Africans In China

The well-known “Les Ballets Africans de Guinea” has brought passion and rhythm to the Meet In Beijing Arts Festival in China. Two performances this week at the PLA Theatre, also mark the 50th anniversary of the diplomatic relationship between China and Guinea.

It’s an intricate mix of rhythm and boundless energy. The performers looked as if they were dancing on hot coals, so quickly did their feet move, arms gesturing outward and torsos unbending. The musicians take the stage, performing on instruments that look like artifacts from a folk art museum.

Art director Bangoura Hamidou said, “All the dances you see are from people in Guinea. It’s all about the people. It’s the original folk culture of Guinea. So there is no barrier for audiences anywhere to understand. It’s unique, but also international. ”

Les Ballets Africans was formed in Paris in 1952 by distinguished Guinea choreographer Keita Fodeba. Since Guinea’s independence in 1958, the troupe has become the country’s national ensemble.

The troupe has been recognized and encouraged as roving ambassadors, carrying with them on their travels the pride and aspirations of their people. Whether the are performing in Sydney, Rio, Berlin, Tokyo, Moscow or Los Angeles, their performances have always received a acclaim, together with an open invitation to return.

The troupe has been popular in China. It made its Chinese debut in 2004 and is back again with another nationwide tour. After Shanghai and Beijing, Les Ballets Africans de Guinea will also hit the stages of the International Country Music Week in southern Zhangjiajie and the second national intangible cultural heritage festival in the southwestern city of Chengdu.

(CCTV.COm)

John Garnaut
April 27, 2009

China is wise to Africa’s divide-and-rule tactics, writes John Garnaut in Beijing.

China has underscored its power in the developing world by revealing it was offered a huge African iron ore deposit seized from Rio Tinto but declined to accept out of “sensitivity” to international repercussions.

The late dictator Lansana Conte’s offering to Chinese companies including Chinalco has implications for the Australia-China relationship, particularly in the Pacific, and Chinalco’s $US19.5 billion ($27 billion) investment bid in Rio Tinto, which Canberra will soon have to block or approve.

Rio had sunk $US400 million into Guinea’s Simandou iron ore tenement and had planned to invest another $US10 billion to make it the largest iron ore mine outside Australia and Brazil.

At the same time, the Chinese Government built a 50,000-person sports stadium, a national assembly building and other landmarks in the Guinean capital, Conakry, and provided services including training for the army’s special forces.

Guinea is one of the world’s poorest and most ill-governed nations, with annual per capita income of just $US442 and ranking number 173 of 180 countries on Transparency International’s corruption perception index.

Wang Wenfu, who leads Chinalco’s overseas acquisition team, including its pursuit of 18 per cent of Rio, told the Herald that the Guinean Government last year offered to hand Rio’s iron ore tenement to Chinese state-owned companies in exchange for railways, roads, ports and hydro-electricity projects.

“The Guinea Government was trying everyone in China including Chinalco,” he said.

Ultimately, some time after the August Olympics attended by the late Mr Conte, Beijing declined.

“The Chinese Government encourages Chinese companies to go to Africa but they are also sensitive to the international results,” Mr Wang said. “Chinalco said no - it wouldn’t have been professional.”

The episode also shows how China is pulling back from a previously gung-ho attitude to investing in unstable developing nations. “China is getting better aware of the practices of African governments to divide and rule among Chinese companies and foreign powers,” said Zha Daojiong, professor of international relations at Peking University.

But China’s decision to knock back the multibillion-dollar iron ore-for-infrastructure deal has not yet helped Rio Tinto.

Late last year, Mr Conte handed the northern half of Rio’s Simandou tenement to BSG Resources Mining & Metals, controlled by a controversial Israeli diamond-mining billionaire, Benny Steinmetz.

“They will see us in court,” said Sam Walsh, head of Rio’s iron ore division.

One version of events is that Guinean politicians were said to have ended Rio’s tenement at Simandou because they were unhappy that Rio wanted to connect the proposed mine directly to an existing port in Liberia rather than build a railway to a new port on the Guinean coast. “For them, it’s if you invest in our infrastructure we’ll pay you back with mining resources,” Mr Wang said.

In another version, Rio was also considering the indirect railway-and-port option and lost its grip on Simandou only when some Beijing leaders systematically courted Mr Conte and undermined the Anglo-American miner after the China-Africa Co-operation summit in Beijing in November 2006.

China’s ambassador to Guinea, Huo Zhengde, promised in 2007 to “spare no effort” in assisting the country because the two nations were “good brothers and good friends”.

Chinalco’s Mr Wang said African countries wanted to work with the Chinese Government because of its long history of support, including scholarships for thousands of African students who are now rising to senior posts, and because of its unrivalled record in building fast and cheap quality infrastructure.

He said it showed how China’s influence in Africa could prove useful for Rio and Australia.

“It’s an example of how Chinalco could enhance the position of Rio Tinto,” Mr Wang said. “This sort of thing is happening wherever you go in Africa.”

Mr Wang said China might not be so accommodating of Australia’s international interests if the Government did not approve Chinalco’s investment in Rio. State-owned companies such as Chinalco tend to compete vigorously with each other and make their own investment decisions, while also being swayed by privileges given to companies and executives who fulfil government objectives.

Mr Walsh said Rio had talked with Chinalco - which has bauxite exploration activities in Guinea - about running Simandou as a joint venture. But the discussions were superseded by more comprehensive investment talks after BHP Billiton dropped its hostile takeover bid for Rio in November.

Rio has said it plans to mine more than 70 million tonnes of iron ore a year in Simandou and possibly as much as 170 million, which would make it one of the largest iron ore mines in the world.

On December 27 Moussa Dadis Camara announced that Mr Conte had died and that he had seized power and dissolved the constitution and what remained of the institutions of government.

Mr Walsh said the new dictator had not overturned his predecessor’s decision to deprive Rio of its tenement rights.

“We’re now in a hiatus,” Mr Walsh said. “But we are confident we retain legal rights to the full Simandou tenement.”

Mr Walsh said Rio had been pulling back its work in the southern half of the tenement, where the company has focused on infrastructure, exploratory drilling and other development, until clarity was restored.

Mr Walsh acknowledged recent erratic behaviour by Captain Camara towards global mining companies but said the new military leader provided some cause for optimism because he was “pro-development and clearly working actively to remove corruption and bribery.”

Four former mining ministers have been investigated for corruption since Captain Camara took power.

Analysts say China’s calculus of risk and reward in Africa is changing. The investment rewards have crashed with commodities prices and some African governments have reneged on Chinese investment deals.

“Like all newcomers with deep pockets, they run the risk of being exploited or expropriated,” said Susan Shirk, a leading China official during the Clinton administration and now director of the University of California’s Institute on Global Conflict and Co-operation.

“China’s investments in Africa and Latin America may give it a new appreciation of the value of solid governmental and legal institutions,” she said.

Kidnappings and murders of their employees in Africa have raised the stakes for Chinese companies operating in conflict zones that Western miners would not touch.

Professor Zha said China has reached a turning point in Africa, out of self-interest. He pointed to the conflict-ridden mess of Chinese oil investments in Angola and Sudan with Angola - China’s single largest oil supplier - so problematic that “it’s just not worth it”.

“It’s not because China wants to be nice to other international governments … but because China is learning that African governments are pretty good at milking the cow.”

(business.smh.com.au)

BEIJING (Reuters Life!) - Dozens of Chinese students who saw little prospect of getting into a top medical school have secured admission by becoming nationals of the tiny west African country of Guinea-Bissau, a newspaper said on Thursday.

Among the 112 international students that entered Peking University Health Science Center in 2007 and 2008 were 48 from Guinea-Bissau — all ethnic Chinese from Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, the Shanghai Morning Post said.

“Only themselves know the reason,” a university official was quoted as saying when asked why they chose to change nationalities to Guinean and pay much more in tuition fees.

The center is one of the most competitive medical colleges in China, but the entrance examination for international students was easier than the one for Chinese students, the newspaper said.

Guinea-Bissau, a country of under two million people, was once the Portuguese colony of Portuguese Guinea.

Hong Kong, a former British colony, and Macau, a former Portuguese colony, are now “special administrative regions” of China with wide-ranging autonomy, while China has claimed sovereignty over self-ruled Taiwan since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949.

(Reporting by Yu Le and Nick Macfie; Editing by David Fox)

(reuters.com)

CONAKRY, Guinea — Chinese and Guinean workers toil shoulder to shoulder on a sun-blasted construction site at this crumbling city’s edge, building the latest symbol of an old and sturdy alliance: a $50 million, 50,000-seat stadium.

This city is littered with such tokens of a friendship that first flowered when Guinea was an isolated and struggling socialist state in the late 1950s.

But so far Guinea has not gotten what it really wants from the world’s fastest growing economy: a multibillion-dollar deal to build desperately needed infrastructure in exchange for access to the impoverished nation’s vast reserves of bauxite and iron ore.

As global commodity prices have plummeted and several of China’s African partners have stumbled deeper into chaos, China has backed away from some of its riskiest and most aggressive plans, looking for the same guarantees that Western companies have long sought for their investments: economic and political stability.

“The political situation is not very stable,” Huo Zhengde, the Chinese ambassador here, said in an interview, explaining the country’s hesitation to invest billions in Guinea, where a junta seized power after the death of the longtime president in December. “The international markets are not favorable.”

Just a year ago China appeared to be upending the decades-old order in Africa, stepping into the void left by large Western companies too timid to invest in the continent’s resource-rich but fragile states as the market for copper, tin, oil and timber soared to new heights. In the new scramble for Africa’s riches, China sought a hefty share.

With a no-strings-attached approach and a strong appetite for risk, China seemed to offer Africa a complete economic and political alternative to the heavily conditioned aid and economic restructuring that Western countries and international aid agencies pressed on Africa for years, often with uninspiring consequences. Rising China, seeking friends and resources, seemed to be issuing blank checks.

Today, China’s quest for commodities has not stalled. State-owned companies are bargain-hunting for copper and iron ore in more stable places like Zambia and Liberia. But Chinese companies are now driving harder bargains and avoiding some of the most chaotic corners of the continent. African governments facing falling revenues are realizing that they may still need the West’s help after all.

“We have seen in the recent past Chinese companies wade into countries nobody else would,” said Philippe de Pontet, an analyst at the Eurasia Group, a private research firm. “That may be changing.”

In 2007 China announced a $9 billion deal with Congo for access to its giant trove of copper, cobalt, tin and gold in exchange for developing roads, schools, dams and railways needed to rebuild a country roughly the size of Western Europe and shattered by more than a decade of war.

But that deal is now in doubt as falling prices have left Congo in a much weaker negotiating position. It also suddenly finds itself needing the help of the International Monetary Fund, which has objected to writing off the country’s old debt even as Congo takes on what amounts to new mineral-backed loans from China. Congo’s political and ethnic turmoil remains deep, and its economy is near collapse.

A year ago those factors seemed irrelevant. Chinese companies did not flinch from making deals to search for oil in the pirate-infested waters off Somalia, or to mine industrial metals in places like Zimbabwe.

Unlike many Western companies, Chinese state oil companies had no qualms about doing business with the government of Sudan, which has become an international pariah because of the conflict in Darfur.

China espoused a new model for African investment: mutually beneficial trade between sovereign nations with none of the meddling so common among Western donors and investors, with their demands for labor and environmental standards, as well as respect for democracy and human rights.

These policies proved popular among African governments, and trade between Africa and China grew to more than $100 billion by 2008, from less than $10 million in the 1980s. African leaders spoke openly about China’s offer of an alternative to the edicts of Western-dominated institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

But here in Guinea, which has some of the world’s largest deposits of bauxite, an ore needed for making aluminium, that hope has all but collapsed.

“The Chinese have changed their strategy,” said Ibrahima Sory Diallo, a senior economist in Guinea’s Ministry of Finance and an advocate for Chinese investment. “They are not going to inject $5 billion into an unstable country in an uncertain market climate.”

French colonists once called Guinea a geological scandal, so rich are its deposits of valuable minerals. Despite years of mining and billions in profits, Guinea remains one of the poorest and least developed countries in Africa.

So it is no surprise that Guinea’s government, first under Lansana Conté, the strongman who ruled for 24 years until his death last year, and the junta that replaced him, wanted to tap China’s cash and building expertise.

China’s approach to securing minerals in Africa has been to sign agreements to build huge projects in exchange for minerals. In Angola, this kind of arrangement has guaranteed Chinese access to oil in Africa’s fourth largest oil producer, which is now booming after emerging tattered and broke from a vicious civil war that lasted decades. Chinese and Angolan officials trumpeted this partnership as a model for Chinese investment in the continent, a win-win relationship benefiting both countries.

But that formulation has proved problematic in an economic downturn. African governments are now realizing that these deals are in essence loans against future revenue, and falling prices could leave them saddled with giant piles of debt.

That is what appears to have happened in Congo. At current prices Congo would struggle to meet the stringent production targets in the Chinese deal, said Patricia Feeney, executive director of Rights and Accountability in Development, a Britain-based advocacy group.

“The Congolese have raised expectations so much that they could rely on Chinese and turn their backs on Western donors, and in the process they have probably managed to alienate people who were willing to help,” Ms. Feeney said.

In Guinea, China has backed away from what Guinean officials portrayed as a done deal to build a much-needed $1 billion hydroelectric dam.

“The dam is not a gift; it is an investment,” said Mr. Huo, the Chinese ambassador. “That is what win-win means.”

Guineans are increasingly suspicious of Chinese investment. Many people see Chinese companies as being just as exploitative as Western ones, if not more so. After the military took power in December, it raided Chinese companies suspected of selling fake medicines, but the raids degenerated into open looting of Chinese businesses, tapping a vein of resentment long suppressed.

Hamidou Condé works bare-chested under the relentless sun, digging a hole for the foundation of a new hospital being built by a Chinese company, yet another symbol of Chinese-Guinean friendship.

Mr. Condé, 35, who has two wives and four children, said that he had been digging in the hard rock with a shovel, pick and ax for two months, but that he had yet to receive any pay from his Chinese taskmasters.

“We work like slaves,” Mr. Condé said. “And like slaves we are not paid. The Chinese bring nothing good to Guinea.”

(iluvsa.blogspot.com)

By Saliou Samb
Guinea’s President Lansana Conte has died after an illness, the government said on Tuesday, leaving a potential power vacuum in the West African bauxite exporter he had ruled for nearly a quarter of a century. The impoverished country that the diabetic, chain-smoking general headed has experienced anti-government riots and strikes and a spate of bloody military mutinies in recent years.

When government leaders gathered to announce Conte’s death on state television in the early hours of Tuesday, military commander Diarra Camara ordered troops to protect strategic locations and the borders of the former French colony.

National Assembly President Aboubacar Sompare, accompanied during the broadcast by Prime Minister Ahmed Tidiane Souare, Camara and other officials, said Conte died on Monday night. Conte was believed to be 74.

Sompare asked the country’s Supreme Court to name him president in line with the constitution. He was expected to subsequently organise elections to choose a new president.

“I have the heavy and difficult task to inform you with great sadness of the death of General Lansana Conte, President of the Republic of Guinea,” he said in the television broadcast.

As the television played Guinean music, Sompare declared 40 days of national mourning in the world’s number one exporter of bauxite, the ore from which aluminium is made.

He praised Conte, who liked to cultivate rice at his home in solidarity with Guinea’s farmers and sometimes received visitors while puffing a cigar, as “a solid peasant, a brave soldier”.

Although rumours that Conte was seriously ill had circulated in the dilapidated seaside capital Conakry for days, the government chose the early hours of Tuesday, when most people were sleeping, to announce his death. The streets were calm.

MILITARY HAS KEY ROLE

Conte, who said he was born around 1934, had governed Guinea since 1984 when he seized power after the country’s first president, Sekou Toure, died in a U.S. hospital.

But he never groomed a clear successor. “I arrived as a soldier, and I will finish as a soldier … God gives and takes life — end of story,” Conte once said.

Analysts said the way in which the military, a key pillar of support for Conte’s rule, reacted to the news of his death would be crucial to the future stability of the country, where major international mining companies have operations.

“The military obeyed Conte … and now he’s not there,” one veteran local journalist told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

Guinean economist Mohamed Sadou Diallo said the television appearance of all the national leaders offered some reassurance. “But there’s still uncertainty about the future of the country,” he said.

Conte, who became reclusive in his later years of rule, had suffered health problems for years, including sometimes collapsing in public. He often travelled abroad for medical treatment in Morocco, Cuba and Switzerland.

Veteran opposition leader Jean Marie Dore of the Union for the Progress of Guinea party, a fierce critic of Conte, said he was saddened by the death of a man he called a “compatriot”.

“The most important is what is to come: It is essential that the institutions function correctly and that the provisions of the constitution be respected,” said Dore.

Last year, a general strike triggered anti-government riots in which more than 180 people were killed, most of them shot by Conte’s forces, according to witnesses and human rights groups.

Units of the army and police staged violent mutinies this year to demand payment of back pay and other benefits.

Foreign companies with operations in Guinea include Alcoa (AA.N), Rio Tinto Alcan (RIO.L) and Russia’s RUSAL. (For full Reuters Africa coverage and to have your say on the top issues, visit: africa.reuters.com/) (Writing by Pascal Fletcher)
(Reuters)

China has given Equatorial Guinea EUR5.7 million towards a series of public works projects in the oil-rich former Spanish colony, the country’s state radio reported Monday.
The report said agreements were signed on Sunday during an official visit by Chinese Vice Minister for Foreign Trade Chao Wu-Chen.
China agreed to give the EUR5.7 million to fund a number of government projects in the Gulf of Guinea, according to the report.
The country is currently the third-biggest oil producer in sub-Saharan Africa after Nigeria and Angola, producing some 500,000 barrels a day.
Since the increase in oil exploitation in Equatorial Guinea, China has invested heavily in the country’s construction, public works, oil and electricity industries.

(AFP)