主题：中国军火船成功停靠安哥拉港口卸货 -- 大大的熊

美国想在非洲一手遮天，但安哥拉已经把天撕开了一个口子

　　国际先驱导报记者戴阿弟发自罗安达 装载军品的中国货轮“安岳江”号，一度因非洲沿海国家迫于美国压力不敢接纳，而游离于非洲西海岸。4月25日，传闻不得不折返回国的“安岳江”号，最终停靠安哥拉罗安达港口卸货。

　　安哥拉政府一发布这个消息，美国官员闻声而至，津巴布韦国防部长一行更是抢先赶到，美津之间围绕中国货轮“安岳江”号，展开了一场外交角力。

　　津美总统特使前脚跟后脚

　　中国与津巴布韦之间的一次正常军品贸易，却导致美国等西方国家的围追堵截，津巴布韦也是使出了浑身解数。

　　4月25日上午，津总统特使埃默森·穆南加格瓦和国防部长悉德尼·赛克拉马伊，突访安哥拉，并向安哥拉总统多斯桑托斯转交了津总统穆加贝的信件。访问行程既短促又低调，两人下午就飞回了津巴布韦，并且丝毫未透露访问的具体内容。不过当地媒体猜测，这无疑是冲着“安岳江”号来的。

　　津总统特使前脚刚走，美国总统特使后脚跟进。当天下午，美国总统特使、负责非洲事务的助理国务卿弗雷泽亦从南非飞抵罗安达，向安哥拉总统递交了美国总统布什的信件。访问行程同样短促而低调，26日上午弗雷泽与安哥拉国防部长库迪·帕亚马会面后，马不停蹄地飞往安哥拉通往津巴布韦的陆上必经之地 ——赞比亚。

　　弗雷泽在机场接受采访时，并未透露具体的会谈信息，只是表示他与多斯桑托斯总统的会谈是在“富有成效的气氛中”进行的。但当地媒体分析，从弗雷泽急匆匆飞往赞比亚的行程看，弗雷泽的安哥拉之行，并不如其所说的那样“富有成效”。

　　安哥拉反感美国指手画脚

　　美国想在非洲一手遮天，但安哥拉已经把天撕开了一个口子。

　　美国之前警告安哥拉，如果允许“安岳江”号卸货，将严重影响安哥拉与美国的关系。但是安哥拉并没有言听计从。

　　安哥拉政府在公报里明确表示，“安岳江”号货轮上装载有安哥拉的货物，让“安岳江”号停靠是理所当然的。当然，为顾全美国面子，安哥拉政府同时表示，该船装载的津巴布韦军品不得在安哥拉国土上卸货。

　　正因为如此，才有了美国和津巴布韦轮番游说安哥拉的一幕。不过，安哥拉对美国的不满是显而易见的。正如当地媒体一名记者所说，在安哥拉卸下的货物是安哥拉内战结束后经济建设急需的货物，安哥拉政府是不会让在安哥拉内战时反对自己的美国人来指手画脚的。

　　中国货船将继续按计划行驶

　　在安哥拉长达27年的内战中，美国等西方国家支持反对党安盟，与多斯桑托斯领导的执政党打了整整27年的仗，直到安盟领导人萨文比被政府军击毙后，内战才得以结束。而在安哥拉战后重建过程中，美国等西方国家说的比做的多。安哥拉的不满显而易见。

　　而中国在安哥拉的重建中发挥了重要作用。内战结束6年来，中国政府给予安哥拉政府45亿美元的一揽子合作项目贷款，中国公司在安哥拉所有18个省开工建设和恢复重建的基础设施项目有上百个。中国公司不仅承担了大多数安哥拉战后重建的基础设施项目，还为安哥拉提供了大量的就业机会。

　　这次安哥拉不顾美国警告，同意“安岳江”号货轮停靠，就说明了问题。

　　据悉，“安岳江”号停靠安哥拉罗安达港口是其原定航程中的一站，在罗安达港口卸完货后，“安岳江”号货轮还将继续按计划行驶。

美国《外交政策》５～６月号：“你们太糟糕，中国人棒极了”（作者　Ｓｅｒｇｅ　Ｍｉｃｈｅｌ/编译　王永生）

“你好！你好！”我在刚果首都布拉柴维尔市的街上刚溜达了１０分钟，这时一群玩球的小孩停下来向我打招呼。在非洲，白人通常听到的是“哈罗，先生”或“嗨，白鬼”等，但这些孩子显然掌握了更多问候语。他们用中文喊“你好”，接着继续玩游戏。对他们来说，所有外国人都是中国人。

在布拉柴维尔，所有新东西都来自中国：体育场、机场、电视机、道路、公寓楼、仿冒的耐克鞋、电话机甚至壮阳药。漫步于这个位于西非的贫穷首都，访客会以为他身处在中国人的地盘上。

没人比克劳德・尼希卢这位刚果建设和住房部长更了解中国在刚果的影响。事实上，中国人在布拉柴维尔建造了超过１０００个单元的住宅，全由尼希卢设计。夜幕降临时，我与部长在建筑工地的住处见面，外面中国一家建筑公司的工人打开了聚光灯，以便能继续在脚手架上搅拌水泥和敲敲打打。

“你看过他们怎么干活吗？”尼希卢兴高采烈地说，“他们为我们修建了马桑巴・代巴体育场，还有外交部办公大楼、电视公司总部。现在他们在英布鲁造水坝，把布拉柴维尔市的整个排水系统重新改造了，为我们建了一座机场。他们将要修建从黑角到布拉柴维尔的公路，他们在为我们造公寓楼，他们将要在河畔修一个游乐园，所有这些都已经定下了。这是双赢！你们西方太糟糕，中国人棒极了。”

自２０００年到２００７年，中非贸易额从１００亿美元猛增至７００亿美元，中国现在已经超过英国和法国，成为仅次于美国的非洲第二大贸易伙伴。到２０１０年，中国很可能取代美国成为非洲最大的贸易伙伴。

对于中国人和非洲人来说，这种伙伴关系是“双赢”：中国获得了国内工业繁荣所需的石油、铜、铀、钴和木材，而非洲最终看到了急需的道路、学校和其他攸关发展的关键设施的建成。大多数分析家认为这只是开始。中国拥有可靠的基础技术和动员数千人到任何地方工地的能力，以及庞大外汇储备，因而中国有机会在非洲担任重要角色。为什么不会呢？中国人已在国内创造了真正的经济奇迹，因而更有资格在世界其他国家造就相同的繁荣奇迹。

Ni hao, ni hao.” I had been walking along a street in Brazzaville only 10 minutes when a merry band of Congolese kids interrupted their ball playing to greet me. In Africa, white visitors usually hear greetings like “hello, mista” or “hey, whitey,” but these smiling kids lined along the street have expanded their repertoire. They yell “hello” in Chinese, and then they start up their game again. To them, all foreigners are Chinese. And there’s good reason for that.

In Brazzaville, everything new appears to have come from China: the stadium, the airport, the televisions, the roads, the apartment buildings, the fake Nikes, the telephones, even the aphrodisiacs. Walking through this poor capital city in West Africa, a visitor could be forgiven for assuming he was in some colonial Chinese outpost.

No one knows more about China’s reach in Congo than Claude Alphonse N’Silou, the Congolese minister for construction and housing. In fact, in Brazzaville, the Chinese are building more than a thousand units of housing designed by N’Silou, who is also an architect. They are also building the minister’s house, a Greco-Roman palace that makes the U.S. Embassy next door look like a small bunker. I meet the minister at nightfall in the habitable part of his construction site, while, outside, Chinese workers from the international construction company wietc have turned on spotlights so they can keep making concrete and hammering in scaffolding.

“Have you seen how they work?” N’Silou says jovially, gripping the arms of his leather chair while a servant serving French sparkling water glides along the marble floor in slippers.

“They built the Alphonse Massamba Stadium for us, the foreign ministry, the television company’s headquarters. Now they are building a dam in Imboulou. They have redone the entire water system of Brazzaville. They built us an airport. They are going to build the Pointe-Noire to Brazzaville highway. They are constructing apartment buildings for us. They are going to build an amusement park on the river. All of it has been decided. Settled! It’s win-win! Too bad for you, in the West, but the Chinese are fantastic.”

The story of China’s quick and spectacular conquest of Africa has captured the imagination of Europeans and Americans who long ago considered the continent more charity case than investment opportunity. From 2000 to 2007, trade between China and Africa jumped from $10 billion to $70 billion, and China has now surpassed Britain and France to become Africa’s second-largest trading partner after the United States. By 2010, it will likely overtake the United States as well. The Export-Import Bank of China, the Chinese government’s main source of foreign investment funds, is planning to spend $20 billion in Africa in the next three years—roughly equal to the amount the entire World Bank expects to spend there in the same period. For the Chinese and the Africans, the partnership does seem to be “win-win”: China gains access to the oil, copper, uranium, cobalt, and wood that will fuel its booming industrial revolution at home, and Africa finally sees the completion of the roads, schools, and other keys to development it desperately needs. Most analysts think it is only the beginning.

With its basic but reliable technology, its ability to mobilize thousands of workers to building sites anywhere, and its phenomenally large foreign-cash reserves, China has the opportunity to assume a leadership position in Africa and to transform the continent profoundly. And why not? The Chinese have created a true economic miracle at home, so they more than anyone should be able to pull off the same magic in a place where the rest of the world has failed.

And yet, there are cracks in the facade. China’s profits and influence may be on the upswing in Africa, but China is beginning to run into the same obstacles the West has faced for years: financial and political corruption, political instability, lack of interest—even resistance—from the local population, and sometimes a simply miserable climate.

Several of the head-spinning contracts the Chinese signed throughout the continent have been canceled. Those cheap sneakers the Chinese are sending in by the shipload are infuriating the local manufacturers and storeowners they undercut. And the Chinese, with their laissez-faire attitude toward workers’ rights, may be earning themselves more enemies than they realize. What’s more, China, unlike its Western counterparts, is attempting to operate in a region that is, by and large, more democratic than it is. What happens when the world’s most enterprising business people run up against the hard truths of a continent that has known more poverty than profits? Might China be just another mortal investor, subject to the same problems, inefficiencies, and frustrations every other global power has faced in Africa? If so, it may mean that, for Africa, the Chinese “miracle” is nothing more than another lost opportunity.

HOLLOW VICTORIES

It isn’t hard to see why Chinese immigrants would be attracted to Africa.With wages rarely exceeding $150 a month on the farms and in the factories of China’s remote provinces—and with the eastern cities becoming overrun with migrant labor—Africa looks like a promised land. According to Huang Zequan, vice chairman of the Chinese-African People’s Friendship Association, there are now 550,000 Chinese nationals in Africa, compared with 100,000 French citizens, and 70,000 Americans. Beijing sent some of them to build dams, roads, and railroads. Other Chinese simply hope to get rich in some of the poorest countries on the planet.

For many African governments, China’s interest in the continent is most welcome. African leaders have not hesitated to hand over the responsibilities of public office to China. It’s China that these leaders turn to when they want schools, housing, or hospitals—often just before elections in order to gain as much profit as possible from these projects. They rely on the efficiency and ambition of the Chinese in hopes of having their own shortcomings forgotten.

“The Chinese are incredible,” says Omar Oukil, an advisor to the Algerian Ministry of Public Works. “They work round the clock, seven days a week. It would be good for us if a little bit of their rigorous work culture rubbed off on us.” I was politely shown the door when his workday came to a close at 4 p.m. The hallways of the ministry were empty when I left. At the same time, on the Mitija plain in southern Algeria, Chinese workers from the Chinese construction firms citic and crcc were putting night crews in place. They would have a little more than 3 years to build a large portion of a 750-mile highway full of tunnels and viaducts. To do so, they had to bring 12,878 workers from China to Algeria.

But these immense projects also highlight the competing interests of Chinese-African cooperation. Take, for example, the dam being built at Imboulou in Congo. Officially, it’s a huge success: It’s expected to help double national electricity production by 2009. Ten years ago, the World Bank had deemed the country too indebted to warrant financing of the project. China, however, dedicated $280 million to it in 2002. Congo plans to pay that sum back in oil.

“The Chinese drive me crazy,” says an engineer from Fichtner, the German company that oversees the work. They are building the dam at a discount, and he worries it might not hold up very long. He claims that the quality of the cement being used is sub-standard, that the Congolese workers are so poorly paid that none of them stays longer than a few months, and, above all, that the drilling has been so poorly done that half of the dam sits on a huge pocket of water that continually floods the site and could cause it to collapse one day.

It’s difficult for Wang Wei, the Chinese engineer in charge, to respond to these accusations, and not only because he’s been knocked out by a bout of malaria. “It is my first trip to Africa,” he says, his eyes shimmering with fever. It is also the first time that his company, cmec, has built a dam. Its previous business had only involved importing and exporting construction vehicles. Wang blames the company’s problems on the sub-Saharan climate. “The rainy season is too long here,” he says. “We have gotten a little behind, but we will emerge victorious from our battle with nature.” The Chinese boss is particularly angry with the workers he pays three to four dollars a day. “They treat the site like a school. They have hardly learned something before they go somewhere else to use it.” He would like to ask the Congoles government to make some prisoners available to him so he could be sure his workers wouldn’t fl

Angola, long held up as China’s most spectacular success in Africa, is also beginning to question China’s commitment to the country. In 2002, after 27 years of civil war that brought the country to its knees, Western countries refused to organize a conference of donors, citing a lack of transparency and the disappearance of billions of dollars in oil revenues. The government turned to China, which offered between $8 billion and $12 billion of credit to rebuild the country (and to make Angola its main supplier of oil, ahead of Saudi Arabia and Iran). At least, that was the plan. But you have to expect some surprises when you attempt to rebuild a railway connecting the coastal city of Lobito with the inland border of the country formerly known as Zaire. This vital artery of colonial Angola was entirely destroyed during the war. The Chinese promised to rebuild it by September 2007. By November, however, they had abruptly dismantled their base camps along the line.

“The Chinese spent months getting their camp together and bringing in brand-new bulldozers,” says a security guard at Alto Catumbela, an old industrial center in the Angolan plateau that was devastated by the war. “Then, instead of beginning to repair the line, they dismantled it all, ate their dogs, and left.” You can still see the spot in the middle of the big field are still visible. But, except for a few antimalarial tablets on the ground, everything has vanished.

In Lobito, the assistant director of the Benguela Railway Company confirms that 16 Chinese camps were dismantled and reveals that the $2 billion contract has been canceled. “I don’t know anything else about it; the negotiations are taking place at a very high level,” he says.

This very high level, on the Chinese side, is a mysterious holding company in Hong Kong called the China International Fund (cif). Its job is to coordinate funds and projects in Angola, as well as deal with reimbursements in oil. Its Internet site boasts about 30 gigantic projects, none of which appears to have broken ground. On the Angolan where the sheds used to be. The vegetable plots where the Chinese cooks grew cabbage and other vegetables are still visible. But, except for a few antimalarial tablets on the ground, everything has vanished.

On the Angolan side, the very high level is the National Reconstruction Office, headed by Gen. Manuel Helder Vieira Dias. He is considered a possible successor to the president. Neither side agreed to respond to questions, but there are numerous signs of a major crisis brewing between the two countries: A $3 billion contract for an oil refinery in Lobito was canceled by the Angolans, and $2 billion allegedly disappeared into Chinese accounts.

It all brings a smile to the faces of the 20 or so Western diplomats in Luanda who send cryptic messages to their capitals detailing the Chinese-Angolan dispute, even as they try to make up ground in a country thought to have been lost to China.

“The Chinese promised an awful lot, [and] the Angolans demanded an awful lot,” says a Western diplomat. They were both “out of kilter with reality.” Says another: “The Chinese do not have enough experience in Africa. They did not realize that the kickbacks in Angola would be so high.” A European diplomat sticks the knife in deeper: “We say to our Angolan friends, ‘It’s great that you’re taking a little walk with the Chinese. Enjoy yourself. But when you’re ready to play in the big leagues, pay your debts and come and see us.’”

THE BACKLASH BEGINS

Despite the arrogance and condescension in such words, they do reflect some hard truths. China may be a willing partner to many of the regimes and countries the rest of the world won’t touch, but that hardly means Africans are always satisfied with their arrangements. In a country like Angola, which has raked in $100 billion in five years and has posted one of the highest growth rates in the world since 2002, newfound economic success often means they can begin to dictate the terms of their own deals. And often, those new deals don’t include the Chinese.

Ironically, because of early help from the Chinese, Luanda may now have the means to avoid getting trapped in a relationship with a partner as voracious and demanding as China. The oil refinery in Lobito is expected to be awarded to the American firm kbr, and the regime of José Eduardo dos Santos has just reconciled with France after an eight-year tiff. And Angola isn’t the only country beginning to feel comfortable saying no to China. In Nigeria, an April 2006 agreement in which China would have paid $2 billion for first access to four oil blocks was canceled. A similar agreement that involved cnooc, the state-owned Chinese oil company, fizzled out. In Guinea, a billion-dollar financial package involving a bauxite mine, an aluminum refinery, and a hydroelectric dam was called off.

In some cases, such contracts have been canceled or failed to materialize as a result of a deliberate strategy on the part of African rulers. Spectacular announcements of Chinese contracts have beenmade with the intention of frightening Western partners into offering better terms. In meeting after meeting with African officials, I heard the following plea:

“Write in your magazine that the Chinese do not have a monopoly here, and we would love to have the French or anybody else doing work here, if they make a competitive offer.” Niger, for instance, dangled uranium rights in front of Chinese companies and even went so far as to expel an official from the French nuclear concern Areva in an apparent effort to persuade it to increase its bid for a mine in Imouraren, which has one of the world’s largest untapped deposits of uranium in the world. Areva signed the contract in January 2008, and it was considered a triumph for the regime of President Mamadou Tandja. When China feels betrayed by African governments, it can’t easily fall back on public opinion.

Despite all its talk of brotherhood and lack of a colonial past, China remains unpopular. From Congo to Angola, taxi drivers, street sellers, even locals working on Chinese construction sites complain about the influx of Chinese. “They are like the devil,” “They do not respect us,” “They are here to take everything from us” are the common refrains. Perhaps the relationship is too recent—and one that really only exists between officials—to have given personal ties the chance to form. It’s rare to see Chinese and African workers at the same construction site go and drink a beer together at the end of the day.

Grass-roots resistance to the Chinese has sprung up. In 2004, in Dakar, Senegal, the powerful lobby of Senegalese and Lebanese shopkeepers’ organized several protests against the Chinese boutiques, whose prices they said were undercutting them. Shops were set on fire. President Abdoulaye Wade was given an ultimatum by the shopkeepers union to kick all Chinese nationals out of the country.

Although he didn’t go that far, he forced through a near total moratorium on visas issued to Chinese citizens from his country’s embassy in Beijing. He then finagled a more open policy toward visas from the Chinese Embassy in Dakar. This enabled Senegalese storeowners to establish connections in China and maximize their profit margin on Chinese imports to Senegal. In October 2007, China’s state-owned news agency had to admit that “the Senegalese doing business in China far exceeds the number of Chinese doing business in Senegal.”

Undoubtedly, though, the country with the most intense anti-Chinese sentiment is Zambia. When an April 2005 explosion in a Chambishi copper mine killed at least 50 people, the Chinese owners were accused of ignoring basic safety regulations. The miners demonstrated against their employer, and their protests struck a chord in the capital, Lusaka. Opposition leader Michael Sata made the Chinese the focal point of his presidential campaign in September 2006 by accusing them of destroying the country. He even charged the Chinese Embassy with supporting his opponent, incumbent President Levy Mwanawasa. Although he briefly led in the polls, his bid was unsuccessful (and likely the result of voter fraud). Five months later, while touring the continent, Chinese President Hu Jintao was forced to abandon plans to visit the “Copper Belt” due to fears that the workers would revolt again. Never before had a Chinese leader experienced such an affront in Africa.

Generally, China seems to have difficulty maneuvering in countries more democratic than itself. Zambia is not a perfect democracy, but, unlike in China, its press is relatively free, unions exist, and public opinion matters. During a major China-Africa summit in Beijing in November 2006, organizers at the Chinese press center distributed the short book, China and Africa 1956-2006, by historian Yuan Wu. It presents democracy as a scourge because it “exacerbates” tensions inside African countries. “Fortunately,” the author concludes, “the wave of democratization has started weakening.”

OUT OF AFRICA?

For all the tensions between Africa’s need for development and democracy and China’s need for resources and riches, however, there is one sector where the interests of both Africa and China seem to be in sync: oil. It’s the most important commodity that China wants from Africa, and the oil-producing countries in Africa also happen to be the ones that receive the most Chinese investment. So, many experts consider oil to be the principal indicator of whether China will have succeeded or failed on the continent. And it’s not the African oil that China buys at market price, which makes up around 20 percent of its imports, that’s so important, but the oil that it manages to produce there. Oil-producing African countries have lured most of the Chinese investment, which was supposed to create “goodwill.”

So far, the harvest has been thin. It has been a major handicap for Chinese companies that they lack almost any expertise in deep offshore oil production. It has prevented them from participating in bidding on the most attractive fields in the Gulf of Guinea. These companies have used Africa’s east coast as a fallback location, though deposits there have turned out to be much less abundant than those in the west. Because four of cnooc’s six oil blocks proved too difficult to explore, the company returned them to the Kenyan government, which graciously took them back last July.

As a result, the only real success that the Chinese have had with oil in Africa has come in Sudan. International companies had to leave Sudan in the 1980s because of civil war and U.S. sanctions. China took advantage of the situation and invested massively, building oil wells, a refinery, and a huge pipeline to Port Sudan. Thanks to China, Sudan has been able to export oil, and Khartoum is experiencing an economic boom that makes it seem like an African Dubai. Of course, this situation captures perfectly the problems inherent in China’s approach in Africa. On one hand, China has an interest in convincing Khartoum to put a definitive end to the massacres occurring in Darfur, so as not to sully its reputation as a peaceful power. On the other hand, China wants to keep political risks high enough to ensure that Chevron, Total, and Shell—companies that once had operations in Sudan—do not jump back in. All this is not quite a failure, but it’s hardly a “miracle,” either. It’s proof that what’s good for China may not be good for Africa, and what’s good for Africa may be something no foreign power, even one as ambitious as China, is able to deliver.