Beijing quietly cools relations with Mugabe

Asked whether China’s close ties with President Robert Mugabe’s regime risk harming its image, one of Beijing’s senior officials in Africa gives an intriguing reply.

“In China we have a saying,” says Zhou Yuxiao, the minister counsellor at the embassy in Zimbabwe’s neighbour, South Africa. “Will you drop a stone into the well when someone is drowning, or do you try to give him a rope to pull him out? We don’t think that at times of difficulty [in an old friendship] you wash your hands and walk away.”

“We are doing this not because we want to help a ‘bad guy’ in Zimbabwe,” he adds. “But in China friendship is a tradition.”

Sceptics might caution that Chinese officials have long liked to bamboozle foreigners by citing ancient nostrums to explain away controversial policies. But only the sycophantic Zimbabwean state press could spin the “well” analogy as anything but the most lukewarm of endorsements. It reinforces the growing perception in Harare that Beijing is quietly scaling down its relationship with Mr Mugabe’s regime.

In the past few years the Chinese ambassador in Harare is one of the few foreigners whose visits Mr Mugabe can have welcomed. Since the Zimbabwean president launched his “Look East” policy in 2003, Beijing has refused to condemn his repressive policies and has provided much-needed loans to help prop up the crumbling economy.

In the latest tangible sign of support, much to the delight of Mr Mugabe, Jia Qinglin, a senior Chinese Communist party official, toured Zimbabwe in late April promoting the arrival of a batch of 424 Chinese tractors and 50 trucks. They are badly needed in the country’s once booming agriculture sector, which has all but collapsed since Mr Mugabe expropriated most of the commercial farms as part of his controversial land reform scheme.

But diplomats in Harare say that in private their Chinese counterparts confess to being increasingly concerned that their links to Zimbabwe are damaging their image, and risk harming their investment prospects elsewhere.

While posters at the recent meeting of the African Development Bank in Shanghai lauded Zimbabwe, diplomats believe that the African itinerary of President Hu Jintao in February was a clearer guide to the state of Sino-Zimbabwean relations: he all but circled Zimbabwe on his eight-nation tour yet did not stop off to see his most ardent fan in the region.

Mr Zhou denies that was a snub. “It’s easy to be interpreted that way, but we can’t go there every time,” he says, recalling visits by senior officials in recent years. To understand the relationship the world has to appreciate that the ties go back several decades to when China supported Mr Mugabe in the liberation war, he says.

Yet he readily volunteers that Zimbabwe is in crisis. “Zimbabwe is a much-discussed problem. Everyone realises there is a problem there. It is a sad situation.”

Businessmen in Zimbabwe suggest economics, as much as politics, are affecting Chinese calculations. China is now Zimbabwe’s second-largest trading partner after neighbouring South Africa, and the largest investor. But Zimbabwe is struggling to honour its debts, and has given Chinese firms mining contracts and mortgaged much of the tobacco crop as payment.

But there are very few statistics testifying to the relationship. In 2006 the volume of bilateral trade between Zimbabwe and China reached $275m, split roughly evenly, according to the Centre for China Studies, at Stellenbosch University. The centre cautions that much of the commerce is not done through official channels.

“We hear a lot of pronouncements about big Chinese investments that somehow are never followed up,” said Innocent Matshe, the author of a report on the relationship for the African Forum and Network on Debt and Development, a non-governmental organisation in Harare. “The Chinese feel very much that it will be difficult to recoup any investment if the present situation remains . . . [But] my impression for the Chinese side is that they believe in waiting and seeing.”

Another difficulty for the Chinese, as they plan for an eventual post-Mugabe Zimbabwe, is the perception that their goods are sub-standard.

The chief executive of a Zimbabwean manufacturing business is scathing about the new tractors: “They are not suited to local conditions, do not have spares or back-up. In truth they are bloody awful tractors which break down and rust.”

Mr Zhou readily concedes that China has an image problem in parts of Africa but he pleads for time, saying China is a relative newcomer to the world of global trade. “We do commit mistakes but not intentionally. China is always regarded as an elephant and when the elephant comes people tend to be scared. But actually the Chinese are just ordinary business people.”