분석: 아프리카에 대한 중국의 원조를 풀어보다.

[뉴스 분석 - 김성훈 ]

 

 

Analysis: Untangling China's aid to Africa

분석: 아프리카에 대한 중국의 원조를 풀어보다.

 

- 2013년 9월 17일자 -

 

중국과 아프리카. 이 둘은 우리에게 언뜻 보기에 별 관련이 없는 단어로 다가온다. 하지만 실상은, 중국의 아프리카에 대한 지배력은 나날이 커지고 있으며, 우리의 상상 이상으로 밀접한 관계를 훨씬 이전부터 맺어왔다. 중국의 아프리카 지원의 시작은 냉전시대로 거슬러 올라간다. 당시 두 슈퍼 파워 틈에서 큰 힘이 없던 중국은, 자주적인 힘을 기르기 위해 아프리카와의 협력관계를 택했다. 

아프리카의 개발되지 않은 자원과, 중국의 자본이 합쳐지면 엄청난 시너지를 낼 수 있다고 판단한 것이다. 그 이후로 중국은 수십 년간 아프리카를 꾸준히 큰 규모로 지원해 왔다. 1975년도에는 1860억 달러 규모의 타자라 철도를 설치해주는 한편, 2000년대 이후로는 특히 지원을 대폭 확대하여, 2006년에는 50억 달러, 2009년에는 100억 달러, 2012년에는 200억 달러 규모의 지원을 약속했다. 

특히, 미국과 비교하자면, 버락 오바마 美대통령이 2009년에 단 하루 가나를 방문하고 간 것과 달리, 중국 지도자들은 수십 년간 꾸준히 아프리카를 방문하며, 많은 협력과제들을 수행해 왔다. 이미 총 아프리카와의 총 거래량도 미국의 그것을 넘어섰으며, 실제 현지인의 반응도 서구에서 받지 못했던, 그런 지원을 중국에게서 기대하며 중국에게 호의적인 태도가 많다고 한다. 특히 중국은 재정적인 지원을 하는데 있어, 그 나라의 정치에 간섭하지 않는다. 

중국에서의 부정부패, 조작, 뇌물 등이 자주 벌어지는데 이 또한 아프리카와 일맥상통하는 부분이 있어 경제협력이 빨리 이루어졌다는 서구 측의 비판도 있지만, 결과적으로 이러한 중국-아프리카간의 협력 관계는 미래에 더욱 공고해 질것으로 예상되며, 우리나라도 이에 뒤처지지 말아야한다. 우리나라야 말로 자원이 가장 필요한 나라이며, 현재 아프리카와의 관계가 거의 무에 가깝기 때문이다. 

더 이상 아프리카가 주목받는 세계정세를 외면한 채 눈 감고 귀를 닫고 지내다가는, 흐름에 뒤처지고 곤란을 겪게 될 것이다. 우리는 아프리카와 같이 가난했던 시절을 비교적 최근에 겪었고, 그것을 극복해내어 선진국에 대열에 오르게 된 유일무이한 나라이다. 그 점을 이용하여 아프리카에 좋은 선례가 되어주고, 그들이 일어설 수 있게 도와준다면, 미래에 있어 크나큰 도움이 됨은 물론 세계를 주도해 나갈 수 있을 것이다.

 

 

 

<출처 및 참고사이트>

▪http://www.irinnews.org/report/98771/analysis-untangling-china-s-aid-to-africa

▪http://blog.naver.com/yhchung60?Redirect=Log&logNo=60179363002

▪http://thinkafricapress.com/drc/corruption-congo-how-china-learnt-west

▪http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/series/china-africa-soft-power-hard-cash

▪http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2013/07/02/china-africa-us/

 

{원문}

NAIROBI, 17 September 2013 (IRIN) - This year, the two most powerful men on the globe, presidents Barack Obama and Xi Jinping, both embarked on Africa tours, pledging to increase aid and investment and work with the continent to improve development.

 

While this was Barack Obama's first extended tour of Africa since taking office (he made a one-day stop in 2009 in Ghana), Chinese leaders have been visiting the continent regularly for decades, quietly working on joint development, trade, foreign direct investment and assistance projects.

 

"China is the largest developing country in the world, and Africa is the continent with the largest number of developing countries," Jiang Zemin, then-president of China, said in his opening remarks at the first Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in 2000.

 

Since 2000, China has ramped up its aid to Africa, leading to significant interest in and speculation over its motives for doing so. With each FOCAC meeting, China has doubled its pledge to Africa, promising US$5 billion in 2006, $10 billion in 2009 and, at the 2012 summit, $20 billion.

 

A long history of aid

 

As Chinese officials are at pains to point out, China has a long history on the continent. Its first major project was the 1,860km Tazara rail line. The five-year scheme, completed in 1975, linked landlocked Zambia to the Tanzanian port of Dar es Salaam, ending Lusaka’s dependence on minority-ruled Rhodesia and South Africa.

 

"China historically had a robust ideological engagement with Africa, reflecting the revolutionary spirit of its foreign policy under Mao, but it didn't have any substantial economic interests in the continent," Daniel Large, professor at the Budapest-based Central European University (CEU) and a leading expert on China-Sudan relations, told IRIN.

 

What is different today is that it now has economic interests, in addition to being an aid donor.

 

Experts say China's role in Africa is often misunderstood.

 

"Given some of the more inflated claims about the impact of China in Africa, often contained within arguments about a 'new scramble' or 'new imperialism', there is a marked gap between the perceptions and exaggerated projections of an inexorable Chinese rise in Africa and knowledge of how this is actually playing out," wrote Large.

 

Some of the confusion, especially relating to aid, may be because China does not release many statistics about how much aid it gives and has a number of agencies responsible for distributing foreign aid to Africa. The structure of China's economy - where many private firms are fully or partly state-owned - and China's approach to assistance also blur the line between investment and aid.

 

So how much aid is there?

 

Quantifying the China-Africa relationship is a difficult undertaking because China does not break down its statistics or release detailed reports about how much assistance it gives to Africa, and it has a different definition from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) of what exactly is meant by "aid". For example, China includes military aid in its definition, while the OECD does not, but China does not consider scholarships to students from developing countries as foreign aid when calculating statistics.

 

As a result, estimates by experts on just how much China gives to Africa differ widely, ranging from $580 million to $18 billion a year.

 

The Chinese government argues that it does not have the capability to make the data available.

 

"There is an assumption in some of the Western media - and to a lesser extent the African media - that the Chinese government has lots of data that it refuses to make public. It is important to ask the question - how accurate is the data we have?" said Ambassador Zhong Jianhua, China's special representative on African affairs, in an interview with the African Research Institute, published in August. "The government's statistical capacity is that of a developing country."

 

In 2011, the government did, however, publish a white paper that broke down the data by region: 45.7 percent of aid went to Africa in 2009, and between 1950 and 2009 it spent slightly over $41 billion.

 

In 2012 and 2013, China AidData, in partnership with the Centre for Global Development, came up with a database to measure how much aid was being dispersed, using media-based sources. It classified Chinese-funded development projects into "official finance", which includes projects in four categories: those similar to Official Development Assistance (ODA), those similar to Other Official Finance (OOF) - both of which OECD indexes use - Official Investment (made up of foreign direct investment and joint ventures), and Military Aid without Development Intent.

 

Their database includes 1,673 non-investment projects to 50 recipient countries from 2000-2011, which they classified as ODA- or OOF-like. Over the course of these 11 years, they found these projects totalled $75.4 billion.

 

"Chinese development finance was dispersed really widely," Austin Strange, research associate at AidData, told IRIN. "The only outliers are countries that diplomatically recognize Taiwan."

 

“In terms of the number of projects, sectors like education and healthcare were at the top of the list," he added. Infrastructure, transport and energy were also areas where China had a very large presence.

 

While most academics believe that transparency on Chinese aid is improving, it still falls far short of the OECD, which releases detailed reports.

 

"There's still some secrecy in the official statistics," said Xue Lei, a research fellow of Shanghai's Institutes for International Studies, noting that transparency and reform is something being discussed by academics domestically, too. "Maybe we need one structure, and more transparency on the statistical side. I think in the next few years China will release the actual number."

 

Those favouring reform point to the need to set up a single agency with responsibility for aid programmes. For inspiration, many look to China's Asian neighbours, arguing that taking a model from Japan, South Korea or India could be successful.

 

Non-interference - really?

 

As China gets more involved in Africa, non-conditional aid is becoming a hugely important form of soft power for the country. But many are unsure whether China will be able to maintain its principle of non-interference in another state’s affairs should it need to protect its citizens in volatile areas on the continent; it is estimated that there are between 500,000 and 800,000 Chinese migrants residing on the continent.

 

Xue believes that the principle of non-interference will not change, and that China's approach will be a long-term, stability-through-development approach. "We want to try to stabilize the fragile states, to maybe prevent the crisis or conflict from happening," he said, while acknowledging that this would not always be possible.

 

"This whole mantra of non-interference and mutual cooperation is not unique to China. It is part of a broader south-south cooperation agenda and rhetoric," said Warderdam. Reconciling this in crisis situations, he believes, will be very difficult.

 

 

Photo: Government of South Africa

President Zuma with President Jiantao observe the Chinese Presidential guard during the welcome ceremony for the 5th Forum on China – Africa Cooperation (FOCAC)

 

Underpinning much of the criticism of China's role in Africa is the claim that they are only interested in extractive industries and are plundering the continent's vast resources. They've attracted prominent critics, notably Nigerian Central Bank Governor Lamido Sanusi and South African President Jacob Zuma.

 

"Africa is now willingly opening itself up to a new form of imperialism," Sanusi wrote. "China is no longer a fellow under-developed economy - it is the world's second-biggest, capable of the same forms of exploitation as the west. It is a significant contributor to Africa's deindustrialization and underdevelopment."

 

Hong Kong University professor Adams Bodomo disagrees with Sanusi, believing that his colonial comparison is flawed. "We are in a world where everybody has their competitive advantages… We have minerals, they have manufactured goods," he told IRIN. "In fact, the presence of Chinese manufactured goods in Africa is an opportunity for African manufacturers to up the ante, to compete. We need competition; we can't talk about free market and then not like competition."

 

 

 

Kenneth King, professor emeritus at the University of Edinburgh who, for his new book, China's Aid and Soft Power in Africa, travelled across Africa with his wife and interviewed more than 200 people on the continent, also dismisses claims that Africans consider the Chinese to be neo-colonialists. "There are differences in perceptions, but they are remarkably positive," he said, claiming that they had not noticed much antagonism towards China from people on the ground.

 

But there is no denying that, at the local level, tensions sometimes run high.

 

In 2010, when Chinese managers shot at coal miners in Zambia after a labour dispute, the incident sparked outrage across the country, and Michael Sata, then the opposition leader, used anti-Chinese sentiment to rally support for his presidential campaign. Similarly, in Lesotho, protests and resentment for Chinese migrants have occurred.

 

Earlier this year, tensions between China and Ghana increased over allegations about illegal mining, leading to the Ghanaian government deporting more than 4,500 Chinese gold miners.

 

"The miners in Ghana - this is very bad for China, and the Chinese government is very upset about this," said Ward Warmerdam, a researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague and an economic researcher at the think tank Profundo. He explained that while the government tries to influence the business practices of private Chinese firms in Africa through a series of directives on foreign direct investment, they are unable to influence companies that are not at least in part state-owned or reliant on funding from the government, nor individuals who migrate to Africa on their own.

 

"These are companies and actors that it doesn't have an influence over, and this is going to be a big problem for China," he added.

 

CEU's Large cautioned that it is necessary to disaggregate core principles of mutual cooperation and non-interference, to see how they meaningfully impact more than just the elites in recipient states. "On win-win and mutual benefit, these should be taken seriously, as constitutive of genuine convictions,” he told IRIN, “but at the same time seen as liable to more instrumental uses.”

 

The real question to ask is whether Chinese aid and development policies benefit the population at large, not just leaders. “Just as OECD DAC [Development Assistance Committee] principles or human rights can be subject to all sorts of uses, the same is true of China's principles," he said.

 

According to Xue, there is much that China can learn from the West: "Building a tall building is relatively easier compared with more in-depth knowledge of the country and their needs. We can learn from Western experiences in this," he said.

 

He believes that China has the opportunity to build a stronger network of NGOs and grassroots projects in Africa that may have more impact on everyday people, something that they have thus far steered away from in favour of larger state-to-state projects: "We are gradually increasing aid provided to other institutions, but a large part of the aid is still provided in bilateral aid."

 

But, he said, "China's aid policy is still gradually evolving."

 

Warmerdam agrees, but believes that in that process of evolution, it is crucial for African leaders and states to have a greater stake in the decision-making. "The cogs aren't in place, and the dynamics of this relationship aren't set yet," he said. "It's good for African leaders to be careful."