When China Met Africa

It seemed a perfect match: A growing country looking for markets and influence meets a continent with plenty of resources but few investors.

Now that China has moved in, though, its African partners are beginning to resent their aggressive new patron. What happens when the world’s most ambitious developing power meets the poverty, corruption, and fragility of Africa? China is just beginning to find out.
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 ballplaying 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...