China is financing the construction of four coal-fired power plants in southern Africa, despite its climate pledge in September to quit supporting such infrastructure overseas. But the new facilities taking shape in South Africa and Zimbabwe are just a few of Beijing’s massive investments in airports, railway lines and other national infrastructure on the African continent. 

Many countries have been eager for the investment, but mounting levels of debt over the past five years are raising doubts about the long-term prospects for more expensive infrastructure projects.

China committed to lending African countries $153 billion from 2000-2019, but that pace of lending may be slowing down. Chinese loan commitments dropped by 30% in 2019 when compared with the previous year, according to the China-Africa Research Initiative at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. The research looks at loan commitments which get “disbursed to borrowers as projects are implemented.”

In Zambia for example, Chinese financiers committed $10.3 billion in loans from 2000-2010.Since 2000, Zambia has only repaid some $1.2 billion to Chinese lenders. 

Uganda now owes China $200 million for its only international airport, fanning fears that China could seize it. Both countries have rejected speculation in African media outlets of a Chinese takeover.

Loan repayment measures

Neighboring Kenya had received a $4.5 billion loan to build a railway from Nairobi to the port city of Mombasa, and China indicates it will redo the terms after a committee of the African country’s parliament found that operating losses and debt to Chinese banks were straining taxpayers.

Some analysts have warned that opaque lending terms means China could eventually seize infrastructure should countries struggle to meet repayments

U.S. and British officials say, “debt traps,” where countries cannot raise enough money to repay China’s loans, are structured to give Beijing leverage over time. Last month, the head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, Richard Moore, in an interview with BBC Radio 4 said Beijing can acquire “significant ports which have the potential to become naval facilities etcetera.”

Sri Lanka earlier this year passed legislation that critics say will give China control over a key deep-water port that Beijing financed.

But that has not happened so far in Africa, where Chinese diplomats reject seizures are a part of Beijing’s strategy.

“Not a single project in Africa has ever been “confiscated” by China because of failing to pay Chinese loans. On the contrary, China firmly supports and is willing to continue our efforts to improve Africa’s capacity for home-driven development,” stated the Chinese Embassy in Uganda. 

Instead of seizing assets, Beijing will likely extend deadlines for loan repayment or rework payback terms such as interest rates, analysts told VOA. Those measures would avert takeovers of the infrastructure itself and in turn preserve China’s reputation in Africa where trade and lending have bested its superpower rival in dollar terms.

China will probably “keep kicking the can down the road” until creditors find the means to settle the loans, Bulelani Jili, an African studies Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University, told VOA.

To confiscate any assets, including minerals, would “confirm people’s initial biases of China as a neocolonial actor,” Jili said, and risk upsetting diplomatic ties with “some of the few friends that China has on the global stage.”

“From the China side, it’s about getting access to new possible markets and expanding both economic activity — also the diplomatic relation,” he said.

Chinese loan concerns

China encourages lending to Africa in search of high returns on investments and a global reputation as a supporter of poor countries, said Edward Miguel, Oxfam professor in Environmental Resource Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. It is trying to “equal the U.S.” as a donor country, he said.

However, China differs from other international lenders and donors mainly for its relative lack of transparency that raises questions in Africa as well as in the West, Miguel believes.

Unlike loans from western governments or international lending bodies like the World Bank, which require labor and environmental safeguards on financed projects, China’s aid and loans to Africa have been described as “no strings attached,” which has been attractive for many countries.

 But African nations, especially with economies slipping because of the impacts of COVID-19, face increasing trouble paying back loans, said Hannah Ryder, senior associate with the Africa Program at the U.S. think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“China and other countries are becoming more sophisticated in bargaining with one another,” wrote Deborah Brautigam of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and Harvard Business School’s Meg Rithmire in a joint article. 

Residents in Dakar, Senegal, where the 500-person Forum on China-Africa Cooperation meeting took place on November 29-30, want more Chinese-funded infrastructure but without debt levels like those of the 1990s, Ryder noted.

Chinese creditors are expected to lend less money to Africa going forward and more carefully analyze the projects those loans support, experts say. Loans have already “sobered down” [tapered off] from a peak in 2014, Jili said.

Commitments for loans and other investments made at the China-Africa Cooperation meeting came to $40 billion, one-third less than the $60 billion made at the same conference in 2018.

Lenders may calibrate loans based on predictions of a post-pandemic future when African countries have more cash, said Yun Sun, co-director of the East Asia program at the Stimson Center in Washington. Another option, she said, is to ensure Chinese equity from future projects as repayment for older loans, she said in a VOA interview.

“It’s politically risky, because although it’s not an equity-asset swap, it smells a lot like some sort of swap, and [that] China is exploiting Africa’s weak position, so I don’t think it will happen in the immediate future and in fact this debt restructuring is also taking quite a while,” Sun said.

China is becoming more confident all the while in setting up international public-private partnerships, though many African countries still worry about a repeat of the debt crisis in the 1980s and 1990s when nations could not pay off debt, Ryder says in an African Business commentary. International organizations ultimately wrote off that wave of unaffordable debt with conditions including opening “their economies to international trade, liberalize their currencies and drastically cut costs in exchange for loans,” wrote Peter Fabricius in the Institute for Security Studies.

Fast forward to the present, with loans from China, African countries, Miguel said, often end up asking “what did we agree to do” and “how much do we owe” China.

 
…

The U.S. Congress moved one step closer this week to making the United States the first country to ban the import of goods produced by Uyghur slave labor.

After more than a year of negotiations, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act passed the House of Representatives unanimously late Tuesday and is poised to move quickly through the Senate and to President Joe Biden’s desk.

Once it becomes law, the bill will ban all imports from China’s Xinjiang region into the United States unless companies can show the U.S. government “clear and convincing evidence” their supply chains have not used the labor of ethnic Muslims enslaved in Chinese camps.

Beijing describes the camps as “re-education” facilities aimed at combating terrorism.

Democratic Representative Jim McGovern and Republican Senator Marco Rubio reached a compromise agreement on bills they had each passed in their respective chambers over the past year. The White House said Tuesday it would work closely with Congress to implement the measure.

“We agree with Congress that action can and must be taken to hold the People’s Republic of China accountable for genocide and human rights abuses and to address forced labor in Xinjiang,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement ahead of House passage of the bill.

The renewed push to hold China accountable for rights abuses comes ahead of the February 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. The U.S. declared Chinese treatment of the Uyghurs genocide earlier this year and announced a diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympics last week. Earlier this month, an independent tribunal found Chinese senior leadership holds “primary responsibility” for acts of genocide against the Uyghurs.

China condemned House passage of the bill early Wednesday, describing the U.S. as hypocritical for not addressing forced labor within its own borders.  

“China firmly opposes the interference by the U.S. Congress in China’s internal affairs under the pretext of Xinjiang-related issues. By cooking up lies and making troubles on such issues, some U.S. politicians are seeking to contain China and hold back China’s development through political manipulation and economic bullying in the name of human rights,” China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Zhao Lijian, said in a press conference Wednesday.

Human rights groups praised the legislation and said it marked an important starting point for countries to address Chinese treatment of the Uyghurs.  

“It’s a signal to the rest of the world that the U.S. is actually going to take action on this,” Peter Irwin, senior program officer for advocacy and communications at the Uyghur Human Rights Project, told VOA.

“It can also set a template for other governments to pick this up and say we’re going to pass our own forced labor bill. For example, if the U.S. stops allowing in forced labor goods, then [Chinese] leaders shift their exports to Europe or to Canada. So having that template for other governments to pick up and actually pass these kinds of bills, that helps the U.S. — similar to the diplomatic boycott. The U.S. was first; other governments followed.”

The original 2020 Senate version of the bill, co-sponsored by Rubio and Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley, marked the first time a bill addressing Uyghur human rights was passed anywhere in the world.

U.S. companies Nike and Coca-Cola actively lobbied against earlier versions of the legislation. The Biden administration did come out in support of those versions, leading Rubio to claim the White House was holding back on his bill due to concerns from climate change envoy John Kerry. Irwin told VOA more than 40% of the world’s polysilicon supply comes from Xinjiang, a loss that would complicate the manufacture of solar cells and panels.

Rubio praised the compromise legislation in a statement Tuesday, saying, “The United States is so reliant on China that we have turned a blind eye to the slave labor that makes our clothes, our solar panels, and much more. That changes today. Our Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act will require businesses importing goods into the United States to prove that their supply chains are not tainted with slave labor. It is time to end our economic addiction to China.”  

The legislation marks a rare point of bipartisan agreement on Capitol Hill.

Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also praised the legislation, saying it marked an opportunity for the U.S. Congress to “continue to condemn and confront the CCP’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang and in the region and hold it accountable. If America does not speak out for human rights in China because of commercial interests, we lose all moral authority to speak out for human rights any place in the world,” Pelosi said in a statement ahead of the vote.
…

Торги на міжбанку станом на 12:25 відбувалися на рівні 27 гривень 22,5–24,5 копійки за долар
…

In Lebanon, a desperate economic situation has led to a rise in illegal logging. Local authorities are in a bind as they try to protect both a valuable ecological heritage and their own vulnerable residents. Jacob Russell reports from northern Lebanon. Producer: Marcus Harton.
…

Бюджет програми на період з 2021 по 2027 року складає 2,4 мільярда євро
…

Ф’ючерси на американську нафту West Texas Intermediate (WTI) впали до менш як 70 доларів за барель, а фʼючерси на нафту Brent є меншими за 73 долари за барель
…

Nigeria has been recording massive growth in its information technology sector, but only one-fifth of IT workers are women, according to government figures. Aid groups are trying to help women and girls enter the IT world by teaching them about blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. Timothy Obiezu reports from Abuja. Camera: Emeka Gibson.
…

За словами ініціаторів документу, він спрямований на «на надання податкових стимулів ІТ-індустрії»
…

Всього таких постанов було 23, частину з них депутати відхилили 3 грудня
…

Суд закрив провадження в цій справі, ідеться в повідомленні регуклятора
…