The US is clearly worried about China’s rising economic and political influence in Africa.

As recent comments by a State Department official and independent analysts show, the concern stems partly from threats to US corporations’ market share in Africa and partly from reduced American leverage over the policies and behaviour of African governments.

China dramatically increased its trade with Africa during the past decade, pushing the US into second place among Africa’s trading partners. In 2000, China’s exports to and imports from Africa were valued at $10 billion. By 2010, the amount had soared to $127 billion as China achieved an unprecedented rate of economic growth.

Much of that trade volume takes the form of imports of oil and minerals from African countries to feed China’s ravenous appetite for resources. But China also sells billions of dollars’ worth of manufactured goods to Africa, including weapons.\

(Read: Multinational firms flock to East Africa in search of oil)

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reports that China was the number one supplier of arms to sub-Saharan Africa from 2006 to 2010, accounting for 25 per cent of total weapons exports to the region during that period. Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda are among about 20 black African countries to which China has sold arms.

China also invests heavily in infrastructure projects in Africa — often as part of deals to acquire access to raw materials.

For example, China is currently building a 1,250-Megawatt dam in Sudan that will rank as the largest hydropower project on the continent. Chinese companies are also extending and modernising roads in many African countries, including Kenya.

Sometimes the deals go bad, however. Such is the case in Tanzania involving a resources-for-infrastructure agreement.

Carolyn Bartholomew, the head of an advisory commission on US-China economic relations, told a congressional committee last week that 1,300 families were evicted in the Kipawa neighbourhood of Dar es Salaam to make way for a Chinese company’s construction of a terminal for the Julius Nyerere International Airport. The uprooted families were compensated for only 50 per cent of the value of their homes — “all for a project that has since been abandoned,” Ms Bartholomew noted.

Donald Yamamoto, the number-two official in the State Department’s Africa bureau, called attention at the same congressional inquiry into China’s refusal to insert political or human-rights conditions into its deals with African countries.

“China’s no-strings-attached approach to investment and aid often undermines international efforts to promote good governance, revenue transparency and responsible natural resource management,” Mr Yamamoto declared.

That stance is in keeping with the traditional Chinese foreign policy principle of avoiding “interference” in the internal affairs of other countries, Mr Yamamoto noted.

Others speaking at the congressional hearing noted that repressive Africa governments are thus more eager to seek deals with China than with the US, which does set political standards for participation in the African Growth and Opportunity Act, a trade-preference programme, and in the Millennium Challenge Account, which provides US development aid only to countries that meet a range of criteria.

Another of China’s advantages over the US in the competition for deal-making in Africa centres on Chinese investors’ alleged willingness to contribute to corruption on the part of African officials, Yamamoto suggested.

Bribery is, in any event, a secondary reason for China’s success in Africa, David Shinn, former ambassador to Ethiopia and now a professor at a university in Washington argued. Far more important, he told the panel, is “ the direct assistance provided by the Chinese government to finance projects and sale of products, often as part of a package arrangement.”

American companies seldom have such a collaborative arrangement with the US government, speakers at the hearing noted.

China is being falsely accused of grabbing massive amounts of land in Africa, Prof Shinn said. In fact, he pointed out, in seven African countries studied as part of an American think tank’s investigation of land grabbing, “ there were more land lease projects proposed by American investors than those from China.”

There are also competitive disadvantages for China in its investment policies in Africa.

“ Specifically,” Ms Yamamoto noted, “some Chinese companies either refuse to hire local labour, or sharply limit such hiring, preferring instead to bring in labour, skills, and sometimes raw materials from China. Such practices do little to build local capacity and create local employment.”