Introduction: Mediating China—Africa

Abstract

Over the past five years one has not had to go far to find western journalists deriding China’s revitalized role in Africa. Typical is Christopher Hitchens, writing in the United Kingdom’s Daily Mail:

It is my view … that China’s cynical new version of imperialism in Africa is a wicked enterprise. China offers both rulers and the ruled in Africa the simple, squalid advantages of shameless exploitation. (Hitchens 2008)

Similar sentiments were expressed in many other leading international newspapers (see, e.g. The Economist 13 March 2008) where China’s moves were treated as cynical and self-serving. This zeitgeist is part of a broader concern, expressed in popular culture, about China’s ‘rise’. For example, the mid-1980s movie Red Dawn featured Russian soldiers invading America and a group of teenagers doughtily defending their nation. In the 2011 remake the invaders were to have been Chinese and as if to emphasize the declining economic power of the United States vis-à-vis China it is set in Detroit, the once proud heart of US automobile manufacture. In mid-June 2010 the Global Times, a leading Chinese daily, reported on leaked scripts from the film which started a furore under the headline ‘U.S. reshoots Cold War movie to demonize China’. Although the film is now due for a 2012 release, post-production editing has changed the invading army from China to North Korea in an effort not to offend such a lucrative market for America’s cultural output (Fritz and Horn 2011).