Global Security and Intelligence Studies Volume 2, Issue 1, Fall 2016 | Page 103

Is China Playing a Contradictory Role in Africa?
aggressive behavior while presenting an image of China being different from the West;
and (3) shroud the fact that Chinese military personnel are ready to do battle and
have even done so in Sudan, the Niger Delta of Nigeria, and the DRC. These points
make China’s longstanding policy of non-interference in Africa tenuous. In particular,
China’s arms transfer and peacekeeping policy in Africa is schizophrenic because it
supports the AU peacekeeping efforts with funds, while at the same time supplying
weapons to oppressive authoritarian regimes, effectively contributing to small arms
proliferation through its modestly priced weapons, militarizing the African continent.
The danger in China–Africa relations is the fact that China could end up being
a role model for the continent furthering human rights violations that could escalate
into civil strife. Perhaps the most important concerns related to China’s peacekeeping
activities in Africa is reconciling its historical record with two fundamental concepts
found in the definition peacekeeping; protection and promotion of basic human rights
for individuals, the core values and primary goals of UN peacekeeping operations.
China has not fared well on the international scene, earning criticism for its
suppression of human rights defenders, control, intimidation, and harassment of
lawyers that take politically sensitive cases or seek redress of abuses of power at the
hands of government officials, ethnic discrimination, and severe religious repression
of Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang, mass rehousing and relocation policies in Tibet, and
suppression of Hong Kong’s “Occupy Central Movement,” just to name a few.
In Africa, China is already playing out its human rights violations in places
like Sierra Leone, where a mass and forced relocation of employees was carried out
by the nation’s largest mining employers. The families of the workers were forced
to settle in an arid area that does not support productive agriculture. The reports of
forced labor in mining sectors, poor safety conditions, long work schedules of up to
18 hour shifts, and anti-union activities enforced by Chinese companies in countries
like Eritrea, Zambia, and Sudan, among others. The UN often points out that while
China repeatedly calls for political solutions to conflict situations in African states, as
an influential member of the UN Human Rights Council, it regularly votes to prevent
scrutiny of serious human rights abuses in the continent and around the world. The
persistence of human rights abuses in a country eventually results in political instability
and human insecurity in all its various forms.
China’s domestic policy emphasizing a “harmonious society” has been
incorporated into its foreign policy toward Africa. What began as a policy to reduce
inequalities and social injustice has now taken on a new meaning. “Stability at all
costs” has become the overarching objective. Observers claim the government uses
the ideology to justify suppression of dissent and tightening controls on information
inside China. Extending and superimposing that ideology in Africa, China is assisting
some African regimes like the one in Ethiopia in controlling and monitoring the use
of the internet by its people. China has also helped the Zimbabwean regime of Mugabe
in jamming the radio broadcasts of its opposition party.
While China seems to have made impressive strides in African security and
peacekeeping activities through its financial and military assistance to the African
Union and UN peacekeeping activities, its priority in Africa is still geo-economic
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