Is China Really Building 100 Dams in Africa?

I've just seen a short article on the website of the Oxford University China-Africa Network stating that Beijing is involved in "more than 100 dams" in Africa.

Really?

Here's what the author, Dr. Harry Verhoeven, says: 

"Beijing especially is using its formidable technical expertise in hydro-infrastructure and immense foreign reserves to resurrect dam-building overseas: in half of all African countries, from the Sudanese desert and the Ethiopian lowlands to the rivers of Algeria and Gabon, Chinese engineers are involved in the planning, heightening and building of more than 100 dams. The tens of billions of US dollars and thousands of megawatts involved in these projects have so far remained off the radar in the China-Africa debate, but are possibly more consequential for the future of the African continent than the exports of oil, copper and other valuable resources."(emphasis added)

Verhoeven cites a 2009 publication as his source for this statement: Michael Kugelman (ed.), Land Grab? The Race for the World's Farmland. Washington DC: Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, 2009. Verhoeven doesn't provide a page number, but I searched through this online publication for "dams" and "100" and found nothing relevant to this claim. Sources aside, this claim is problematic for several reasons.

It's true that there has been a resurgence of interest in building hydropower dams in Africa, and that Chinese banks and construction companies are part of this. (This interest has not been "off the radar" however. I wrote about it in The Dragon's Gift. Peter Bosshard at International Rivers has been following this trend and wrote about it for Pambazuka.)

International Rivers recently produced the 2nd edition of a report on Chinese interest in dam building. It is probably their database of media reports that is the ultimate source for this statement. Yet International Rivers has also been prone to exaggeration on this issue. I found this with the spin that accompanied their earlier report on Chinese "dam building".

In 2010, International Rivers released a list of (only) 25 dam projects that were said to have Chinese involvement, in Africa, as of 2008 (map to right).  Although the map and list implied that these were current and active cases, this is what I found (and blogged here on January 28, 2011), on looking into each case: 

1. Four were Chinese foreign aid projects, usually quite small, completed between 1982 and 1996.
2. Three involved repairs or expansions of hydropower plants (i.e. new turbines, etc.), not dams. 
3. Ten appear at the present moment to have been MOUs or expressions of interest that went nowhere. 
4. Three seemed to have construction contracts signed recently & appeared to have financing lined up, but hadn't started construction & so could still fall apart (Ethiopia-Neshi; Togo-Adjarala] 
5. As of January 2011 only 6 of the listed projects were dams currently under construction or completed recently (Ethiopia-Tekeze; Ghana-Bui; Congo-Imboulou; Sudan-Merowe; Botswana-Dikgatlhong; Gabon-Grand Poubara).

It does no service to our understanding of this important issue to create yet another stylized picture that appears to be way out of proportion to the reality. 

If you write about Chinese involvement in building dams in Africa, why not spend a little time and effort to dig into these cases and come up with numbers that you can stand behind?  Remember what Steven Mufson and John Pomfret, former Washington Post Beijing bureau chief, wrote on February 28, 2010: “inflating the challenge from China could be just as dangerous as underestimating it.” I got that quotation from International Rivers, by the way, and send them a tip of the hat.

Note: This blog posting was slightly revised on January 8, 2012. I removed some snarky language that unfairly generalized about advocacy NGOs. I am impressed by the new work being done at International Rivers and their efforts to push for accuracy.  Anyone reading this blog should also see the comments section for a robust response and explanation from the author, Dr. Harry Verhoeven, who stepped up to the plate to provide more information about his research, and from Peter Bosshard at International Rivers.

Being a Constructive Critic: "China's Growing Role in African Peace and Security"

photocredit: japanfocus.org

On being a "constructive critic":  Saferworld, a UK-based non-governmental organization, has just released their report on China's Growing Role in African Peace and Security. They sent me a copy last week.

I read the Executive Summary, which seems overall to be a balanced and helpful treatment. I'm not (at all) an expert in the security area: I always recommend Ian Taylor's excellent work. However, the report frames Chinese security engagement within Chinese engagement more broadly, and here there are a few mistakes. Below, my comments to the authors:

It looks good! There were a few areas where I saw some room for improvement:

p. 1  "China ... has started to deliver development assistance..."

As you know, I'm sure, China "started" to deliver aid to sub-Saharan Africa around 1960. Recently aid has increased, but it's still fairly modest and not new. This is important because it helps dispel the myth that China just arrived as part of a desperate search for resources. This engagement is much more complex.

p. ii. "China has developed close relationships with African regimes that the international community, or more specifically, Western countries, only engage
with in a manner that is conditional on improvements in governance."

Perhaps you mean Western governments only provide aid "in a manner that is conditional on improvements in governance"? (even this is debatable: see Egypt for example...). Western companies have lots of engagement except when specifically banned, which is extremely rare (Sudan). And Western governments "engage" with all sorts of poorly-governed and/or non-democratic countries: Angola, Nigeria; Egypt; Chad; DRC; Guinea; Equatorial Guinea ... and even Sudan and Zimbabwe.

One statement is quite inaccurate:

p. ix  "As part of China’s wider participation in Africa’s infrastructure development, Chinese finance and companies had been involved in the construction of 25 dams in Africa by 2008."

I've seen the report you cite. The authors did a good job of compiling media reports. However, the figure of 25 is far from the real story.

Here's how these 25 projects break down:  4 refer to projects, usually quite small, completed between 1982 and 1996; 3 refer to repairs or expansions of hydropower plants (i.e. new turbines, etc.), not dams; 2 have construction contracts signed recently & seem to have financing lined up, but haven't started construction & so could still fall apart (Ethiopia-Neshi; Togo-Adjarala); 10 appear at the present moment to have been MOUs or expressions of interest that went nowhere; as of 2011 only 6 of the listed projects are dams currently under construction or completed recently (Ethiopia-Tekeze; Ghana-Bui; Congo-Imboulou; Sudan-Merowe; Botswana-Dikgatlhong; Gabon-Grand Poubara).

Some of these points are small, but as you know, as a constructive critic, it's important to present things as accurately as possible -- it shows you know what you're talking about, and this matters for Chinese readers as well as us in the West.

Evaluating the Impact of China-Financed Power Projects on Electricity Access

This guest blogpost is by SAIS PhD student Keyi Tang 

Photo credit: ZSM

In the last decade, China has overtaken the World Bank and the African Development Bank to become the biggest financier of infrastructure projects in sub-Saharan Africa. The CARI loan database now housed at Boston University provides extensive data on these projects. Yet little research has been done on how Chinese loans affect the social welfare of African countries. Africa is the region with the highest percent of people who do not have access to electricity. Electric power is the second largest sub-sector in Chinese lending, making up 20 percent of all loans (transport makes up 54 percent). 

Has Chinese lending improved the access to electricity for Africans? This blogpost proposes a research idea that attempts to answer this question using the SAIS-CARI China-Africa Loan Data and other databases. We hope other researchers will take up this challenge.

Research period: 2010-2019

Although SAIS-CARI documents China-financed energy projects in Africa since 2000, the bulk of the loan projects are recorded as being signed post-2010. A focus on the 2010-2019 period could allow a higher number of samples, which translates to more observable events. 

Unit of analysis:

Because the SAIS-CARI data is at the country level, the easiest way to answer the question is to look at the impacts of China-financed energy projects in different African countries at an aggregate level. Researchers can also use the subnational unit of analysis by searching the subnational location of these projects through Google Map.

Databases

Variables	Name	Database	Note
Dependent Variable	Proportion of population with access to electricity	International Energy Agency	Access to electricity by country and year, 2000-2019
Main Independent Variable	China-financed energy projects	SAIS-CARI China-Africa Loan Database	China’s loan to Africa, by country, year, and sector, 2000-2019
Control Variables	OECD countries’ bilateral finance to African countries’ energy projects	OECD Development Finance Data	By recipient country, donor, year, and sector, 2010-2019
	Spatial distribution of population and population density	Worldpop	Other socio-economic and geographical indicators that might influence access to electricity through channels other than investment on energy infrastructure.
	Armed conflicts location and event data	ACLED Database
	Nighttime lights	VIIRS Data
	GDP per capita, PPP, by country and year	The World Bank
	Mines in African district	Data in Space project
	International commodity price by year	The IMF Primary Commodity Prices

 

Empirical strategy:

The following econometric methods are generally applied to evaluate the impact of large-scale infrastructure. Researchers can check the literature below.

a. Ordinary least square (OLS):  Humphrey & Michaelowa (2019)

b. Difference-in-differences: Martorano et al. (2020), Tang & Shen (2020)

c. Instrumental variables: Duflo & Pande (2007)

If you do undertake this research, send us a copy at sais-cari@jhu.edu!

Helpful References:

Duflo, Esther and Rohini Pande. (2007). Dams. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 122, Issue 2, Pages 601–646.

Humphrey, Chris and Katharina Michaelowa. (2019). China in Africa: Competition for traditional development finance institutions? World Development, Volume 120, Pages 15-28.

Martorano, B., Metzger, L., & Sanfilippo, M. (2020). Chinese development assistance and household welfare in Sub-Saharan Africa. World Development, 129, 104909.

Tang, Keyi & Yingjiao Shen. (2020). Do China-financed dams in Sub-Saharan Africa improve the region's social welfare? A case study of the impacts of Ghana's Bui Dam. Energy Policy, Volume 136, 111062.

"The Zambezi Valley: China's First Agricultural Colony?" Fiction or Fact?

More than four years ago, Loro Horta, then a Ph.D. candidate at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) in Singapore, posted a series of stories including "The Zambezi Valley: China's First Agricultural Colony?" (1) on the website of the Center for Strategic International Studies (CSIS), repeated in "Food Security in Africa: China's New Rice Bowl," at the Jamestown Foundation China Brief (2) making strong claims about Chinese interests in Mozambique agriculture: "China" wanted to grow rice in Mozambique to ship back to China, use Chinese farmers to do it, and had pledged $800 million toward this goal.

I read that commentary, as did many other people. It is regularly cited as a key example of Chinese interest in "land grabbing". It appears in an oft-cited review of land-grabbing published by the International Food Policy Research Institute (3) and was cited by an authoritative study of land-grabbing in Africa by a joint FAO-IFAD-IIED (4) team and a new study by two Standard Bank researchers (5). It is a major contributor to the belief that "China" wants to grow food in Africa to ship back home.

The problem: very little of what was written in this sensational commentary appears to be real.

Intrigued by the story, I made sure to include Mozambique in my field research for The Dragon's Gift. I went to Mozambique in the summer of 2009. Apparently, Horta did no fieldwork for this research (and mentions none in his references). None of the Mozambique experts I interviewed had been contacted by him. Horta provided no references to interviews in Mozambique or any news stories supporting these claims. I later wrote to Horta and asked him if he could provide any actual evidence for his claims. He replied that he couldn't find his source material or notes.

After I returned from Mozambique, I wrote about the lack of evidence for Horta's claims in a 2009 article for China Quarterly, and in The Dragon's Gift (6) Sigrid Ekman, a Norwegian researcher, later went to Mozambique to research this story for her master's thesis (7). She came up with the same conclusions: a lot of this story appears to have been fabricated -- or to put it more kindly, woven together out of rumors, mistakes, and a grain of interest.

Yet myths created in the internet age have a life of their own. Today, I received peer review comments on a small piece I wrote for IFPRI on China's agricultural engagement in Africa. One reviewer wanted me to be sure to take account of "Horta's research" in my piece. I only wish I had enough space to do so adequately in an IFPRI publication.

It's embarassing to take apart a student's paper in public. Usually we have the chance to do peer review in a more professional and discrete way before something makes its way to print. CSIS never had the Horta paper peer-reviewed. Nevertheless, this blog posting is way overdue.

First, Horta comments on China's "growing demand for food stuffs from Africa," providing as evidence China's increased general consumption of "seafood, rice, soybeans, sugar, cereals and other crops." However, between 2000 and 2009, no African country exported rice, soybeans, sugar or cereals to China (some did export seafood and sesame seeds). This doesn't seem to be very robust evidence of China's demand for food from Africa.

"China’s search for new land has led Beijing to aggressively seek large land leases in Mozambique over the past two years, particularly in its most fertile areas, such as the Zambezi valley in the north and the Limpopo valley in the south."

Did this really happen? Sigrid Ekman's study, summarized in a recent Mozambique political bulletin by Joseph Hanlon (8), "notes that the now abolished Zambeze valley office (Gabinete de Promoção do Vale de Zambêze, GPZ) tried hard to get Chinese investment and failed." So rather than China "aggressively" seeking large land leases, the Zambeze valley investment promotion office was aggressively courting Chinese investment.

"Chinese interest in the Zambezi valley started in mid-2006, when the Chinese state owned Exibank [sic] granted $2 billion in soft loans to the Mozambican government to build the Mpanda Nkua mega-dam on the stretch of the Zambezi in Tete province."

In fact, although discussions were underway on Chinese financing (China Eximbank) for the Mpanda Nkua dam, this project did not go forward. No Chinese bank has ever granted a loan for Mpanda Nkua.

"Since then, China has been requesting large land leases to establish Chinese-run mega-farms and cattle ranches. A memorandum of understanding was reported to have been signed in June 2007, allowing an initial 3,000 Chinese settlers to move to Zambezia and Tete provinces to run farms along the valley. A Mozambican official said the number could eventually grow to up to 10,000. However, the reports of this deal caused such an uproar that the Mozambique government was forced to dismiss the whole story as false."

Maybe it was false. In a 2007 story, Horta put the figure at 20,000. I tried to find out more about this in Mozambique. However, no one I interviewed in Mozambique recalled such an uproar. I could find no reports on the alleged memorandum of understanding or an "uproar" in the press (I hired a university student to go through four years of newspapers looking for any stories on Chinese engagement in land or agriculture) or in the memories of the dozens of people I interviewed across civil society, think tanks, journalists, the donors, and academia. The whole story began to sound fishy to me.

If Chinese investors wanted large land leases, they clearly could have signed some. After all, as a 2012 Oakland Institute study (9) showed, "Mozambique granted concessions to investors for more than 2.5 million hectares (ha) of land between 2004 and the end of 2009" almost entirely to European and South African investors -- there were no Chinese investors in their list.

"One thing seems to be certain: China is committed to transforming Mozambique into one of its main food suppliers, particularly for rice, the basic element of Chinese diet. An analysis of China’s activities in the valley in the past two years provides some strong indication of China’s long term intentions.

Following this statement, Horta has put together real facts about China's aid program and interest in building dams, roads, and modernizing harbors, and surmises that this interest "is clearly designed to maximize production and facilitate the rapid export of foodstuffs to China".

That's quite a leap. Chinese are interested in building infrastructure all around the continent, but I don't think one can conclude that this is evidence of a masterplan to feed China!

Horta then makes what I believe to be his most egregious claim:

"In early 2008, the Chinese government pledged to invest $800 million in modernizing Mozambican agriculture ..."

I have seen no evidence, anywhere, in Mozambique or outside, of this pledge. People were baffled when I asked about it. No one knew anything about it, even as a rumor. While I can often find the source of big mistakes, I haven't been able to track this down (11). The trail starts with Horta.

"...with the goal of boosting rice production from 100 000 tons to 500 000 tons a year in the next five years."

The goal of boosting rice production was Mozambique's goal, not China's. The amount mentioned here represents the gap between local demand and local production, at the time filled by imports. Which makes Horta's next statement all the more surprising:

"Mozambique’s increased rice production is clearly destined for export to the Chinese market, since the staple accounts for just a tiny fraction of the Mozambican diet."

Clearly, Horta didn't look up consumption and import statistics for rice in Mozambique (12).

"With this objective in mind, China is funding the establishment of an Advanced Crop Research Institute and several other small agricultural schools throughout the country."

Horta here uses as "evidence" for Chinese plans to make Mozambique into its rice bowl a real project -- the Umbeluzi/Boane agro-technology research and demonstration center, one of 20 China is building across Africa as part of its aid program.

"Over 100 Chinese agricultural specialists are currently in Mozambique, including teams from the Hunan Hybrid Rice Institute, China’s top institution in the field."

There is no evidence that I could find that China ever sent 100 agricultural specialists to Mozambique. I suspect Horta was mixing up China's pledge to send 100 agricultural specialists to Africa. It’s true that the Hunan Hybrid Rice Institute did send a team to Mozambique (13). They later decided to bid to run China's foreign-aid funded agro-technology demonstration center in Liberia, not Mozambique (14). I suspect their visit was connected to a decision about which project to bid on.

"Other major projects include the construction of numerous irrigation and canal networks in the valley."

I’m not sure what Horta was referring to here, but possibly it is the modest project in Gaza province operated by Hubei province (15), which also provided the company associated with China’s foreign aid-funded agro-technology demonstration center (see below). Hubei province has a twinning arrangement with Gaza province to develop 300 hectares to demonstrate the potential of irrigated rice to Mozambicans. As of 2009/2010 they had developed 35-40 hectares, and in 2010 they applied for more land (16).

"The lifting by the Chinese government of import tariffs for 400 Mozambican agricultural products, including rice, will further facilitate food exports to China."

China has lifted import tariffs on 400 products not for Mozambique alone but for all of Africa's low income countries. Rice is not on the list (17).

"The idea of moving thousands of Chinese settlers into the valley has caused great outrage locally, with many fearing the repetition of the dias negros (black days of oppression)."

Again, my research assistant and I could not find any Mozambican news reports on this "great outrage" nor did people I interviewed during my fieldwork recall any.

"The Chinese are now linking the implementation of major projects such as dam construction and the funding for the Catembe Bridge – an important project that will link the capital, Maputo, to the district of Catembe across the bay – to concessions on the land lease issue ... Instead of thousands of Chinese settlers, it’s now more probable that a few hundred or perhaps 1,000 Chinese will move into the valley in coming years. The Chinese will manage the large farms, operate and maintain the advanced agricultural equipment, and maintain the canals, while Mozambican labor will do most of the manual work."

These appear to be pure conjecture. No evidence is provided or references to interviews or new stories that would support these claims. And so on.

My point in writing this is not to argue that there has been no Chinese interest in Mozambican agricultural investment. There has been. In March 2006 a delegation from China did tour agricultural areas of Mozambique, although it’s not clear whether this was to look for investment or to find a suitable site for a promised agro-technology demonstration center (18). Maybe both.

The authors of the 2009 FAO/IIED/IFAD report (4) interviewed Chinese state-owned grain and oilseed trading company, COFCO, who told them they were "involved in discussions for a major land concession to grow rice and soybeans in Mozambique, though at present this deal has not progressed." This interest was real, if far more modest and ordinary than it appears in Horta’s writings. Another Mozambican researcher, Sergio Chichava, showed that between 2000 and 2009, five Chinese agricultural investment projects received approval from the Mozambique authorities (19). Among these was the aborted COFCO project, approved in 2005 at $6 million. The average size of the other four approved projects was only $615,000, and one of these was Hubei Lianfeng’s approved project, for just over $1 million (20).

None of this, however, supports the idea that “China” was intending to create an agricultural colony in Mozambique, or make the Zambezi Valley into China’s rice bowl. My take on this is that Horta, who was then a student, wove his paper out of bits of real things on the internet, spiced up by rumors and gossip. But if anyone has another take on this, or evidence (either way), please post. I'm interested in seeing it.

update: This blog post has been translated into Flemish on the Chinasquare.be website and appears also at the Flemish site Mondiaal Nieuws.  H/T to Frank Willems.

Horta has published a response to this story at the same CSIS website. For a deconstruction and critique of that response, see this posting by Sigrid Ekman, a Norwegian researcher who did months of fieldwork in Mozambique for her master's thesis.

Rather than respond point by point to Horta, I'll just note one thing. Horto begins by saying that he was not the first to circulate a report that "China" wanted to acquire land in the Zambezi Valley, but rather that a Chinese paper made this claim in May 2008. In fact, as I wrote above, it was Horta who first made this claim, writing in August 2007:  "In 2006, Beijing and Maputo signed a memorandum of understanding concerning the creation of a massive agricultural project in the Zambezi river valley area. Under this agreement, as many as 20,000 Chinese settlers may move into the valley to run large- to medium-scale farms destined to supply the ever more affluent Chinese market."

Horta promised to elaborate on his rebuttal of this critique in a longer article to be published by the South African Institute of International Affairs. No article has yet appeared, as of October 2014. Sigrid Ekman and I published a more elaborate version of our findings in May 2012 in African Affairs: Rumours and Realities of Chinese Agricultural Engagement in Mozambique.


Notes:

(1) http://csis.org/publication/zambezi-valley-chinas-first-agricultural-colony May 2008. Horta first made some of these claims in 2007: http://www.isn.ethz.ch/isn/Current-Affairs/Security-Watch-Archive/Detail/?id=53470&lng=en. Then, he said that "up to 20,000 Chinese" might move to the Zambezi Valley.

(2) http://www.jamestown.org/single/?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=35042 May 2009.

(3) http://www.ifpri.org/sites/default/files/bp013Table01.pdf April 2009.

(4) http://www.ifad.org/pub/land/land_grab.pdf 2009.

(5) https://m.research.standardbank.com/DocumentReader?docId=1671-E1AFB8F7AF0747A98326A4419C169FE0-1 November 2010.

(6) http://www.american.edu/sis/faculty/upload/Brautigam-Tang-CQ-final.pdf December 2009.

(7) Sigrid-Marianella Stensrud Ekman, “Leasing Land Overseas: A Viable Strategy for Chinese Food Security?” unpublished master’s thesis, Department of Economics, Fudan University, Shanghai, 2010.

(8) http://www.gg.rhul.ac.uk/Simon/GG3072/2011-67-3.pdf February 11, 2011.

(9)http://www.oaklandinstitute.org/sites/oaklandinstitute.org/files/OI_country_report_mozambique_0.pdf December 2011.

(10) I’ve often seen a figure of $55 million associated with the Chinese agrotechnology demonstration center in Mozambique. According to a copy of the contract given to me by the Ministry of Agriculture in Mozambique in June 2009, China's agricultural center in Mozambique would cost 55 million RMB (about US$6 - 9 million depending on the exchange rate), not dollars. Such a typical mistake, but an important one. China is building 20 centers around Africa, all at the request of local governments that will be using them for their own agricultural purposes. Mozambique’s was the first built. All the centers I've seen have a big agricultural training component (labs and dormitories, for example). All the centers appear to have been budgeted at around 40-55 million RMB. They follow in the footsteps of China’s failed projects in the past. See http://www.american.edu/sis/faculty/upload/Brautigam-Tang-CQ-final.pdf December 2009.

(11) Could it be related to a request the Mozambicans made for China to help fund the Moambe Science and Technology Park, a pet project of the Minister of Science and Technology? Together with the agricultural research center in Umbeluzi/Boane, the two projects would have cost $700 million (the Chinese agricultural center itself was projected to cost 55 million RMB, about US$9 million) (10). The Chinese did say they would help out with Moambe, but not fund the entire thing. Mozambique later received a mixed grant/credit of $15.8 million from China to support distance education and "science and technology" See:  http://www.clubofmozambique.com/solutions1/sectionnews.php? secao=social_development&id=22558&tipo=one

(12) http://www.riceforafrica.org/card-countries/g1/mozambique/353-mozambiques-rice-statistics

(13) http://www.macauhub.com.mo/en/2006/03/31/786/

(14) http://www.american.edu/sis/faculty/upload/Brautigam-Tang-CQ-final.pdf December 2009.

(15) http://allafrica.com/stories/201112272506.html

(16) http://www.macauhub.com.mo/en/2010/05/14/9086/

(17) http://www.chinaafricarealstory.com/2010/04/list-of-zero-tariff-products-is-now.html

(18) http://www.agroportal.pt/x/agronoticias/2006/03/24.htm

(19) http://www.iese.ac.mz/lib/noticias/2010/China%20in%20Mozambique_09.2010_SC.pdf

(20) I haven’t been to Mozambique since 2009, but in 2010, I interviewed a Chinese agricultural specialist who knew about Chinese engagement in Mozambique. She told me that Hubei Liangfeng, the company from Hubei province that is managing China's foreign aid research station in Umbeluzi, Boane, Mozambique experimented with growing hybrid rice and soybeans for profit. "They experimented first on a small scale, but found many problems. The land was too dry. They needed to water two or three times a day. It was very costly. Also, mice destroyed the plants."

China in Nigeria: Power Myths & Realities

How many times have you read that "China" is building the Mambila Hydropower Project in Nigeria? Folks, as of right now, this project is moribund.

Yes, two Chinese companies, China Gezhouba Group Corporation (CGGC) and China Geo-Engineering Corporation (CGC), signed a contract to construct the dam. But the expected China Eximbank financing was never finalized. The Mambila dam fell victim to the review of President Obasanjo's murky "oil-for-infrastructure" deals ordered by his successor, the late President Yar'Adua, in October 2007. This was nicely detailed in an August 2009 Chatham House report, Thirst for Oil. The Chinese companies have a contract, but without secure financing, the project will not go forward.

Nigeria does have two real cases of Chinese power plant construction, however. Two sites (Papalanto/Olorunsogo and Omotosho) were chosen for multi-phase gas-fired power plants, and both contracts were signed in 2002. Both had Chinese financing, almost certainly suppliers' credits from the two companies. (I was given a copy of the terms of these Chinese loans:  $114.9 million each, for two 335MW power plants, signed in 2002, at 6% interest, a grace period of 6 years, maturity in 12 years.)

As opposed to hydropower dams, which use a renewable resource, but are controversial for their environmental and social disruption, gas power plants use a natural resource that Nigeria has in abundance, yet is currently wasting in useless flares (see photos above and below, courtesy of BBC). Each site was projected to reach 1000+MW over time. For the first phase of 335MW, as former president Obasanjo recounted in "My Power Plant Story" (May 12, 2008):

We had to seek loan from China at concessionary rate to support two of the sites ... Omotosho and Papalanto [Olorunsogo] were built to the point of commission before I left government in May 2007. As at today, Papalanto [Olorunsogo], Omotosho ... are generating power for the grid. 

Obasanjo also pointed out that Omotosho and Papalanto/Olorunsogo were slated for expansion, and Nigeria did launch second phases at both sites. According to a January 30, 2010 investigative report in the Nigeria Compass by lead reporter Charles Okonji:

• China National Machinery and Equipment Company (CMEC), the major state-owned firm which had completed the first phase, was awarded the EPC (Engineering, Procurement, and Construction) contract for Phase II of the Omotosho plant, for 750MW of additional thermal power.
• Shandong No. 3 Electric Power Construction Corporation (SEPCO III), the smaller Chinese firm that built the first phase of Papalanto, was also awarded the contract for the second phase of 750MW at Papalanto [Olorunsogo].

However, China Eximbank did not finance the second phase of Omotosho, where the Nigerian government defaulted on the financing after providing a down payment. The work stalled. Omotosho is reportedly being pruned down to 500MW. At Papalanto, apparently financing was secured and the work on the 750MW expansion was said to be close to completion with a projected June 2010 commissioning date.

The financing for the second stage of Papalanto/Olorunsogo could also have been from China Eximbank. Building Bridges, a 2009 report* on Chinese infrastructure projects in Africa done by researchers at the World Bank, states (p. 26) that $300 million (or, on p. 57, $298 million) of the financing for Papalanto was secured from China Eximbank with a deal for China National Petroleum Company (CNPC) to purchase 30,000 barrels of oil per day from Nigeria's national oil company. Given that the first phase of Papalanto was financed in 2002 at $114 mil and that the first phase, at 335MW was less than half the size of the second phase, at 750MW, this financing of $298 or $300 million seems certain to be for Phase II. Would be interesting to know more about this oil-backed infrastructure deal. I haven't seen another hint of it anywhere. Has anyone else?

Ironically, despite their ongoing expansion, the Omotosho and Papalanto plants (first phase) were both operating well below capacity in 2009 ... due to inadequate gas supplies. A resource Nigeria has in abundance continues to burn across the Niger Delta, and Nigerians continue to experience famously "epileptic" power supplies. Perhaps it's time to reconsider the finance for Mambila?

*The 2009 report is confusing because it does not mention that the two power plants were constructed in two stages, with the first phase (2002-2007) financed by China. Yet it states that the size of the two stations will be 335MW, (actually the size for the first stage only). The second stage was for an additional 750 MW, although this was apparently scaled back to 500MW at Omotosho. The report also said that China Eximbank was financing the construction of the power plant at Geregu (built by the German company Siemens). This is highly unlikely, given that the purpose of China Eximbank is to finance exports from China, not Germany. Since the Building Bridges study provides no documentation for their information, it is hard to double check their sources. 

China: Not the Rogue Dam Builder We Feared It would Be? | International Rivers

Peter Bosshard, policy director at the advocacy group International Rivers, has been working hard and very constructively to engage China's emerging overseas financiers and corporations on responsible practice in building hydropower dams in other developing countries. See his account of International Rivers' experience and his assessment of the results of six years of advocacy and "constructive engagement" in
China: Not the Rogue Dam Builder We Feared It would Be? | International Rivers
What other examples do we have of the evolution of corporate social responsibility in China's "going global" effort? Is this self-interested window dressing, or a true shift of consciousness, as we saw earlier with the World Bank/IFC? Comments welcome.

Guest Post: Visiting the Chinese-financed Zongo II Dam

Zongo Waterfall, Inkisi River. photo: Oldrich Neumayer

This guest post comes to us from Antoine Lokongo, a Ph.D. student studying international politics at Peking University. In August 2012, Antoine visited Sinohydro's Zongo II dam project in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His report provides a useful lens into Sino-African relations.

As part of my field research, it was of great importance to me to visit some Chinese projects undertaken in my country, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). I visited all such projects in and around the capital Kinshasa, including the expansion of the bridge over the Basoko River project, the reconstruction of Boulevard Lumumba, from Limete up to the International Ndjili Airport, the widening of Ndjili Airport’s runaway project and so on. But above all, spending five days in Zongo, the site of the construction of Zongo II Hydropower project over the Inkisi River waterfalls, living and working together with the Chinese there, was the most interesting activity of my field research. 

Zongo is a beautiful place on the bank of the Congo River in the Western Lower Congo Province of the DRC. Its topography very much resembles that of China’s Yunnan Province (which makes Chinese immediately feel at home). Here, the Congo River, which constitutes an artificial border between the DRC and the Republic of Congo-Brazzaville, is squeezed by rocky mountains, making the deepest river in the world coil like a big snake among those mountains.

Now, the inhabitants of Zongo’s hitherto quiet mountains and valleys are woken up by the sound of the Chinese hammer. From dawn to dusk, hammer beats echo here in these mountains and valleys. The hardworking and industrious Chinese people who have been building dams for thousands of years, have come to the Inkisi River to build a hydroelectric dam called Zongo II (during colonial times, the Belgians already built a first dam, Zongo I, over the Inkisi River to provide Kinshasa with electricity but had always postponed the construction of another dam over the Inkisi River).

Wanting to know whether or not Congolese workers were absorbing Chinese people’s hard-working and organizational culture, I joined different teams on different days and worked with them on site (manual labour like mixing cement with sand, digging trenches to canalize rain water and so on). Although Congolese workers were skilled and knew what they were doing (especially electricians), they were constantly complaining. The culture of complaining in Africa stems from the harsh colonial experience, I guess, but Chinese should not become the new target in this very region of Lower Congo where so many Chinese and Congolese died of slave labour, forced to break the rocks with hammers, to build King Leopold of Belgium’s first railway in Congo, from Kinshasa to the port of Matadi.

"Why don’t we have shoes and uniforms, the same like Chinese workers?"

"Why have they not yet paid us our wages on time?"

"Why don’t they pay us $5 an hour but less?"

These are some of the questions Congolese workers fired at me, “one of them, who could speak Chinese”, as they put it.

I put those questions to a certain Mr. Li Gang, in charge of human resources, who was tirelessly addressing all the questions raised by the Congolese workers to ensure good relations between Chinese and Congolese workers. He told me that he had already many times and repeatedly explained to the Congolese workers that a cargo of new boots and uniforms had arrived at the port of Matadi, but the goods had not yet been delivered to the Zongo due to the slow customs clearance of goods at the port facilities. About pay delay, he explained: “Congolese workers usually get their wages on the 4th of each month. Today is the 6th of August and unfortunately they have not yet been paid. They will definitely get paid tomorrow. This postponement was due to the fact that our financial manager fell ill and went to Kinshasa for treatment."

Mr. Li Gang confirmed that unskilled Congolese workers (jobbers) are paid $2 to $3 a day, but highly skilled Congolese workers are paid $8 per day. “This is very fair,” he said.

The Zongo II Hydropower project, is being jointly built by Sinohydro (China) and Societe Nationale d'Electricite or SNEL (Democratic Republic of Congo). Neither partner is the "boss". SNEL has provided manpower; so has Sinohydro. But of course Sinohydro is injecting more money, expertise and equipment in the project. When the dam is completed, Sinohydro will get more out of the sale of electricty (entitlement is to each according to his contribution). After Sinohydro recovers its money, it will hand over the dam and the management of it to the Congolese government and will have nothing to do with it anymore unless Kinshasa solicits Sinohydro's assistance.

As a reminder, after recovering its investment over five years, Sinohydro handed back to Congo the Kinshasa-Matadi Highway it built, as commissioned by the Congolese government (Matadi is the Congolese port on the bank of Atlantic Ocean in the West). That is what the Chinese are doing all over Africa, and I think it is a good thing that does not leave African countries in debt. Of course due to cultural differences, there were a lot of misunderstandings. I particularly witnessed two negative incidents. The first one involved a Chinese worker. One afternoon, I saw a number of Congolese workers just standing there, chatting, chatting instead of working. This made the Chinese supervisor very angry and he slapped one of the Congolese in the face. 

I mediated between the two. I said to the Chinese supervisor that it would be better to report the matter to the office and the office will decide to sack inefficient Congolese workers. But he should not hit people! A second incident involved a Congolese worker who forged the signature of a Chinese manager, ticked more hours he did not work for in order to get more money. That is a crime! I told the Congolese workers to learn from the Chinese culture of working hard and abandon the habit of corruption.

But at end, the two sides got used to each other. Although they still ate separately, used separate showers and latrines, I could see Chinese and Congolese workers getting on well after all, playing football together on the sandy bank of the Congolese river after work. Local women were employed as cleaners and cooks.

The DRC is still very underdeveloped, but I think for both the Chinese people and Congolese people, this represents a great opportunity. Of course, some labour problems are bound to occur, but this a universal problem, that also occurs in American and European projects sites in Africa. As China begins to transfer its new technologies and expertise to Africa, practical solutions to some of these problems and issues will be found.

Guest Post: Stretching the Data

This guest post is by Jyhjong Hwang, the Senior Research Assistant at the China-Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins SAIS.

This is the story of how five Chinese-financed coal power stations in Africa became 50.

On July 21, 2017, the New York Times published an op-ed titled, "China's Other Big Export: Pollution," written by Paulina Garzon at the Wilson Center and Leila Salazar-López of Amazon Watch.  While the op-ed focused mainly on Latin America and the Caribbean, one paragraph using our CARI data on Chinese official loans to Africa caught our attention:

"China is worsening the climate crisis with its financing elsewhere as well. From 2000 to 2015 China extended $94.4 billion in loans to Africa, fueling extractive industries like oil, minerals and timber; the expansion roads [sic] and ports to get those raw materials to market; and dirty energy like large dams and power plants. Beijing is building and financing some 50 new coal plants across Africa." (Emphasis added).

China-Africa Research Initiative (CARI) has a bone to pick with just about every sentence of this paragraph. While we are glad that our data is being utilized, we would like to set the record straight regarding the nature of these loans – and in particular, the nature of Chinese involvement in African coal stations. We show below how data and information get distorted as they are passed from source to source, rephrased, paraphrased, and taken out of context.

1.    Do Chinese loans go to “fueling extractive industries like oil, minerals, and timber”?

No. That would be stretching the data. Here are the top five sectors for Chinese loans (2000 to 2015):

Rank	Sector	US$ billions, unadjusted
1	Transportation	30.1
2	Power	22.8
3	Mining	9.2
4	Communication	6.8
5	Other social*	4.3

* Chiefly low-cost social housing and stadiums.

Source: China-Africa Research Initiative, 2017.

Mining (oil and minerals combined) constituted only 9.6% of all Chinese loans in Africa. And we could not identify even one loan-financed timber project. The impression that Chinese loans are primarily given to foster extractive industries like oil, minerals, and timber is not borne out by our data.

2.    Do Chinese loans finance “roads and ports to get those raw materials to market”?

Well… the Chinese do finance a lot of transport projects. Roughly 32% of all Chinese loans went to the transportation sector. However, many of these projects have more to do with Africa’s own infrastructure deficits and little to do with natural resource exports. For example, land-locked Ethiopia, with almost no oil, minerals, or timber to export, borrowed billions to build a freight and passenger railroad from its capital, Addis Ababa, to a harbor in the neighboring country of Djibouti. Ethiopia will be using this infrastructure to export manufactured goods and to import fossil fuel from the global markets. At least 17 countries have borrowed to build or renovate airports. Assuming that all Chinese-financed transportation projects are geared toward China’s needs for raw materials is a gross simplification. As the Ethiopia case shows, complex factors related to global and domestic trade, urbanization, population density and distribution, and local politics all shape decisions around road and port construction – not just the presence of resource commodities.

3.    Is “Beijing […] building and financing some 50 new coal plants across Africa"?

No, and not even close – but let’s first clear up some definitions to understand what we mean. As we will further explain below, there are currently only five coal-power complexes in Africa that have received any confirmed Chinese financing. The misunderstanding here lies in a point of confusion over terminology when discussing coal power stations, leading readers to infer that 50 new complexes are rising from the ground thanks to Chinese money. However, this is absolutely false, as one must distinguish between “units” and “stations”: individual coal power stations usually have multiple generating units (i.e. individual turbines and generators). For example, the Morupule B Power Station in Botswana has four units, each generating 150 MW. Therefore, "100 coal-generating units" will always mean fewer than 100 coal power stations.

To further complicate matters, the commonly-used term “plant”, when referring to coal power production, varies in definition: while in layman’s day-to-day discussion, "power plants" and "power stations" are often understood to be the same thing (this is the definition used in the NYT op-ed), other sources (such as the research project CoalSwarm) use "plants" as synonymous with "units", while referring to entire (often multi-unit) complexes as "stations". For clarity’s sake, we will avoid using the word “plant” in this post, and will opt to use the terms “unit” and “station” instead.

So where did the “50” figure originate? We traced the claim to a May 10, 2017 article in the National Geographic article: "As the World Cuts Back on Coal, a Growing Appetite in Africa":

“According to data compiled by CoalSwarm, an industry watchdog, more than 100 coal-generating units with a combined capacity of 42.5 gigawatts are in various stages of planning or development in 11 African countries outside of South Africa—[...] roughly half are being financed by the world’s largest coal emitter: China.” (Emphasis added.)

For their NYT op-ed, Garzon and Salazar-López, appearing to have mistakenly assumed that each coal generating unit is one power station, took the phrases "roughly half" and "100 coal-generating units" and came up with the number 50.

But then what did National Geographic’s source, CoalSwarm, originally mean to say? We tracked down an August 2016 report written by CoalSwarm contributor Dr. Christine Shearer, titled "China’s growing role as funder of Africa’s proposed coal plants", with data from their Global Coal Plant Tracker. The report states that there are:

"42.2 GW of capacity under development on the continent (excluding South Africa) [...] About half of the proposed capacity (21.5 GW) is being supported by Chinese finance [...] totaling 47 units (there are often several units, or plants, within a power station)." (Emphasis added).

CoalSwarm did mean that half of the proposed capacity is Chinese-financed-- not half of the units (or for that matter half of the stations). As noted above, “units” are not standardized in terms of their electricity production capacity (gigawatts)-- it cannot be assumed that half of one is equal to half of the other, as we could for instance be looking at fewer units, but with a much higher output capacity.

CoalSwarm’s specific terminology choices appear to have been lost in the National Geographic article, which uses "plants" and "stations" interchangeably. As a result, this practice was carried forward in the NYT op-ed, where no mention of "units" was made, and "plants" are used to refer to entire complexes. While CoalSwarm does report 47 units with potential Chinese financing, there is no way for readers to understand this merely from the NYT op-ed.

To firmly establish the exact number of coal power stations involved in this discussion, CARI reached out to Dr. Shearer of CoalSwarm, who kindly provided us with their unpublished granular data. CoalSwarm has actually been able to find 17 projects (totaling 47 coal-fired generating units) with Chinese involvement, with the caveat that these 17 "projects are at various stages - China institutions are either actively financing or discussing financing the plants." Thus, 17 is not even the total number of Chinese-financed coal power stations, but an aggregate of coal power stations that have secured Chinese finance, or are in the process of negotiating for it.

Then, excluding projects with financing still under discussion, how many of these projected 17 coal power stations, with a combined capacity of 7.265 GW, actually secured Chinese financing? Below is the full list of confirmed Chinese-financed coal power stations: from 2000 to 2017, we could only find five such projects.

Chinese-financed coal power stations in Africa, 2000-2017
Country	Project Status	Loan Signing Year	Borrower	Chinese Financier	Loan US$ millions, unadjusted	Project	Total Capacity
Botswana	Completed	2009	Botswana Power Corp[1]	ICBC[2]	825	Morupule B Coal Power Station expansion project	600 MW (4 units)
Kenya	Signed	2015	Amu Power Company[3]	ICBC	900	Lamu Coal Power Station	1050 MW (3 units)
Morocco	Implementation	2014	Moroccan government	Eximbank[4]	305	Jerada Coal Power Station	350 MW (1 unit)
South Africa	Signed	2017	Eskom[5]	CDB	1500	Medupi Coal Power Station expansion	4800 MW (6 units)
Zambia	Completed	2015	Maamba Collieries Ltd.[6]	ICBC & Bank of China [7]	183	Maamba Coal Power Station Phase I	450 MW (3 units)

Source: China-Africa Research Initiative, 2017.

Throughout this whole “telephone game”, from the CoalSwarm data through the National Geographic article and ending with the NYT op-ed, the original data was misinterpreted and distorted, leading the actual figures – five confirmed Chinese-financed projects – to balloon into 50. Such distortions unfortunately reinforce false perceptions and skew the debate, while the data often does not support these assumptions. Terminology and definitions have their importance when discussing technical issues. Knowing that the public is at times confronted with misleading information, we must strive more than ever to ensure that data on such sensitive issues is correctly compiled, analyzed, and circulated.

Edited 15-Mar-2018

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[1] Botswanan state power company.

[2] Industrial and Commercial Bank of China.

[3] A consortium of private Kenyan businesses that won the BOOT contract for the power plant.

[4] China Export-Import Bank.

[5] South African state power company.

[6] A joint-venture between the Zambian government and a Singaporean company.

[7] Bank of China, a commercial bank with its headquarters in Hong Kong. Distinct from the People's Bank of China, which is the country’s central bank.