China’s Healing Power

The dragon’s wing has twitched. A tiny shift in China’s Africa policy might just lead to peace in Darfur. China is Sudan’s largest trading partner, buying 65% of its oil. Until now Beijing has protected Khartoum from the Western world, which was crying genocide and demanding intervention and sanctions. Now China has helped persuade Sudan to accept a new United Nations-led peacekeeping force of 26,000 military personnel and police, subsuming the 7,000 African Union peacekeepers who have failed to have any significant impact on the conflict.

In the past, China has taken the position that it doesn’t interfere in other countries’ internal affairs. (To do so would invite interference in its own internal affairs, including its insistence that Taiwan is a renegade province of China.) And its foreign aid has been unconditional. (In contrast to the “Imperialists,” China wants a relationship of equality with other developing countries.) But lately, China has displayed a new willingness to twist arms in Sudan, and its officials have been talking in different terms about the crisis there. Listen, for example, to Liu Guijin, China’s Special Envoy on Darfur, speaking in June at a conference on Africa: “China supports African countries in their efforts to improve democracy and the rule of law, and to practice good governance … Closer cooperation between China and Africa is helpful to African countries in maintaining stability and enhancing governing capacity.”

These phrases could have been copied straight out of a Western textbook on African development. That’s a mark of how much changed in recent months as the Chinese grew increasingly frustrated by Sudan’s stubborn refusal to cooperate with the U.N. At a closed conference in Beijing in late July, one Chinese adviser on Africa said pointedly: “The Sudanese government should be more cooperative with the international community and make more efforts to find a solution to the Darfur crisis.”

Why has China’s stance changed? One reason is that it suffered a recent setback in Africa. The murder by separatist rebels of nine Chinese oil workers in Ethiopia in April shocked Beijing, which sees itself as a benign — and welcome — force in Africa. China now has huge investments across the continent, yet realizes that it cannot rely on African governments to protect its interests. Whatever the public expressions of eternal friendship, we should expect to see the Chinese bypassing government contacts to engage more at a local level wherever they have operations in Africa. A second explanation is that China, now restored to the world’s top table, wants to play by the rules and do what the other big boys do — but in a way that does not besmirch its virtue as a noncolonial power. Expect China to continue pretending to be Sudan’s benevolent senior partner, only interested in helping its less fortunate sibling to develop.

The third reason for the shift is that China desperately wants the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing to go smoothly. That means everyone must come and the hosts must be in control. Threats of boycotts or demonstrations worry China enough to risk a little interference in Sudan. It is all discreetly handled, of course, but China does appear to have played a significant part in getting the Sudanese to accept the U.N.-led force.

It would be wrong to take this to mean that China has fallen into line and adopted Western positions on Africa. China would like to position itself as the mediator between an aggressive, imperialist West and a recalcitrant but misunderstood Sudan government. In the U.N. Security Council, Beijing secured the removal of phrases from the British-drafted resolution on Darfur, including the threat of sanctions if Sudan obstructed the U.N. deployment, and the condemnation of Khartoum for past violence against its own people.

In return for these concessions, the peacekeeping mission is authorized to defend itself with force, to protect civilians and ensure safe passage of aid workers and aid. Though it is hoped that most of the troops will come from Africa, the logistics and technical support — which the ineffective African Union force lacked — will come from outside the continent.

The new resolution means humanitarian aid workers will be safer, and so will the 1.8 million displaced people living in camps in Sudan. But to impose peace on all of Darfur would require a force several times larger, and with a mandate to attack militias and confiscate guns. The war has mutated. It began as a rebellion by two local movements; the government responded by arming Arab-speaking militias who attacked civilian communities of the same ethnicity as the rebels. Today the rebel movements and the militias have splintered, and more than 20 gangs range across the harsh terrain seeking loot and land. Now, thanks in no small part to the intervention of China, there are glimmers of hope, but what is still needed is mediation to establish some peace for the peacekeepers to keep.

Richard Dowden is director of the Royal African Society, which promotes cooperation between Britain and African nations