China Takes Africa

From today's NY Times Magazine article by James Traub:

Angola is a very, very poor country, but it is also an extremely rich one, for immense deposits of oil lie under the South Atlantic Ocean within its territorial waters. Thanks to the growing appetites of several developing nations, China in particular, that need oil to sustain the furious expansion of their economies, last year Angola, which otherwise has almost no economy, had more than $10 billion to play with. And it has used that money to pay more advanced countries to rebuild its infrastructure. This vision — call it “Development by China” — looks like a catastrophic mistake to the Western experts and institutions that have scrutinized, invested in and at times despaired of Angola.

And yet Development by China looks more like Africa’s future than its past. Angola is not alone in having choices, for the high price of oil has begun to transform the prospects of African countries once viewed simply as basket cases. Earlier this month, Nigeria, the continent’s oil giant, signed an $8.3 billion agreement with China to build an 1,800-mile railway. Oil production in Africa is expected to double over the next 20 years while it stays flat or declines in much of the rest of the world. And China has already begun, in myriad ways, to serve the interests of these emerging clients, while the United States, preoccupied with terrorism, has seen its dominant status slip. Angola, once a cold-war pawn, can now serve as a kind of test case in the latest struggle to shape Africa’s destiny. Call it Chinese-style globalization.