I visited Zambia, Ethiopia and Ghana in September and had the opportunity to interact with government officials, academic circles, NGOs and the media about Sino-African relations. I had the vivid impression that most of the African hosts hold positive opinions about the continent's relations with China, although they do not doubt the Asian country's intention to exploit rich natural resources as part of its engagement in the vast African land.

Unlike Western countries, whose activities in Africa over the past half a century have been mainly dominated by unreserved attempts to snatch more natural resources, China, they believe, has also done a lot of infrastructure building. China's spectacular development in the past decades, according to them, should serve as clinching evidence that African countries should no longer regard the "European or US model" as the panacea to solve their problems in the process of economic and social development.

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Theoretically, no country should excessively depend on outside elements to extricate itself from poverty and achieve development. But African countries' resolve to break away from the "Western model" bears clear testimony to their utter disappointment and dissatisfaction toward their failure to free themselves from impoverishment under the promised support of European and US aid and their markets.

It is unfair to deny Western countries' development assistance to the continent in the past decades. Rough statistics show that African countries have received more than $300 billion worth of aid since 1970, mostly from developed Western nations and international financial organizations dominated by them.

But now it boils down to the question: Why did this considerable assistance fail to produce tangible effects in helping extricate African countries out of poverty and boost their long-anticipated development? Not long ago, Dambisa Moyo, an Oxford- and Harvard-educated Zambian scholar who once worked for the World Bank, authored a book trying to offer an answer to this question. In the book, titled Dead Aid, which has generated heated debate, she lashes out at the Western aid policy toward Africa and its role in widening the gap between the rich and the poor. She insisted that African countries should learn from Asia, China in particular, in developing local economies and praised China's large-scale infrastructure and investment in the continent during the past few years.

Western countries have never relented on demands that African nations push for so-called "good governance" and improve human rights conditions in the process of offering economic assistance. Since the end of the Cold War, Western countries led by the US have made unremitting efforts to draw Africa into the Western capitalist system and to peddle their political and economic models to African countries. Aid has even been linked to whether African countries adopt the "multi-party democracy" political system.

In contrast, China's aid to Africa is free of any "ideological element". It is China's consistent stance that aid is based on non-intervention in African countries' internal affairs and its respect for the recipients' choice of their own development paths. China has never attached any preconditions for its aid. The Chinese share with African people painful memories of their colonial and semi-colonial past, and both are confronted with unprecedented challenges in the their pursuit of development.

The great success China has achieved since its adoption of the reform and opening-up initiative is not a result of blind duplication of Western political and economic models. Instead, it is the outcome of the country's endless efforts to oppose Western intervention and its persistence in exploring a development path suitable for its own national conditions. China believes African countries and Africans know their own national conditions better than others and thus are certain to find a suitable development path. China has oriented its relationship with Africa not as one between benefactor and beneficiary, but as a new South-South cooperative relationship based on equality and mutual benefit, mutual respect, and the pursuit of joint development.

China's efforts to strengthen economic and trade cooperation, help with large-scale infrastructure construction, and initiatives to improve living conditions and alleviate poverty nail the lie of some Western politicians and NGOs that the country supports some "failed" and "rogue" states in Africa and obstructs the West's self-proclaimed campaigns for development of democracy and human rights, and eradication of corruption.

"China is doing a much better job than Western capitalists in responding to market demands in Africa", the Senegalese president said in newspaper article carried last year.

At a recent international symposium co-sponsored by the International Poverty Reduction Centre in China and the OECD's Development Assistance Committee in Beijing, participants were unanimous that China's remarkable poverty reduction and its outstanding development indisputably demonstrate that a backward developing nation can reduce poverty and achieve economic development through its own efforts.

China should share its experiences with other developing nations, including African states. Its close economic and trade cooperation with Africa in the past decade serves as an important component of its efforts to help African countries achieve the UN-drafted Millennium Development Goals.

The author is a researcher with the Institute of West Asian and African Studies under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

(China Daily 11/19/2009 page8)