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Chinese traders are playing two roles. On the negative side, they are competing with other traders. In Tanzania for example, Chinese traders are sitting on the pavement next to the Tanzanian traders and laying out their groundnuts, speaking Swahili, calling customers to come buy their groundnuts. And this has happened in a lot of countries. To see a Chinese person there... people are not comfortable and the same applies in small shops.

What the Chinese are saying is that there is a lot different ways to develop, and it doesn’t all have to be by Washington consensus. Business people have new partners. A lot of African traders have been going to China and picking up Chinese goods and services and bringing them back. What’s been happening in some parts of Africa is that traders have been going to China and looking at their factories and say, This is not difficult to do. And they have been seeking Chinese technical assistance to help them set up factories - I have seen this happen in Nigeria for instance.

The high level of support for civil society that we witnessed in the 1990s has begun to decline. Over the past five years, donor agencies have begun shifting more towards supporting governments directly, which has led to a reduction in the amount of aid flowing directly to CSOs (civil society organisations).

Some of the CSOs that attended the dialogue with me were actually defunct as donors had booted them of the funding list due to financial misappropriations.

From the perspective of the Chinese government, the role of the civil society is to provide welfare gaps and to fill the holes where state support is diminishing, and not necessarily to become a tool to promote democratisation or to focus on being a government watchdog.

She said a major strength of Chinese aid was its orientation to recipient priorities such as infrastructure (telecommunications, energy, roads) and productive sector investments (agriculture).     "Furthermore, Chinese assistance is considered to be relatively predictable assistance because it is disbursed on schedule within the intended financial year."

Jamie Monson, a historian of the Tazara line, writes lucidly about this strategy: To construct a railroad was to command a region—the most famous manifestation of this being Cecil Rhodes’s dream of linking “Cape to Cairo” through a continent-wide rail connection. To control a region in turn was to keep rivals out, or at least to restrict their trade participation through tariffs and other regulatory interventions.

I met with Kalej Nkand, director of the Congolese Central Bank for Katanga province.

In polished French, he told me that Congolese desperation had enabled the worst aspects of the early Chinese copper rush. “Most of these arrangements were negotiated at a time of great difficulty for the Congo because of the war,” he said. “It was too easy for people to come, get their product, and take off.” He described the big new Chinese package as “bait,” with “terms that were a bit unconventional,” but nonetheless appealing to a war-torn and bankrupt country. For the rest of our conversation, Kalej studiously avoided criticizing the deal, often leaning forward and rocking slightly with his hands clasped before his face as he weighed his words. In Congo it was commonly said that President Kabila had bet his presidency on relations with China; for an official to say anything critical could be career-ending, or worse.

Everywhere I traveled in Africa, people spoke in defense of conditionality—the attachment of good-governance strings to loans from the West. “Many people look at Western conditions as a good thing, because nowadays so many things can be discussed openly, unlike the past—like corruption, for example,” said John Kulekana, a veteran Tanzanian journalist. “There are no more demigods here, and that is because of the growth of civil society, which has received lots of help from the West. Former ministers are called to account for their behavior. We are building accountability.”

Many African intellectuals bridle at Western criticism of China’s African full-court press. The West, they say, has long patronized their continent, and since the end of the Cold War, has subjected it to outright neglect. And all of that is true. But the question remains: How does their continent overcome a pattern of extractive foreign engagement—beginning with its first contact with Europe, when gold or slaves were acquired in exchange for cloth and trinkets—that is still discernible today?

But Hilsum found that this was precisely what worried local anti-corruption campaigners, among them Zainab Bangura of Sierra Leone's National Accountability Group.

The South African trade union federation COSATU has called for restriction of Chinese imports and has urged retailers to stock a minimum of 75% of locally made goods.

t would be wrong to suggest that China’s impact only raises problems, or is merely a re-run of past imperialisms. The fact that Western corporations and government now face competition can give African states more room for manoeuvre, and an alternative to accepting the dictates of the IMF. Naturally, NGOs, human rights campaigners and trade unionists have concentrated on cases where this room for manoeuvre has been exploited by repressive regimes seeking to avoid pressure exerted on Western governments to impose some minimal human rights or environmental conditions. But that does not mean that the ‘Chinese option’ could not also be exploited to widen the room for all African states, not only those abusing human rights. In this respect, China’s willingness to advance a loan to Angola regardless of IMF conditions could prove a beneficial precedent in other cases. And China’s willingness to invest in sectors which Western investors have neglected, such as cotton production in Zambia, should be welcomed even if China sees them as ‘loss-leaders’ for more directly self-interested involvement.

African civil society from researching and advancing a package of measures which could be put forward as a necessary conditional component of Chinese investment packages. These could include training prorammes, technology transfer, the fostering of local management skills, and the reservation of a proportion of Chinese investment and infrastructure projects for local firms and labour.

The two sides noted that achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) remains an urgent and arduous task. The two sides hold that the current international financial crisis has made the realization of the MDGs more difficult, particularly for African countries which face bigger challenges.

The two sides reaffirmed their respect for the principle of universality of human rights, with no prejudice to the cultural and social particularities with regard to perceiving and applying the concept, and with priority on the right to development. The two sides oppose politicization and double standards in the field of human rights.

broaden their economic cooperation, which is currently dominated by trade in goods, so that it becomes multi-pronged to include trade in goods, investment, trade in services, technology and project contracting.

The Chinese Government offered to cancel due debts of interest-free government loans that will mature by the end of 2009 owed by all heavily-indebted poor countries and the LDCs in Africa having diplomatic relations with China.

Noting the important role of technology transfer in enhancing African countries’ capacity-building, China will encourage and promote technology transfer to Africa in various cooperation areas, in particular, the transfer of advanced applicable technologies with a major impact on Africa’s economic and social development, such as technologies for drinking water, agriculture, clean energy and health.

Former NNPC head Shehu Ladan revealed that the CSCEC-led consortium would be operated by China holding 80 per cent of shares, until costs were recovered. Given the opacity of accounting, especially concerning mega-developments, this is likely to become a major fault-line replicating Nigeria's long history with supply and demand-side corruption.

‘The public needs to be informed about when CSCEC expects to complete the recovery of its investment,’ said Nnimmo Bassey, director of Nigeria's Environmental Rights Action movement (ERA) in an interview. ‘The deal as reported appears open-ended. There is no estimated termination date when CSCEC will handover facilities to the NNPC.’

China's preferred Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) model accompanying their resource-for-infrastructure system, is often successfully realised in African countries, despite governments being shortchanged when tenders (and loans) are recycled back to China. The Nigerian government will have no shares and make no contributions whether through financing or in the construction and management phase.

Recently, a multi-billion secretive deal between Trafigura, the Swiss-based commodity trader and one of three leading oil traders, also infamous for dumping toxic waste in Africa, signed a deal with the NNPC allegedly valued at $3 billion, swopping 60,000 bpd or 27 per cent of overall NNPC production, for open-ended refined products.

‘Right now, Nigerians are not getting value for their oil anyway,’ said Brautigam. ‘If the government can agree to allow a Chinese company to build and manage these refineries for an extended period of time, they may finally be able to say good-bye to the days of long lines at petrol stations.’