When China Met Africa

"Ni hao, ni hao." I had been walking along a street in Brazzaville only 10 minutes when a merry band of Congolese kids interrupted their ballplaying to greet me. In Africa, white visitors usually hear greetings like "hello, mista" or "hey, whitey," but these smiling kids lined along the street have expanded their repertoire. They yell "hello" in Chinese, and then they start up their game again. To them, all foreigners are Chinese. And there's good reason for that.

In Brazzaville, everything new appears to have come from China: the stadium, the airport, the televisions, the roads, the apartment buildings, the fake Nikes, the telephones, even the aphrodisiacs. Walking through this poor capital city in West Africa, a visitor could be forgiven for assuming he was in some colonial Chinese outpost.

No one knows more about China's reach in Congo than Claude Alphonse N'Silou, the Congolese minister for construction and housing. In fact, in Brazzaville, the Chinese are building more than a thousand units of housing designed by N'Silou, who is also an architect. They are also building the minister's house, a Greco-Roman palace that makes the U.S. Embassy next door look like a small bunker. I meet the minister at nightfall in the habitable part of his construction site, while, outside, Chinese workers from the international construction company WIETC have turned on spotlights so they can keep making concrete and hammering in scaffolding.

"Have you seen how they work?" N'Silou says jovially, gripping the arms of his leather chair while a servant serving French sparkling water glides along the marble floor in slippers.

"They built the Alphonse Massamba Stadium for us, the foreign ministry, the television company's headquarters. Now they are building a dam in Imboulou. They have redone the entire water system of Brazzaville. They built us an airport. They are going to build the Pointe-Noire to Brazzaville highway. They are constructing apartment buildings for us. They are going to build an amusement park on the river. All of it has been decided. Settled! It's win-win! Too bad for you, in the West, but the Chinese are fantastic."

The story of China's quick and spectacular conquest of Africa has captured the imagination of Europeans and Americans who long ago considered the continent more charity case than investment opportunity. From 2000 to 2007, trade between China and Africa jumped from $10 billion to $70 billion, and China has now surpassed Britain and France to become Africa's second-largest trading partner after the United States. By 2010, it will likely overtake the United States as well. The Export-Import Bank of China, the Chinese government's main source of foreign-investment funds, is planning to spend $20 billion in Africa in the next three years -- roughly equal to the amount the entire World Bank expects to spend there in the same period. For the Chinese and the Africans, the partnership does seem to be "win-win": China gains access to the oil, copper, uranium, cobalt, and wood that will fuel its booming industrial revolution at home, and Africa finally sees the completion of the roads, schools, and other keys to development it desperately needs. Most analysts think it is only the beginning. With its basic but reliable technology, its ability to mobilize thousands of workers to building sites anywhere, and its phenomenally large foreign-cash reserves, China has the opportunity to assume a leadership position in Africa and to transform the continent profoundly. And why not? The Chinese have created a true economic miracle at home, so they more than anyone should be able to pull off the same magic in a place where the rest of the world has failed.

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