ABSTRACT
While the appeal of Africa endures among Chinese policymakers, some of the early naivety has gone: few Chinese now involved in Africa view the continent simply as a land of unbridled opportunity. As China's appreciation of the complexities of its diverse engagements in Africa's developing and sometimes fragile states grows, the consequences of these engagements increasingly need to be faced. China's ability to recognise and tackle the more negative effects of its engagements will impact greatly on the sustainability of developing Sino-African relations. The danger here is that China's government might fail to look beyond its own rhetoric about equal engagements with Africa to acknowledge the practical reality that many of these relationships are far from equal, and that China incurs certain responsibilities as a consequence of this, notably the responsibility not to be overly exploitative of its relative advantage. The implication of China's line that its relations with African countries are equal is that it is the responsibility of China's African partners to develop policies that make their relationships with China beneficial and sustainable, and that China's role is simply reactive. But China's relative power means that,
in practice, it has the greater say in determining the terms on which investments and other engagements are made, which can make it difficult for individual African nations to build more stringent frameworks for Chinese investment activity. Thus, the best way for China to protect its investments and its image abroad is for it to prove itself an active supporter of robust African strategies for ensuring that Chinese investments bring African benefits.
