a lot of caution among lots of us who had been looking forward" to a new era of international relations, he adds.

South African Finance Minister Trevor Manuel explains the dilemma more starkly. "The key must be mutual benefit," he told Chinese and African officials at the AfDB meeting. "Otherwise we might end up with a few holes in the ground where the resources have been extracted, and all the added value will be in China."

Aside from allegations that China is treating Africa in a neocolonial economic fashion, the Eastern giant has also been accused of propping up dictators just as Western countries have done, and of showing little environmental or social responsibility in its African investments.

By deliberately attaching no conditions to its aid and investment, in a sign of South-South solidarity and noninterference, China has also been charged with failing to encourage better governance in Africa.

A 'huge gap' open for Chinese aid

But with Western donors failing to keep their promises to double their aid to Africa, and World Bank and International Monetary Fund pro-privatization policies frustrating many African leaders, "China's entry onto the scene on the whole offers a lot of promise," argues Jeffrey Sachs, the economist who heads the Earth Institute, a New York development think tank.

Western donors' reluctance to help African governments fund large public-sector infrastructure projects, he says, fills "a huge gap in needs where the Chinese are finding their way.

"China could end up doing things that are unhelpful," he adds, "but more likely than not, its presence will be helpful."

Certainly Chinese money has offered African leaders an alternative to Western aid that often promotes privatization and painful belt-tightening economic policies. "We offer African governments a choice, and more choice is a good thing for them," says Li Anshan, deputy head of the department of African studies at Peking University.

Striving for a louder voice

Chinese NGOs trying to monitor the choices on offer, though, must take their political circumstances into account.

Even if an NGO did find a way to galvanize Chinese public opinion about the social impact of a dam in Sudan, for example, it would not dare attempt to mobilize a mass movement, as a Western NGO might try. But other avenues are open, argues Ge Yun, director of the Xinjiang Conservation Fund.

"China wants to be a responsible member of the international community," she says. "The government cares about losing face in the international arena. This is the perspective from which we can appeal to the government."

Already some local NGOs are adopting some of the tactics their Western counterparts have refined, such as pressuring banks not to lend to companies that abuse the environment or their workforce.

Yu Xiaogang, an environmental activist from the southWestern province of Yunnan, hopes to take that further.

"Chinese NGOs must develop good knowledge of Chinese financial institutions' international policies and their impact," he says.

"Our hope," he adds, is that within three to five years, we NGOs can join in large project policymaking" by institutions such as China Eximbank, which funds billions of dollars' worth of infrastructure projects in Africa.

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