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Relations between China and Africa will take center stage this week at the China Africa Business Summit in Cape Town.
More than 1000 delegates representing business and governments will gather at the Convention and Exhibition Center in South Africa's mother city on Oct. 22-23.
This is a significant milestone in economic relations between the Chinese government and Africa, which were cemented with the establishment of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in Beijing in 2000.
Nine years ago, the international community didn't appreciate the significance of FOCAC and the important role it would come to play. At the time "trade between China and Africa barely surpassed the 10 billion dollars mark," say authors Serge Michel and Michel Beuret in their new book China Safari: On the Trail of Beijing's Expansion in Africa.
Similarly, the second triennial China Africa Business Summit, held in Ethiopia in 2003, did not make the world sit up and take notice, even though the trade figures were moving up (12.39 billion dollars in 2002).
"The view in Paris, London and Washington was that this kind of event with its 'hollow talk' about friendship between peoples, did not imperil postcolonial allegiances."
"By 2006, however, the West's alarm bells had started to go off as China had begun to spread its influence into nearly every part of Africa." By 2006, the trade between China and Africa had risen to 55 billion U. S. dollars.
Last year China's overall trade with Africa reached 107 billion dollars, placing it just ahead of the United States.
This week's summit, the fourth under FOCAC, takes places against the background of burgeoning economic ties between the host country, which is Africa' biggest economy, and China. Since 2007, when China's largest bank, ICBC, bought 20 percent of South Africa's Standard Bank, with extensive links throughout the continent, Africa has opened considerably for China.
Earlier this month, China officially overtook the United States as South Africa's biggest export destination, according to South Africa's Trade and Industry Department figures, which also showed China replaced Germany as South Africa's largest trade partner.
A further strengthening of ties is expected.
China's role on the continent receives a positive appraisal from authors Michel and Beuret: China has met Africa's needs head-on, and at last has established a sound basis for development. If China hadn't built the infrastructure, especially the communications and electricity networks, no one would have.
China's involvement there has woken Africa to the fact that it is not condemned to everlasting stagnation. It has offered Africa a future, or at least a vision of the future that would have been inconceivable just a decade ago. In the end, China's arrival has been a boon for a continent adrift, a continent forgotten for too long by the rest of the world.
So China has achieved something very important. It has given Africa a real sense of worth, as much in the eyes of Africans themselves as in the eyes of foreigners.
The West has never been more interested in Africa than it is now. Americans, Europeans, Japanese, and Australians are just some of those who have received the message loud and clear: If China has bothered to invest so much time, money and energy in Africa, then there must be an opportunity there that's been overlooked by the West.
African leaders "now have the means to see their ambitions through to fulfillment. International organizations have never offered them such huge unconditional loans as China is now offering."
FOCAC and the Africa China Business Summit can be seen in a much longer historical context. Ancient Chinese ceramics have been found on Africa's east coast, suggesting contact going back millennia. During the Song dynasty (960-1279), there were indeed trading ties between China and Africa.
Later, in the 15th century, Chinese explorer Zheng He visited Africa. Unlike Julius Caesar, Zheng came, and saw, but he did not conquer. That has been a consistent theme of Chinese engagement with Africa.
Sarah Raine, in her new book China's African challenges, notes that despite the might of his naval fleet, Zheng's expeditions "did not take advantage of the obvious asymmetry in power, seizing no slaves and leaving no colonizers. If they left a legacy, it was one of trade, stimulating a local market for Chinese silk and porcelain."
China has been a great power before and it has traded in Africa before. "China, as the world's largest developing country, is poised as a natural ally of Africa, the largest developing continent."
In its dealings with Africa, China adheres to the "Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence", which have formed the basis of its foreign policy since the 1950s. These principles are: mutual respect for sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful co-existence.
In the West, the principle of non-interference has given rise to criticism that China ignores human rights and good governance. However, things are not that simple. To cite one example, Daniel Howden, writing in South Africa's Independent newspapers, points out that last year the non-interference principle appeared to be pushed aside when China "helped to nudge Sudan, one of its major oil suppliers, into allowing a beefed-up UN peacekeeping operation in Darfur. Then on a visit earlier this year China's president, HuJintao, signaled Beijing's intent to double aid to Africa".
Western analysts would see such behavior as a contradiction. Yet, as Sarah Raine points out in her book: "There is no inherent conflict between China's interests in Africa and development good governance and democracy on the continent."
"The West has little alternative but to seek to encourage and support China though the challenges it faces in Africa. It should offer its support willingly and with good grace, mindful that the PRC's economic development and political stability to date have come from its participation an integration in the international system, and that this is recognized by the Chinese authorities, who are as a result likely to see a future within this system."
She calls for "sophisticated, balanced and well-reasoned diplomacy on issues such as the development of China's relations with Africa."
Certainly those relations are becoming stronger. When President Hu visited Tanzania in 2009, he said: "Every time I come, it's like coming back home." In South Africa, he will be in the home of the continent's economic powerhouse.
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