The Forum on Sino-African Cooperation, which opens Sunday in Dakar, mark the pace after twenty years of Chinese expansion on the continent.
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After the pomp, frugality. The Forum on Sino-African Cooperation (FOCAC), a great ritual meeting between the Empire of the Middle and the African continent, opens Sunday, November 28 in Dakar, Senegal, under the sign of a sobriety assumed. The status of ministerial conference, and not a summit as in previous editions – more run by African heads of state and governments that the United Nations General Assemblies – highlights the new climate of relations between China and the Africa.
The downward revision of the format is certainly a collateral damage from the Pandemic of Covid-19, Xi Jinping, Chinese President, preferring to remain cautiously at home. It does not illustrate the settlement of a chininfrician dynamic that, for having been spectacular over the last twenty years, has been not less below the hopes of each.
Limited Industrial Impact Projects, North-South Type Unbalanced Trade, Debt Trap, Corruption of Elites, Labor Law Malked in Chinese Settlements … Truspations accompanied the quantitative curves of the presence of Beijing on the continent.
A strategic investment
Result: If China’s satisfaction level in African populations remains high, it’s a decline, according to PEW Research Center surveys. Over the 2013-2019 period, the “favorable” rate of opinions increased in South Africa from 48% to 46%, Kenya from 78% to 58%, and 76% to 70% in Nigeria.
“For the Chinese as for Africans, it’s a bit the end of the illusions, says Thierry Pairault, a specialist in the Chinese presence in Africa. Each realizes that it is not enough to spend money to spark development. “
The rise of this “chininfrick” over the last twenty years – the focus, which meets every three years, started in 2000 – illustrated as much the globalization of China as a very particular strategic investment on A continent rich in raw materials and until then a chase kept from the old colonial powers.
In fact, the numbers are impressive. The value of trade was multiplied by twenty from 2002 to 2020 from $ 10 billion to $ 200 billion (€ 178 billion). This thrust has allowed China to dislodge the United States of their position as the first trading partner of Africa. Beijing has also launched great infrastructure work, building a three project on the continent.
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