China in Africa

Today's hearing will analyze China's activity and engagement in sub-Saharan Africa. In particular, we will look into what motivates China and how Chinese involvement has affected African countries. While a number of African nations have welcomed Chinese engagement and investment, it often comes at a very high cost, with a focus on extractive industries, entanglement with neomercantilist trade policy, and a tendency to adopt the worst practices that prop up kleptocrats and autocrats such as DR Congo's Joseph Kabila, while fueling corruption in an effort to win contracts. China's engagement in Africa was once driven by revolutionary ideology motivated by competition with the Soviet Union as much as it was directed at "capitalist roaders" aligned with the United States. While on the one hand, Africa needs investment and it needs infrastructure, we see a worrisome trend of African countries sliding into indebtedness to China, accumulating burdens that may be beyond their capacity to meet. All too often, the roads China builds are meant to allow it access to mineral resources that it can extract and ship to China, or are a part of the One-Belt, One-Road initiative, which is designed to benefit China and, ultimately, help it project power. China's overall foreign aid and financial leverage on the continent has been difficult to quantify-as has demonstrating how that translates into influence. Yeoman work in this regard has been done by Aid Data at the College of William and Mary. It demonstrates a correlation between how an African country votes at the United Nations General Assembly and how much aid it receives from China.