KABWE, Zambia -- Times have been hard since the state-owned mines and textile mill closed in this industrial town in the early 1990s. Workers, with no other job options, were forced to revert to subsistence agriculture. Kids dropped out of school. Small businesses collapsed.
So when Chinese investors began arriving to reopen the shuttered textile plant, open a manganese mine and build an ore smelter, the welcome could hardly have been warmer.
"We are very impressed with the Chinese investment. We need it. We have no option if this town is to survive," said Thomas Muwowo, secretary of the Kabwe Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
With Chinese help, "this ghost has some flesh now," he said of his dusty town in Zambia's central interior.
But at the reopened textile mill, salaries are low, ranging from $24 to $88 a month. Safety gear is scarce, workers say. And Chinese managers hold all the top jobs.
"We are held at ransom," said Dickson Chirwa, chairman of the local textile workers union. "They treat us like their workers at home, as cheap labor. But the matter is, we need them."
An investor and ally
China is fast becoming one of Africa's biggest investors, donors and political allies. The developing giant is helping build the continent's biggest dam, in Ethiopia. It has launched Nigeria's first satellite into orbit. It has lent Angola $2 billion in exchange for oil. It is farming shrimp in Mozambique, installing telephone systems in Kenya, building roads in Zambia and quickly securing rights to Africa's vast timber, oil and mineral resources.
All told, Chinese investment on the long-neglected continent has mushroomed from $10 billion in 2000 to $18 billion in 2003, and China has become Africa's third-largest trading partner, behind the United States and Britain.
China "is filling the void left by the West," said Bruce Imboela, a development studies professor at the University of Zambia. In particular, he said, China has provided welcome investment and development aid in regions and countries where the West has been reluctant to make deals.
But China's growing sway in Africa also is a worry for Western governments and for many Africans. Chinese loans and investments are a major reason President Robert Mugabe's disastrous regime in Zimbabwe remains afloat, analysts say. China has sent tanks, helicopters and fighter aircraft to Sudan's government, which has supported attacks in its Darfur region in which tens of thousands of people have been killed.
China's willingness to deal with rogue regimes, to overlook public corruption and to push ahead with projects regardless of safety and environmental concerns risks African lives and undermines African institutions and Western efforts to promote good governance, analysts say.
"China offers an alternative source of support, even for some of the United States' closest allies, when they chafe under Western pressure for economic or political reform," the Council on Foreign Relations said in a report released in December. In some cases, "China's aid and investments are attractive to Africans precisely because they come with no conditionality related to governance, fiscal probity, or the other concerns of Western donors."
Growing political clout?
Western governments also fear that China's economic clout on the continent could lead to growing political clout, with small African nations throwing their votes in with China at the United Nations on issues such as Taiwan, or China refusing--as it has in recent years--to condemn human-rights violations in such nations as Sudan that it now counts among its major oil suppliers.
"They're a big player in international politics, and they need the support of small countries like Zambia," Imboela said. "For the Chinese, investment is not always the priority. It's also about building relationships."
In landlocked Zambia, one of Africa's poorest countries, China has been eagerly welcomed as a much-needed new aid, trade and investment partner. The countries, each with a socialist history, have ties dating to Zambia's anti-colonial struggle in the early 1960s, when China backed liberation movements across the continent.
Today, however, China's focus is business. In recent years it has become the third-biggest investor in Zambia behind South Africa and Britain, pouring more than $300 million into mines, manufacturing projects, construction companies and agriculture, according to the Chinese Embassy in Lusaka. It has invested $150 million in reopening the Chambishi copper mine in Zambia's north, creating almost 2,000 jobs, and plans a $100 million smelter at the plant as well. It is mining coal in Choma, processing copper and cobalt ore in Kitwe and smelting copper in Ndola. Nearly all the minerals are being shipped to China.
The investment push has been matched by new development assistance. Chinese banks are helping pay for a hydroelectric dam on Zambia's Kafue River, and China's government has rebuilt most of the main roads linking the country's major cities, a huge help in a nation where potholed nightmares are the norm. China has also financed a new rail link with Tanzania and provided doctors to boost Zambia's weak health system.
"For us, they're an important contributor to economic growth in this country," said Sharon Sichilongo, who now speaks a little Mandarin to facilitate her work as spokeswoman for the government-funded Zambia Investment Center. Most important, she said, Chinese investment is going into "economically dead" industrial areas of the country such as Ndola and Kabwe.
The Chinese like Zambia as well. Li Kekun, the manager of a $6 million manganese smelter set to open next month in Kabwe, said Zambian authorities have been forthcoming with tax breaks and other incentives for the plant, which will provide 300 to 400 jobs in its first phase, and more when a second smelter is added in a year or two.
"They are very helpful to us and regard the plant as their own. We have felt very welcome," he said through an interpreter.
Salaries are an issue
The plant's Zambian construction workers are somewhat less enthusiastic, particularly about the salaries, which Li said range from $44 to $132 a month. But "I want to see this thing go," said Eddy Ndhlovu, the Zambian foreman at the project, who had been unemployed since losing his mine foreman job in 1994. "Kabwe has been devastated. There are no jobs here."
At the reopened former government textile mill on the other side of town, Chinese businessmen have invested $24 million since 1997 to upgrade the plant, which is now the largest producer of African-print cloth in Zambia and also turns out cargo pants and T-shirts. With just less than 2,000 employees, the factory is the largest employer in town.
"Where other nationalities have shown reluctance to invest, the Chinese have come," said Albert Chifta, the Zambian deputy general manager of the Mulungushi Textiles plant, which flies China's red flag and Zambia's green flag out front.
But after nearly a decade in town, the plant's salaries are low, he acknowledged, and Chinese bosses still hold all the top management jobs.
"Zambians are always deputies and will stay that way unless political will changes," he said.
`We have no other options'
Last November, union workers at the plant struck for a week to try to boost salaries, which they say are barely enough to pay a family's rent, much less other costs, and to demand better safety clothing against the harsh chemicals used in the factory. In the end, threatened with being fired, they returned to work without winning any concessions.
"We have no other options of work," acknowledged Chirwa, the chairman of the union.
Safety concerns have been an issue at other Chinese plants in Zambia as well. In April, 49 miners were killed in an accident at the Chinese-run Chambishi copper mine, the worst mining accident of the year in Zambia.
"The Chinese don't put safety and environmental concerns as that important," said Imboela of the University of Zambia. "They do things faster and cheaper than the West. They don't care about human rights."
Zambian analysts also complain about Chinese businessmen's preference for cutting quiet deals with the government, a problem in a nation where corruption is rampant, and about Chinese traders flocking to Lusaka with cut-rate Chinese goods and driving local shop owners out of business.
But overall, "the growth of China is a big blessing for us," said Francis Chigumta, a development expert at the University of Zambia. "As long as Taiwan is separate and China is growing, we expect to enjoy these benefits."
