Misleading portrayal of China in Africa

US-based AidData reported last week that China's official aid to Africa reached $75 billion between 2000 and 2011, close to the amount committed by the US.

But even China's so-called lending with no strings attached has come under attack from the West.

A World Bank report released last week suggested Africa should promote more public-private partnerships to increase its competitiveness. It also calls for more investment in better roads, efficient ports, electricity and other infrastructures to make African countries more attractive to job-creation investors.

This is exactly something China has been doing over the years, building roads, railways and other support services that have been neglected for far too long.

Fantu Cheru, an Ethiopian economist, and Cyril Obi, a Nigerian political scientist, co-authored a paper recently titled De-coding China-Africa Relations: Partnership for Development or (Neo)Colonialism by Invitation? It is a balanced assessment of the mutually beneficial relations between African countries and China.

In Cheru and Obi's views, China has become Africa's preferred partner at a time when Africans are engaged in a major soul-searching exercise to find out what went wrong with Africa's development in the past half century, despite its close ties with Europe and North America.

They believe China's development experience is attractive to Africans and the lending with no strings attached has helped build much needed infrastructure which Western policy lending has not done. China's view of a dynamic Africa also contrasts sharply to the West's doom and gloom analysis of Africa.

China is not perfect, at home and in Africa. But it's also deadly wrong to dismiss China's work in Africa as the selfish grabbing of land and resources or neocolonialism.

The author, based in Washington, is deputy editor of China Daily USA. E-mail: chenweihua@chinadailyusa.com