China has been remarkably successful in extending its footprint into Africa, trading technical assistance and large infrastructure projects for access to resources and consumer markets, in no small part due to China's noninterference policy and low bids. (p. 110)
Tanzania, a former socialist country, is one of the largest recipients of Chinese foreign direct assistance. In 2007, a Chinese telecom was contacted to lay some ten thousand kilometer of fiber-optic cable. Several years later, a Chinese mining company called Sichuan Hongda announced that it had entered into a $3 billion deal with Tanzania to extract coal and iron ore in the south of the country Shortly thereafter, the Tanzanian government announced it had entered into a loan agreement with China to build a natural gas-pipeline for $1 billion. All across the continent, similar symbiotic relationships exist between African governments and big Chinese firms, most of which are state-owned. (State-owned enterprises make up 80 percent of the value of China's stock market.) A $150 million loan for Ghana's e-governance venture, implemented by the Chinese firm Huawei, a research hospital in Kenya, and an "African Technological City" in Khartoum all flow from the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), a body established in 2000 to facilitate Sino-African partnerships. (p. 111)
Source:
Schmidt, Eric & Cohen, Jared. (2013).
The New Digital Age—Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and
Business. (Alfred A. Knopf, NY), pp. 110-111.
