Whenever people talk about China’s growing influence in Africa, I cannot help thinking back to the early 2000s.
At the time, China was buying into oil projects in Sudan, much of which today lies in South Sudan. Western companies were increasingly reluctant to expand their presence because of the country’s human rights record. Beijing, by contrast, had no such reservations. Business was business, and strategic access to energy mattered far more than uncomfortable political questions.
Years later, I found myself in the region.
I spoke with local people, not politicians or executives, but ordinary people who had watched these developments unfold around them. Their observations stayed with me.
They told me there had been a noticeable difference between many of the European operators and the Chinese ones.
European companies, whatever their shortcomings, generally understood that long-term stability required local participation. Roads, schools, clinics, training programs and local employment were not simply acts of generosity. They were part of maintaining a workable relationship with the communities where they operated. The surrounding regions were expected to share, at least to some degree, in the benefits generated by the projects.
The Chinese approach, as it was described to me, looked rather different.
Their companies arrived, extracted what they needed, completed the work and moved on with remarkable efficiency. Local communities often saw very little lasting benefit. Wealth accumulated at the top, where politically connected figures were generously rewarded for their cooperation, while the people living around the projects frequently remained spectators to the prosperity flowing beneath their own feet.
Whether every project followed that pattern is beside the point.
That was the reputation China acquired.
And reputations matter.
I saw something similar myself in Angola in the early 2010s.
South of Luanda stretched enormous informal settlements, and in parts of them the Chinese presence was impossible to miss. Entire shiploads of expatriate workers had been brought in to build roads, housing, industrial facilities and infrastructure. Work that many Angolans had hoped would provide employment instead often went to imported labor.
From Beijing’s perspective, the logic was obvious.
Chinese workers were familiar with Chinese contractors, Chinese standards and Chinese management. Projects could move faster.
From the perspective of many local people, however, the calculation looked rather different.
If the jobs, the contracts and much of the money all returned to China, what exactly had Africa gained beyond another completed construction project?
By the middle of the 2010s, China’s image across parts of Africa had become considerably more complicated than the optimistic rhetoric suggested.
Political leaders were often happy to embrace Chinese investment. Large infrastructure projects are attractive. Easy financing is attractive. And, in countries where governance is weak, generous incentives offered to influential decision-makers have a way of smoothing negotiations remarkably quickly.
But governments are not the whole story.
Even strongmen cannot ignore public opinion forever.
People notice who builds.
People notice who gets the jobs.
People notice who leaves something behind—and who does not.
China enters every new negotiation carrying the weight of its previous reputation.
That does not mean it cannot win new projects.
It certainly can.
But the days when Chinese investment was automatically welcomed as an uncomplicated blessing are largely over.
Africa has a memory.
And reputations, once earned, are rarely easy to rebuild.