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 to
natural resources. A closer look does not only reveal that China’s disbursement of Aid to the continent
is relatively unrelated to natural resources, but also that it fills exactly the areas that Western aid has
increasingly neglected: Infrastructure, industrialization and manufacturing. Chinese and Western aid
work but in many ways can be seen as complementing rather than competing. Western aid since the
1980s focuses almost exclusively on basic social needs, while China’s Aid to Africa is more based on
industrial cooperation. The tools, such as preferential loans, that China uses hereby are often similar to
what has been successful when China was in the role of the Aid recipient. Aid should therefore not be
seen as a philanthropic one way transfer, but part of a mutually beneficial strategy that uses policy to
channel investment into areas in which they are needed most. There is a fine line between aid and
business, but in its relations with Africa today, China is well aware that at home it was not aid that
lifted 200 million people out of poverty.

Key words: Chinese Aid, industrial cooperation, basic social needs, structural adjustments,
development sustainability.

Keywords

• -