U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken testifies before U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs on the Biden Administration's Priorities for U.S. Foreign Policy on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on March 10, 2021. (Ting Shen/Pool via Xinhua)
BEIJING, May 1 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made the factually incorrect inference the other day that China brings a lot of its own workers to Africa at the expense of local job creation.
In a virtual discussion with Alumni of the Young African Leaders Initiative, the transcript of which was published by the State Department this week, attracting international media coverage, Blinken said, "You should be looking hard at whether when other countries come in to build a big infrastructure project, are they bringing their own workers with them or are they giving jobs to people in the country where they're making investments?"
The apparent accusation against China, indisputably quoted by press reports, sounds familiar. Mike Pompeo, Blinken's predecessor, made similarly incorrect remarks.
For example, Pompeo said on Feb. 19, 2020, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, that "not every nation doing business in Africa from outside the continent adopts the American model of partnership... they don't hire the local people."
Successive U.S. Secretaries of State have made this baseless assertion, despite there being ample evidence to the contrary -- including published research by scholars with Western affiliations.
The China Africa Project, a multimedia organization with no ties to the Chinese state and founded by one Western journalist and one South African researcher, said on Twitter that "the evidence just isn't there to support this assertion" and pointed to two studies.
One is a July 2019 report by the School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS), at the University of London, which found that "in terms of job creation the project found that the proportion of national (Ethiopian and Angolan) workers in the labour force is substantially higher than usually assumed in media perceptions. In Ethiopia these rates were 90 percent of all workers (and 100 percent for low-skilled workers) and in Angola, where rates are usually much lower due to skill shortages, estimated rates were 74 percent."
In a press release announcing its research, SOAS said, "In Angola the project found that localization had grown significantly in the previous 10 years as Chinese firms settled in that market context. Given that Chinese contractors have dominated the road construction market in Ethiopia and Angola, they have been the main contributors to job creation in absolute terms in this sector, especially in recent years. Chinese firms have also led job creation in the Ethiopian manufacturing sector during the same period."
The press release quoted the author, Dr. Carlos Oya, as saying, "One of the common perceptions of Chinese firms working in Africa is that they do not employ locals, the working conditions are exploitative, and that they don't contribute to skills development. However, our findings after four years of research have drawn up a very different picture. In Angola, for example, the firms employ some of the poorest where accommodation and food is provided, which in many ways can be seen as a route to actively help with poverty reduction in the region."
The SOAS research is not, in fact, the first time that a serious academic study has challenged the misleading English-language mainstream discourse.
In 2015, Prof. Barry Sautman and Dr. Yan Hairong, both with the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, published a study on the issue. Among their conclusions, they wrote, "Our database on workforce localization shows that, on average, locals are more than four-fifths of employees at 400 Chinese enterprises and projects in 40-plus African countries... Extractive industries, manufacturing and construction mostly have 80 percent to 95 percent local workforces... Localization of workforces at Chinese enterprises is already well-developed and, generally, the longer Chinese firms are in Africa, the more they localize."
Workers operate sewing machines at a workshop of C&H Garments Ltd in Kigali, capital of Rwanda, on April 30, 2018. (Xinhua/Lyu Tianran)
Meanwhile, the number of Chinese workers in Africa is decreasing. The China Africa Research Initiative, a project at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, kept track of the number of Chinese workers in Africa based on Chinese official sources, including China Statistical Yearbooks.
Their latest finding is that "from 2018 to 2019, the total number of Chinese workers in Africa has declined by 10 percent. This continues the trend of declining numbers of Chinese workers in Africa, down from a peak of 263,659 in 2015."
It is also worth mentioning that the SOAS research identified several positives in China's employment offerings in Africa.
On the topic of remuneration, the research found "wages in Chinese firms broadly similar to other top firms in the same sectors." As for professional development, it said, "Chinese firms contribute to training and skill development at least as much as other firms in the same sector."
It is hardly a damning indictment of China's contribution. ■
