China’s Global Times daily has offered the United States some good advice if it wishes to expand relations with the nations of Africa. In an August 9 editorial provocatively headlined “U.S. Paranoid `China Shock’ Narrative Ignores Africa’s Own Growth Agenda, Global Times takes aim at a silly article published the day before by “experts” from the unipolar warmongers at the Foundation for Defense of Democracy (FDD), moaning that “the China shock has arrived in Africa, and America’s economic relationship with the world’s fastest-growing continent is at stake.”
The FDD “frames the US relationship with Africa not as a partnership to be built, but as a stake to be defended against a rival,” and it will therefore not succeed, Global Times responds. True, China’s trade and investment in the African nations surpasses that of the U.S. by far, but the answer is not to pour money into Africa in order “to drive China out.” That strategy will fail. Try this, it recommends:
“Africa is not a fixed pie to be divided between two great powers. It is 1.4 billion people and 54 sovereign states pursuing their own industrialization. No amount of American capital aimed at displacing China will change that basic fact—nor will it actually displace China, whose infrastructure financing, trade volume and diplomatic relationships across the continent are too deeply embedded to be dislodged by a single investment program.”
