The Dragon's Gift

Deborah Brautigam has researched Chinese engagement in Africa for decades, and this book corrects the account that circulated in Western media around 2009. Her method is field research, Chinese-language sources and the actual terms of the agreements.

Her corrections are specific. Chinese aid to Africa is much smaller than commonly reported, because the figures cited generally conflate concessional aid with export credits and commercial loans. Chinese firms in Africa employ substantial local workforces, contrary to claims that they import all labour. Resource-backed loans, in which infrastructure is financed against future commodity output, are not a Chinese invention; Japan used the same structure with China in the 1970s, which is where China learned it. Chinese engagement is driven by its own commercial interests and by the export promotion mandate of its policy banks rather than by a coordinated strategic plan.

Brautigam is not uncritical. She documents the environmental and labour problems, the debt sustainability questions, the limited technology transfer, and the governance consequences of dealing with regimes that Western donors avoid. Her broader argument is that China's approach reflects its own development experience, in which infrastructure and export processing zones preceded institutional reform, and that this is a coherent theory rather than an absence of one. The book was published in 2009, before the Belt and Road expansion and the subsequent debt distress in several African borrowers, which Brautigam has addressed in later work.