China is playing a largely positive role in Africa that may be superior in some respects to that of the United States, Europe and World Bank, a US scholar argues in a newly published book.

Deborah Brautigam, a professor at American University in Washington and a consultant to development agencies, cites China’s sizable and growing investments in African countries’ transportation, infrastructure and manufacturing sectors.

Prof Brautigam further notes in The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa, that Beijing routinely cancels debts owed to it by such countries as Kenya — without imposing the sort of onerous conditions set by the International Monetary Fund.

At the same time, she continues, China does establish safeguards to ensure that its loans do not wind up in the private bank accounts of corrupt African rulers.

And it is hypocritical of the West to criticise China for doing business with “odious regimes” such as Sudan’s and Zimbabwe’s, she adds, because the US, Britain and France have long supported undemocratic governments that advance Western political and economic interests.

In depicting China as a mainly benign force in Africa, Prof Brautigam points to projects such as the Great Wall Apartments complex in Nairobi and the Tanzania-Zambia Railroad financed by the Chinese government.

She also describes the successes of Peng Yijun, a Chinese private entrepreneur who “found a rich reward” by developing a vegetable farm in Kenya and who later transplanted an entire candle factory= from Baoding in China to Kenya.

Officials and commentators in the United States and Europe should stop distorting China’s record in Africa and refrain from “sensationalism and paranoia,” she writes. “At the end of the day,” Prof Brautigam adds, “we should remember this: China’s own experiments have raised hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty, largely without foreign aid.”

Challenge

But the book’s favourable interpretation of China’s actions in Africa was recently challenged by a Senegalese journalist who has written on the same theme.

Adama Gaye, author of China-Africa: The Dragon and the Ostrich, argued in an online debate sponsored by a US think tank that China’s apparent generosity in canceling Africa’s debts and aiding its industrial development is “only deployed to buy goodwill.”

China gets more from Africa than it gives, Mr Gaye maintains.

“It has now grabbed huge natural resources while dumping into the continent cheap industrial manufactured products,” he said in the exchange with Prof Brautigam.