We Love China

I arrived in Sierra Leone in June 2005, at the height of the rainy season. Mud washed down the pot-holed streets of the capital, Freetown, and knots of beggars, some without arms or legs, huddled under trees and against battered shop-fronts. It was a fortnight before the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, where Bob Geldof and Bono were to celebrate a huge increase in aid to Africa, but in the Bintumani Hotel no-one spoke of this. Gusts of rain-filled wind blew through the hotel’s porch to set the large red lanterns swinging. Cardboard cut-outs of Chinese children in traditional dress had been stuck on the windows. The management had just celebrated Chinese New Year.

It was my first visit to Sierra Leone in more than twenty years’ reporting from Africa, and I was to make a film not about the normal issues covered by British television — orphans, war victims, corruption — but about something few outside Africa seemed to have noticed: the rapidly growing influence of China in the continent.

The hotel’s manager, Yang Zhou, was pleased to show me round, helped by his spiky-haired young translator who introduced himself as Maxwell. While Chinese businessmen stick to their real names, Chinese translators in Sierra Leone give themselves English names to ease communication with Africans and visiting Europeans.

The Beijing Urban Construction Group, which is owned by the Chinese government, started to rebuild the Bintumani Hotel even before Sierra Leone’s civil war ended in 2002. The wall opposite the manager’s office had been decorated with glossy photographs of China’s economic progress: one showed the Three Gorges Dam, another a group of pretty young Chinese women throwing their mortar boards in the air to celebrate graduation. The captions were in Chinese and English, as was the sign for the toilet which featured a girl with pig-tails sticking out horizontally from her head and the word ladie’s. The clocks above reception gave the time in Beijing, Freetown, London, Paris and New York. London was out by an hour.

‘Africa is a good environment for Chinese investment, because it’s not too competitive,’ Yang Zhou said as he ushered me into the Presidential Suite, the hotel’s best room. Shower: made in China. TV: made in China. Kettle: made in China. The doors to the rooms were designed for the Chinese as well as by them — the six-foot-four Danish cameraman with me had to stoop to get inside.

Sierra Leone epitomizes the British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s vision of Africa as a ‘scar on the conscience of the world’. By most calculations it is the poorest country on earth, with seventy per cent of the population living in poverty. UN troops keep the peace, after a brutal conflict over power and resources in which child soldiers amputated people's arms and legs with machetes, and rape was widespread. Sierra Leone, a former British colony, is one of the largest recipients of British aid, but the benefit is hard to see. Few homes have electricity or running water, and sixty per cent of young men are unemployed.

Most European companies abandoned Sierra Leone long ago, but where Africa’s traditional business partners see only difficulty, the Chinese see opportunity. They are the new pioneers in Africa, and — seemingly unnoticed by aid planners and foreign ministries in Europe — they are changing the face of the continent. Forty years ago, Chinese interests in Africa were ideological. They built the TanZam railway as a way of linking Tanzania to Zambia while bypassing apartheid South Africa. Black and white footage shows Chinese workers in wide-brimmed straw hats laying sleepers, and a youthful President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia waving his white handkerchief as he mounted the first train. As an emblem of solidarity, China built stadiums for football matches and political rallies in most African countries which declared themselves socialist. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Middle Kingdom withdrew to concentrate on its own development, but in 2000 the first China–Africa Forum, held in Beijing, signalled renewed interest in Africa. Now, the Chinese are the most voracious capitalists on the continent and trade between China and Africa is doubling every year.

On the outskirts of Freetown, on the site of an abandoned centre for disabled refugees, the privately owned Chinese company, Henan Guoji, has created the Guoji Industrial Entry Zone, a small complex of workshops and factories. In the city centre, a new multi-storey government office-block, military headquarters, and refurbished stadium are all the work of the Chinese. The British say future aid will depend on Sierra Leone’s progress towards democracy. China, which follows a policy of 'non-interference' in African politics, and is scarcely in a position to tell any other country to be democratic, has nonetheless built the modernistic, brown bunker tucked into a hillside which serves as the country's new parliament.

Xu Min Zheng (translator: Lucy), the Henan Guoji representative in Freetown, told me that his company was following the Chinese government's injunction to ‘Go Global’. The first part of the twenty-first century is dubbed ‘the period of strategic opportunity’. Chinese companies are preparing themselves to become multinationals, and Africa is their proving ground. ‘The Chinese are very diligent,’ said Mr Zheng, who wore a jacket and tie despite the humidity. ‘We are good at learning, and our equipment and raw materials are cheap.’ Many companies bring even their labour force from China. Africans watch in surprise as buildings are erected in weeks. (‘The Chinese don’t seem to rest,’ Sierra Leone’s Information Minister told me. ‘We could learn from that.’) Managers and translators live in barracks-style accommodation. No spouses, no children, none of the comfort and expense Western expatriates demand.

‘I never thought my life would be so exciting,’ Lucy the translator said. ‘My mother wants me to go back to Beijing and get a boyfriend and have a child, but I want to be here for a few years. Then maybe I’ll get to go somewhere else in Africa or even to Britain. With a company like Henan Guoji, if you speak English, you can go anywhere.’