NEED TO SHIFT SECURITY FOCUS IN AFRICA REFLECTED BY FILM
Evacuation drama tops box office as Beijing aims to protect people, investments and interests abroad
The nation’s film box office champion during last week’s National Day holiday was inspired by the true story of a mission to rescue tens of thousands of Chinese citizens after war broke out in Libya.
Homecoming, directed by Rao Xiaozhi and starring Zhang Yi and Wang Junkai, tells a tale of two diplomats who lead citizens home from a fictional rebel-controlled country in North Africa.
The real event the film is based on marked a turning point in Beijing’s response to conflict in Africa. In 2011, China evacuated 36,000 of its citizens after Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was killed by rebel forces following a Nato-backed revolution.
It remains the country’s largest non-combatant evacuation operation to date.
Since then, Beijing has focused on improving the security of its people and interests in Africa. Most of the nationals evacuated during the Libyan civil war were working on multibillion-dollar projects, largely consisting of railway and petroleum contracts.
Observers say as China’s role in Africa has expanded, it has also become more entangled in the continent’s domestic affairs and conflicts, blurring the lines on whether the non-interference policy still stands.
Paul Nantulya, a research associate at the Africa Centre for Strategic Studies at the National Defence University in Washington, said the increasing engagement in crisis management in Africa posed complications for Beijing’s long-standing policy of non-interference in the internal affairs of another country. He said the vast majority of African conflicts were internal, meaning China could not wade into them without raising questions about its commitment to the policy.
“China in recent years – and especially after the Belt and Road Initiative took off – found itself playing some kind of role in internal crisis management and has scrambled to find a justification for stretching its principle of ‘non-interference’, which has become very elastic in my view,” Nantulya said.
He said Beijing’s engagement was motivated by immediate economic and security concerns as conflicts directly threatened its economic assets, resource extraction activities and personnel. Some of the countries affected by coups, civil wars and insurgencies are sources of essential minerals such as cobalt, copper and bauxite.
Beijing has for example deployed criminal investigators to help halt kidnappings in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which supplies 60 per cent of China’s cobalt demand. The country is plagued by a volatile security situation, especially in the eastern provinces of North Kivu and South Kivu, where the Congolese army is fighting a rebel movement.
Tim Zajontz, research fellow at the centre for international and comparative politics at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, said China’s growing longterm investments in various sectors faced security challenges, especially in regions with weak governance or protracted conflict.
Beijing has pursued a dual strategy to protect its economic interests in these situations, he added.
“It actively beefs up African governments’ security apparatuses, while simultaneously fostering the growing presence of Chinese private security firms on the continent to secure Chinese investments,” Zajontz said.
He said in light of intensifying geopolitical tensions and competition between China and Western powers, it was rational for Beijing to increase its security footprint in African subregions that were of particular importance, such as the Horn of Africa and West Africa.
In June, China organised a peace conference in the Horn of Africa, where the Tigray conflict in Ethiopia has claimed thousands of lives. Special envoy Xue Bing has also visited the region several times to meet leaders.
In 2017, China established its first overseas military base in Djibouti near the Bab el-Mandeb Strait between the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea to enable it to respond to emergencies or evacuations quickly.
“China has decided not to remain a passive onlooker in African conflicts,” said Seifudein Adem, an Ethiopian global affairs professor at Doshisha University in Japan.
Adem said China had played a constructive role in mediating conflicts between and within African states and in management during the post-conflict phase.
According to Adem, this has sparked a competition between the “Euro-American” approach to conflict resolution, which has been tried again and again, and the Chinese way, which has yet to be tried in the Horn of Africa.
Lukas Fiala, coordinator of the China Foresight project at the London School of Economics, said China’s growing involvement in African security reflected its willingness to help ease the effects of instability, crime and conflict on Chinese citizens and companies.
He said under Xi Jinping, China had tried to integrate security cooperation under the auspices of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation and tied capacity building in security-related sectors to broader cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing’s plan to grow global trade.
He said while China’s actions in places like the Horn of Africa and the DRC did suggest a more nuanced public interpretation of the principle of non-interference, “it’s important to note that non-interference has never fully existed in practice”.
“China has long shaped domestic politics in Africa and across the Global South, for instance, by insisting on the one-China principle as a prerequisite for diplomatic relations,” Fiala said.
In the future, “we may see a growing emphasis on security cooperation in line with Xi Jinping’s Global Security Initiative and the growing willingness to use security partnerships to consolidate existing diplomatic ties with African countries”, he said.
However, John Calabrese, head of the Middle East-Asia Project at American University in Washington, said he did not believe that Chinese engagement in Africa necessarily contradicted the “non-interference” principle.
“Why is China deploying investigators and partnering with local law enforcement? It is to protect its commercial interests and nationals, in recognition of the fact that local authorities seem ill-equipped to do so,” Calabrese said.
Whether this was “interference” in host countries’ domestic affairs depended on whether local partners invited and approved these activities or simply acquiesced under pressure or financial inducement, he said.
Regardless, Calabrese said these activities were likely to continue because Beijing appeared increasingly concerned about access to raw materials.
China has decided not to remain a passive onlooker in African conflicts
SEIFUDEIN ADEM, ACADEMIC