ABSTRACT

A key issue facing Africa’s engagement with FOCAC is that the continent lacks a consistent and unified collective policy to connect with Beijing. As a Kenyan report put it, “China has an Africa policy. Africa doesn’t have a China policy.”1 At FOCAC III for instance, Africa was unsuccessful in developing a combined negotiating approach that might have shaped the debate and been advantageous to the continent. “Whereas the FOCAC declaration present[ed] a genuine platform for pragmatic co-operation, to Africa’s advantage, Africa’s failure to form a unified voice could seriously hamper its ability to determine the terms and general direction of the interaction [because] rather than work as a bloc, Africa continues to negotiate with China on a country-by-country basis.”2 As a result, Africa was left largely on the sidelines at what turned out to be a Chinese extravaganza of largesse and ostensible generosity. Though the meeting was supposedly about Sino-African cooperation and mutual exchange, the reality was very different. Africa was in fact the spectator. As one African commentary put it after FOCAC III:

African leaders flocked to this event as if they had wanted to swear an oath of allegiance to the African continent’s new tutor. Standing on a red carpet in the Great Hall of the People, President Hu Jintao could not hide his joy when, hand stretched out, he welcomed African heads of state one after another. Under the cameras of Chinese TV, attentive onlookers could discern the message that the Chinese president was aiming to send. Shortly after what recalled a traditional feature of China’s relations with its neighbors in the past, the ‘kow-towing’ ceremony, Hu Jintao’s announcement of a flurry of measures to help Africa showed that, behind the discourse of equality and the carnival atmosphere of the Summit, the Sino-African relationship is characterized by an undeniable asymmetry.3