The Chinese Government decided, in 2003, to create a new Ministry of Commerce that began to perform the functions previously attributed to government entities responsible for monitoring trade at home and abroad, as well as areas of external economic cooperation.
One of the first tasks of this Ministry was to create a Statistical Department that would monitor foreign direct investment by Chinese companies, an investment that was, in fact, largely conducted by public companies.
The first official Chinese publication with statistics on Chinese FDI would, however, only be published in 2014, with only 14 pages.
Between 2003 and early 2018, 14 publications were published, the last one dating back to November 2017.
According to the aforementioned publications, FDI is “an activity through which an investor resident in a given country obtains a lasting interest and significant influence in the management of an entity resident in another country”.
Contrary to what has been said, the importance of Chinese FDI in Africa, during the first 17 years of this century, has been, in quantitative terms, relatively modest, with it being worth noting, for example, that, in 2016, it represented no more than 1.2% of Chinese FDI worldwide and 0.2% of global investment.
Faced with these data, it makes sense to ask why some authors consider China to be the main investor in Africa, even going so far as to state that Chinese FDI on the African Continent has increased exponentially.
It is true that it seems possible to question the official statistics, especially because a large part of the investment has been going through “tax havens”.
However, everything indicates that the values are lower than those constant in the Africa Investment Reportthese values are also published in the Finantial Times and by the OECD itself.
As an example, in the Africa Investment Report As of 2017, there is talk of 36,000 million US dollars of Chinese investment in Africa, of which 20,000 million in Egypt.
However, a careful reading of the agreement signed between China and Egypt leads us to conclude that there is no quantification of the work to be carried out in the future, and there is not even a timetable for the investments to be made, with the accounting for a Chinese investment of 20,000 million US dollars in 2016 being pure fiction.
It is also considered that there was a Chinese investment of 3.3 billion dollars in Algeria, more specifically in the construction of the El Hamdania port, in Cherchell.
Now, it turns out that the project was not to be completed in one year, but over several years, and it is also certain that the aforementioned project should be the subject of a Chinese loan to the Algerian Government, this financing to be repaid by the Algerians to the so-called Chinese. It would not be a direct foreign investment.
There has, therefore, been a regrettable confusion between investment and financing, which explains the “mainstream idea” that China is investing in infrastructures on the African Continent, when what is happening is that Chinese companies build infrastructures (not always of high quality) that are paid for in raw materials by the countries subject to what, wrongly, is called “Chinese aid”, paying for the provision of services (or repaying the financing, in the long term).
Therefore, there is no significant Chinese investment, there is, rather, a provision of services paid over the long term, but, in truth, the local government is the one investing, an investment that, as a rule, is made in raw materials over a long period of time.
Thus, in 2016, the African Continent received 52,100 million US dollars in long-term paid work, while Chinese FDI itself did not exceed 2,400 million US dollars, iea value 26 times lower than that of work awarded to Chinese companies.
This involves confusing an inflow of Chinese capital with a debt contracted by African countries with China, a debt to be paid in kind or in financial flows, in the long term.
In other words, the typology of the relationship between China and Africa is being subverted, possibly for undeniable purposes.
No more, no less…
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