To this end, this paper looks at the following salient challenges:

Is China's success simply based on its offering Africa a more palatable economic ideology to the West?

Given the large weight of commodities in Sino-African trade, do engagements have meaningful positive domestic multipliers for Africa?

Are low-cost manufacturing goods from China leading to Africa's de-industrialization?

Is a strategic China taking selfishly what it needs from an economically weak Africa with limited local consideration, extending limited gains to the host nation?

Have China's engagements provided rogue states in Africa with a viable trap-door from pressures to reform their political, economic and social institutions?

Are Chinese loans and bilateral assistance free-riding on Africa's past debt relief, adding new layers of additional debt?

The purpose of this paper is not necessarily to endorse a particular position, but rather to provide rational debate on each of the more contentious challenges to Sino-African ties and, in doing so, illuminate the noise currently dominating discourse with greater depth of understanding.

China offers an alternative to the "Washington Consensus"

Challenge: It is frequently postulated that Sino-African relations are burgeoning in part because China offers African leaders a more acceptable alternative economic ideology to the "Washington Consensus," aptly called the "Beijing Consensus." In many ways a host of other criticisms of China's engagements across the continent follow from this, somewhat over-simplistic, misunderstanding.

The "Washington Consensus" refers specifically to a set of policies that commands a consensus in some significant part of the U.S. capital, Washington (Williamson2, 2004:7). The consensus originally comprised a particular policy-mix, informed by a broader neoclassical economic framework, which was formulated to assist debtor countries of the 1990s attain fiscal order. The envisioned path towards economic growth and development included ten broad principles, including fiscal discipline; the re-ordering of public expenditure priorities towards basic health, education and infrastructure; and tax reform (Williamson, 2004:3-4). However, since its inception, the Washington Consensus has detached from its original meaning and principles, incorrectly becoming a synonym for neo-liberal market fundamentalism.

Taking this overly broad interpretation, many have positioned China's centralized political system, state activism in domestic economic affairs, non-intervention in external affairs, and "socialism with Chinese characteristics", to name a few cornerstones of China's ever-shifting ideology, as a polar opposite of the Washington Consensus. As such, the "Beijing Consensus" has been defined simply in terms of contrasting isolated ideological aspects of China against the "Washington Consensus." (Lumumba-Kasongo, 2007)

The unhinged quasi-ideologies have been artificially placed on a collision course, perceived to be played out on the continent in a new, post-Cold War proxy war. Thus, according to this view, much of China's foreign policy that has gained traction in Africa is based fairly simply on its offering of an alternative to the Washington Consensus, which was particularly tarnished by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) structural adjustment programs of the 1980s and 1990s (Merredith, 2005; Van der Wath et al., 2006).

As reported in previous editions in this series, China's macroeconomic success over the past few decades has indeed turned economic theory on its head. These successes are alluring for African economies. Many suggest that China's economic performance rebukes the conventional view that freedom and prosperity are interlinked (Alden, 2007). However, the face-off is superficial, misrepresenting the enormous structural internal transformation China has undertaken since Deng Xiaoping initiated reforms in the late 1970s. China's economic and social successes over the past three decades have promoted economic liberalization.

To lance the boil of partisan perspectives, such a viewpoint is based on misconceptions of basic relationships. Take, for instance, freedom and Gross Domestic Product (GDP): high levels of freedom correlate positively with high levels of GDP per capita as opposed to rapid GDP growth. Indeed, the world's most wealthy nations have, on aggregate, the highest level of economic freedom in the world.