China’s retro Africa policy

Deborah Brautigam is an outstanding scholar on Africa and her work on the unintended pernicious effects of foreign aid on governance made a strong impact on how I think about the issue. For these reasons, I am a bit shocked at her generally favorable view of China in Africa as it ignores almost everything we have learned about development in Africa over the past five decades.

The first prong of Beijing’s efforts is to offer African states resource-backed development loans, an initiative inspired by its experience at home…There is always a risk that African governments will not maintain infrastructure investments.

Brautigam sees this as something new, but this is how foreign aid operated in the 1960s: loans for infrastructure development. It didn’t work out for the same reason Brautigam identifies: donors built the infrastructure and the governments didn’t maintain it. Anyone who spends time in Africa sees clear evidence of this today in its unreliable electricity and lousy roads.

In its second major experiment, China is helping to build special trade and economic cooperation zones in Africa.

Sorry, Deborah. This is not new, either. It did not work in the past in large measure because of bad governance, which brings us to Brautigam’s conclusions:

Westerners support government and democracy; the Chinese build roads and dams.

This is when I began banging my head on my desk. It’s as if Brautigam arrived in Africa from Mars last week with no knowledge about the continent’s history. The west built lots of roads and dams; governments in Africa failed to maintain them. Yes, donors now push for good governance and accountability. There is a good reason for that: these are the foundations of economic development. Brautigam also fails to acknowledge that this same sense of accountability (specifically, the need to create jobs) is what drives Chinese development. China is doing exactly what the World Bank and USAID did in Africa, and it didn’t work the first time. Why this time is going to be different, she doesn’t say.