As China fortifies its economic ties with resource rich states in Africa, offering lucrative investments, particularly in the realm of infrastructure, in exchange for raw materials, Western accounts of this emerging relationship have taken on a more skeptical tone. Occidental representations of a nascent third world cosmopolitanism have largely centered on the negative prospects of this relationship and particularly on labour exploitation, dependency and more implicitly, the dystopia of a Sinocentric Africa. The discourse on contemporary Sino-African relations has been carried out in an excessively foreboding tone, extrapolating a neo-Imperialist catastrophe for Africa beyond the age of Western hegemony. However, what is most problematic about these accounts is their lack of reflexivity, in particular, the absence of investigation into the authors’ biases and interests. Selective omissions are made concerning the West’s involvement in modern Africa and the West’s colonial history in Africa as well as the civilisational anxiety which underlies the production of the said articles, facilitating the propagation of a historically de-contextualised, and yet politically charged, melodrama.

The omissions, made by contributors to U.S. American and European publications, should not be dismissed as trivial, but should be regarded as integral to an understanding of this discourse. Why does a discourse based largely on speculations and exaggerations of Chinese economic exploitation in Africa take precedence over the more immediate concern of the consistent trajectory of colonisation and subsequent neo-imperialism on behalf of the West? How can the cultural forces of a civilization which has produced the Nama-Herero genocide, the Mahdiyya massacre and the atrocities of the Belgian Congo as well as having laid the foundations for the current regime of neo-colonial exploitation, posit the West as a neutral observer, standing back in fetishised awe at the misery of “the dark continent?” Surely the racial slurs uttered by Chinese labourers, which are referenced in The Economist’s recent article, must appear somewhat benign in comparison to the European colonial endeavour. Western Imperialism has gone as far as to abuse the West’s dominance in the sciences to produce the pseudo-scientific category of eugenics, which supposedly proved the biological inferiority of Africans as opposed to Whites and was used to justify a White Empire.

An unbalanced alarmism dominates the discourse on modern-day Chinese economic presence in Africa. With a convenient and consistent de-contextualisation, omitting the Occident’s historical role as the most influential actor in Africa, these articles appear to be benevolent — an appeal warning Africa from the dangers of an oriental superpower. Rather than taking these articles at face value, the position of its contributors should be more clearly investigated. It is perhaps, reasonable to assume that the leaders of the U.S. economy have an instrumental reason to fear Chinese ascendancy in Africa. Trade with a more remunerative partner threatens to intercept an established circuit of exploitation which has stifled any prospect for development in Africa and has forwarded all surplus to the metropoles of neo-Imperialism.

The rendition of the Chinese presence in the economy of African states is peppered with the implicit allusion to an emerging empire. It is interesting that a similar level of politicised and humanist anxiety cannot be shored up for the much more tangible contemporary reality of Eastern neo-Imperialism. This is because the authors of these accounts are not genuinely concerned with Africa at all, but with the decay of a eurocentric Africa. While the often exaggerated narrative of Chinese exploitation has taken centre stage in the political arena, accruing a level of international urgency, similar accounts of human rights abuses by Western corporations, such as child labour in the cocoa plantations in the Ivory Coast which deliver the raw ingredients to some of the most renowned brands do not cast doubt on the legitimacy of the Western trade relations in Africa, but on these practices alone.

China should not be afforded more leniency than the West if it indeed chooses to engage in neo-Imperialist activities. Rather, I suggest that economic exploitation should be tackled and addressed where it is most extensive, which of course is the exploitation which occurs on behalf of the Western powers. Though the economic ascendancy of China and the Global South appears to be gaining momentum, the alarmist prospect of a Sinocentric world order remains, for the time being, rather remote. The prospect of China becoming the world's largest economy, let alone an Empire, has yet to come to pass and I find that much of the material for our dystopias of what China may or may not do are based on what the West has done and will continue to do during the foreseeable future. Thus, the anxiety over what is happening as a result of China’s increasingly cosmopolitan economy is more likely to be less about whether injustices are being committed and more about who is committing them.