Chinese Aid to Africa: Filling the Gaps that Others Left

Abstract

Western observers sometimes shockingly reduce Chinese Aid to Africa to a way of securing access tonatural resources. A closer look does not only reveal that China’s disbursement of Aid to the continentis relatively unrelated to natural resources, but also that it fills exactly the areas that Western aid hasincreasingly neglected: Infrastructure, industrialization and manufacturing. Chinese and Western aidwork but in many ways can be seen as complementing rather than competing. Western aid since the1980s focuses almost exclusively on basic social needs, while China’s Aid to Africa is more based onindustrial cooperation. The tools, such as preferential loans, that China uses hereby are often similar towhat has been successful when China was in the role of the Aid recipient. Aid should therefore not beseen as a philanthropic one way transfer, but part of a mutually beneficial strategy that uses policy tochannel investment into areas in which they are needed most. There is a fine line between aid andbusiness, but in its relations with Africa today, China is well aware that at home it was not aid thatlifted 200 million people out of poverty.Key words: Chinese Aid, industrial cooperation, basic social needs, structural adjustments,development sustainability.