Chinatown Enterprise

Volume 2, Issue 17- April 29- May 5, 2011

International Tribune

Africa is fast becoming China’s next frontier.  Within the last decade, Chinese businesses have flourished all over the once-forgotten continent outnumbering - and even out-maneuvering -European and American investors. Nowadays, one will find more Chinese businessmen traveling to Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, and South Africa, just to name a few countries where Chinese investments are being sunk in.  They are ready to invest in oil, agriculture, construction- you name it.  In a continent plagued with never-ending internal strife, wars, genocides, and rampant corruption, the Africans could not be any happier than to find a more adventurous and pragmatic financial partners.  Africa has struck luck and found new riches coming from the East.    

Chinese men are coming with bags of cash, ready and willing to spend and start their business in rough and tumble fashion.   They dream of new a life in this money-deprived but infinitely resource-rich region.  Making connection with the right person is the key.   Bribery is not surprisingly the name of the game.  Businesses jump start in different ways- they do not have to be necessarily on the books.  It is a business world of fast pace, back-room deals, the kind of financial mergers where it does not have to be necessarily all jotted down.  Keeping transactions off the records are not a problem.  This corporate culture has found its way through around Africa’s biggest cities.   Chinatown enterprise is becoming the business culture in the continent.

  

The Heritage Foundation, an American think tank reported that 14% of China’s investment found its way to Sub-Saharan Africa.  And China has given more loans to Africa than any other region according to the World Bank. Africa now supplies 35% of China’s oil.   The Chinese Ministry of Commerce announced that China-Africa trade is at $100- billion level in 2010.  And this is just the beginning.  It is expected that 2011 will be a banner year for Sino-African trade relations.    

Africa has become the proverbial "greener pasture" for Chinese businessmen.  On the other side of the river, African merchants are catching up with the off-set posed by the competition brought by the investors from the East.   Local business owners and entrepreneurs are beginning to see that this is not good for their business in the long run.  The cheap goods provided by the Chinese exporters are killing the local competition.  And moreover, the infrastructures built by the Chinese are beginning to show faulty cracks along the way.  

Protectionist sentiments are rising to thwart the economic ambitions of investors from China that have been threatening the local businessmen. If this is not economic invasion, then what will it be? A foreign economic intrusion will always smell as rotten as any.  It seems like the oasis is drying up.  Let us see how long this relationship will last.