Last week I had the privilege of joining a group of
Chinese NGOs to attend the African Coalition of Corporate Accountability’s
General Assembly in Abidjan, the capital of Cote d’Ivoire. The theme of this
year’s General Assembly was “Impacts, Opportunities and Accountability in the
Context of Chinese Investment in Africa.”
This gathering was the first time ACCA had Chinese NGOs meeting up with African NGOs. I would go so far to say it was the first time independent Chinese NGOs, as opposed to official Chinese NGOs or GONGOs, had an opportunity to discuss and strategize with African NGOs about best civil society practices for managing negative impacts of Chinese investment.
The Chinese NGO delegation was
organized by Jingjing Zhang, founder of the China Accountability Project (CAP)
based in Washington, D.C. CAP is a
nonprofit organization run by experienced Chinese public interest lawyers and
environmental professionals and dedicated to holding Chinese companies
accountable for their environmental impacts and rights violations. It has been
bridging the knowledge gap between Chinese CSOs and their counterparts in
Africa and Latin America.
This gathering was the first time ACCA had Chinese NGOs meeting up with African NGOs. I would go so far to say it was the first time independent Chinese NGOs, as opposed to official Chinese NGOs or GONGOs, had an opportunity to discuss and strategize with African NGOs about best civil society practices for managing negative impacts of Chinese investment.
As NGOs with experience working on labor and
environmental protection in China, we wanted to share our experiences about
working as NGOs in China on these issues and provide a more realistic picture
of the state of civil society and the environmental and labor movements in China.
We also wanted to provide some recommendations on how African NGOs, trade
unions and communities could respond to the negative social and environmental
impacts of Chinese investment in Africa. We hoped through this experience, we
could move Africans away from stereotypes about Chinese and add more humanity
to a Chinese face.
The first day, sitting in the meeting hall, we were
welcomed by a local band of brass and drums that recalled a New Orleans blues
band, followed by a group of women with painted faces doing a traditional song
and dance. We were welcomed by ACCA organizers and heard a keynote address
about China in Africa from a Nigerian academic doing graduate work on China in
Africa.
I gave a presentation about the labor movement in China,
speaking about my experience at China Labour Bulletin where we worked with
Chinese labor activists to organize workers involved in labor disputes and
trained them on collective bargaining strategies and techniques. I also spoke
about my trip to Zambia looking at labor relations in Chinese workplaces in the
manufacturing and mining sector, and how some Chinese companies in Zambia had
learned over the years to recognize independent unions – something China does
not have - and engage in collective bargaining with them to improve wages and
working conditions.
My other colleagues spoke about the environmental
movement, and their experience holding companies and government departments
accountable for pollution through campaigning and lawsuits. They showed the
negative environmental impact that Chinese companies on their home country, but
also how Chinese NGOs had been able to hold these companies accountable. The
suggestion was that African companies could do the same but it would take time,
strategizing and perhaps assistance from Chinese NGOs to figure out how best to
mitigate the damages wrought by Chinese companies in Africa.
The Africans in the audience were a very curious crowd
and asked a lot of questions. Their questions often reflected a pent-up anger
against what they saw as the damage visited upon their communities by Chinese
companies. One man asked whether it was true that China was only sending
criminals to Africa. Our answer: there’s no evidence of this. Another asked
what would happen if African countries simply refused to accept Chinese
investment. Our answer: Chinese investors aren’t all that different from other
investors; they are largely part and parcel of the global capitalist order. Just
look at the pillaging of the Amazon being carried out by mostly white
(non-Chinese) farmers, miners and loggers. Countries do not shut their doors to
other investors who come to exploit their resources and labor, so why would you
do that to Chinese investors? What we should be asking is not how to keep these
investors from a particular country out (although there may be a good reason to
exclude investors in certain sectors or those involved in informal/illegal
activities), but how to better regulate and manage the risks that come with their
investment.
The next day was spent looking at corporate
accountability mechanisms ranging from grievance mechanisms, to greater
transparency and disclosure of information, to lawsuits. The sessions focused
on large-scale natural resource extraction projects financed through Chinese
state and commercial loans. These are the projects getting the headlines in the
paper, and their sheer size and amount of money involved, as well as their
impact on local communities and the environment, highlights the pressing need
to do something to hold these companies accountable.
In a small separate session on labor conflicts,
another dimension of China in Africa came up that gets less attention but may
be no less important over the longer run: the wave of Chinese companies and
entrepreneurs moving into other sectors of the economy. As David Dollar points
out in his 2016 Brookings Institution report, China’s Engagement with
Africa: From Natural Resources to Human Resources, Chinese financing in
Africa may be concentrated on the large-scale projects in the energy and
transportation sectors carried out by state-owned firms, but the majority of
Chinese people in Africa are dispersed across a wide range of private firms in
services, manufacturing and agriculture. There is no good data on how many
Chinese actually live and work in Africa. Many are said to go to work in large
projects and end up overstaying their visas and going into business for
themselves or working for other Chinese businesses. The mythical number of one
million Chinese in Africa is often used as in Howard French’s 2014 book, China’s
Second Continent: How a Million Migrants are Building a New Empire in Africa.
In Zambia, the estimates of Chinese living there
ranged anywhere from 20,000 to 100,000. Whatever the numbers, the presence of
Chinese migrants not only in the capital of Lusaka but also in the Copperbelt
cities of Ndola and Kitwe were ubiquitous. There are many Chinese raising
families there. There are Chinese malls and stores carrying mostly merchandise
imported from China. There are Chinese restaurants and casinos. There are Chinese
medical clinics, and so on.
Dollar suggests that the growth of Chinese in these
sectors will become more important, as demand in China for natural resources
tapers off over time. This shift is suggested in the title of his report, From
Natural Resources to Human Resources. This smaller-scale private sector
activity has not received the same amount of attention as the large financing
deals in the extractive resource sector. Most importantly, its cumulative
impact on the continent is growing quickly and increasingly being critically
received by local populations.
This impact was the subject of our small session on
labor conflicts which quickly moved to other concerns such as Chinese firms
competing and crowding out African firms in manufacturing and services, lack of
linkages between Chinese firms and African suppliers, Chinese workers taking
jobs that could be given to Africans, and the lack of skills transfer and
training for Africans.
Two days to discuss a topic as enormous as Chinese
investment in Africa was clearly insufficient but it was a good start. There
are many parts to the ecosystem of holding companies accountable. The focus was
on large-scale, natural resource extraction projects such as mines and dams,
and on the NGOs that work on transparency and information disclosure, and on
mechanisms such as campaigns and lawsuits. There could easily have been another
two days devoted to organizing communities, trade unions and business
associations to address the social and economic impact of Chinese investment, and
providing grievance, monitoring and accountability mechanisms not only to hold
Chinese companies accountable but also to hold governments in those African
countries accountable for enabling the negative impacts of Chinese and other
foreign investment. As Charles Kojo
Vandyck points out, CSOs in
Africa can also “trigger conversations about the UN Guiding Principles through
multisectoral convenings and forums” and in regional institutions such as “the
African Union (AU), Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS),
Southern Africa Development Community (SADC), Central African Economic and
Monetary Community (CEMAC) and the East African Community (EAC).”
One point that was made through the two-day meeting
was that the situation in Africa is not all that dissimilar to the situation in
China. In both places, laws, regulations and guidelines are being drafted that
incorporate international standards. This legal framework creates various entry
points for civil society to hold the state and companies accountable. This is a
point I came back to in my presentation when I concluded with three hard-earned
lessons we should keep in mind:
One was that China and Africa have experience with
creating laws that incorporate international standards to varying degrees, but
these laws can have shortcomings or are simply not implemented or enforced. Here
is where civil society comes in.
Second, these laws are not going to be much use unless
NGOs, workers and communities work together to call for improvements in the
laws, and hold governments, banks, international financial institutions and
companies accountable for complying with those laws.
Third, civil society needs to go beyond just naming and
shaming to do the hard work of organizing workers and communities, and engaging,
pressuring and negotiating with companies, governments and other stakeholders
if we are to achieve true win-win solutions for companies, workers and
communities, and realize the still-distant promise of what Vandyck calls
sustainable businesses which he defines as:
“….enterprises
that generate respect for human rights across their value chains. This type of
business does not only use a percentage of its profits to promote a social
cause through corporate social responsibility, but it also safeguards human
rights within its operations and the communities where its products or services
are used.”
