The Review of African Political Economy posted on 24 July 2024 a commentary titled "Africa and China: Counter-Hegemonic Narratives --An Introduction" by Ying Chen and Corinna Mullin.
This piece is a summary of a symposium that took place in December 2023 at The New School titled "The African Continent and China: Counter-Hegemonic Narratives." It assesses "the reductionist, orientalist and often racist depictions that dominate mainstream media and scholarly spaces on China-Africa relations." It attributes African underdevelopment to "policies imposed by western dominated multilateral institutions like the IMF and World Bank under the neoliberal 'Washington Consensus'."
Comment: Much of the jargon used in the symposium took me back to my African study days in the 1960s and 1970s when Cold War terminology was the predominate rhetoric. The summary suggests that the presentations were quick to praise China's positive activities in Africa and gloss over or even ignore the negative ones. While it is useful to assess accurately China's limited role in Africa's debt crisis, was there any discussion of China's mercantilist trade policy toward the continent where it sells almost entirely finished goods and buys almost exclusively natural resources? And in recent years, China has consistently had a large trade surplus!
After reading this summary, it is all smiles in Beijing, and Moscow.
