Africa remains the most important destination of China’s investments despite the general drop in total development finance globally, the Founding Director of the Centre for Asian Studies (CAS) at the Department of Political Science of the University of Ghana, Prof. Lloyd G. Adu Amoah, has said.
These investments, he said, were targeted at resource-rich African countries such as Angola, Nigeria and Zambia.
Primarily, the focus has been on construction and mining, where the prospects of profits are very high, he said.
Prof. Amoah was speaking at this year’s J. B. Danquah Memorial Lectures, put together by the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences (GAAS) in Accra last Wednesday.
It was on the theme: “Africa-China relations: Partnership, peonage, pawnage and possibilities?”
The annual lecture was instituted in 1968 in honour of one of the academy’s founder members, politician and lawyer, Joseph Boakye Danquah, who died at the Nsawam Prison in 1965.
Prof. Amoah was the first to be appointed to the professoriate by a Ghanaian university in the field of African-Asian studies.
Lectures
In his lecture, Prof. Amoah drew on his yet-to-be-released book, Africa-China relations: Partnership, peonage or pawnage?, and over two decades of research on African-China relations in general.
It re-examines Africa-China relations entanglements in the light of emergent and new realities in the international political economy.
Subsequently, he sought to question along the enunciated theme of partnership, peonage and pawnage — the stylised and official tropes of Africa-China relations — and thereby captured the dynamic, shape-shifting and complex nature of this relationship.
Operationalization
Operationalizing the terms pawnage and peonage, the Africa-China relations expert said that while pawnage referred to a country whose actions were controlled by others or who did not have real power but was used by others to achieve their own ends, peonage referred to being in debt and having to make restitution on the debtor’s terms.
Against that backdrop, he advanced the argument that Africa, being a pawn, was in the realms of digital technology or digital imperialism, as well as at the level of architecture and construction.
Under digital imperialism, Prof. Amoah said Africa was simply and pathetically a consumer of digital technology whose hub, not just the heartbeat, was controlled by China, which had the power to stop the digital life of Africa.
For instance, he said, Huawei alone made up to 70 per cent of the 4G network in Africa, and was leading the 5G rollout on the continent.
According to the scholar, the total of smartphone shipments by Chinese companies dominates the markets with more than 71 per cent.
Other outlooks
On his second level of pawnage in the area of architecture and construction, Prof. Amoah posited that China had left notable architecture imprints in Africa’s city-states, under which he coined the term “diplomacy of architecture”.
“China has built stadia, hospitals, museums, office complexes and even whole cities on the continent.
“Through grants, 362 facilities, theatres and cinemas were built by 2009, and by 2018, China had quadrupled it,” he told an excited audience made up of academicians, students and high-profile personalities, including lawyer Philip Addison of the New Patriotic Party election petition fame.
Prof. Amoah said the construction of the African Union building by China perhaps marked the zenith of China’s construction triumph on the continent.
Under Peonage, the astute professor coined another term, “debt trap diplomacy”, where countries on the continent were assisted to build facilities financed by Chinese companies.
These, according to him, had pushed some African countries into debt distress or high risk of debt distress, which accounted for 40 per cent of the total public debt stock in China at the end of 2022.
