Africa/China: Rumble in the jungle

China has a competitive advantage that is rare among economic powers investing in faraway developing countries: a lack of ancient hostility. In the past decade, Chinese investors have been welcomed with open arms in places where Western colonial powers once misbehaved and their descendants sometimes still arouse suspicion.

Hundreds of thousands of Chinese have comfortably set up shop in Africa, bringing with them economic growth and technical skills. Their government, eager to loosen constraints on resources and industrial expansion at home, supports them with abundant loans. Africa now supplies 35 percent of China's oil. Two-way trade grew by 39 percent last year.

China deserves credit for engaging a continent that desperately needs investment. Millions of Africans are using roads, schools and hospitals built by Chinese companies or financed with fees from resources they extracted. Not surprisingly, many African leaders have embraced the Chinese, especially when they have been offered vast loans for infrastructure projects. By contrast, the leaders say, Western governments these days offer little more than lectures on good governance.

But the honeymoon is coming to an end. Growing numbers of Africans are turning against the saviors from the East. They complain that Chinese companies destroy national parks in their hunt for resources and that they routinely disobey even rudimentary safety rules. Workers are killed in almost daily accidents. Some are shot by managers. Where China offers its companies preferential loans, African businesses struggle to compete. Roads and hospitals built by the Chinese are often faulty, not least because they bribe local inspectors. Although corruption has long been a problem in Africa, people complain that China is making it worse.

This antipathy should worry China's government. Granted, it is unlikely to lose access to resources controlled by friendly dictators who have benefited personally from China's arrival. But its ambitions stretch far beyond securing resources. Chinese companies, private as well as publicly owned, are investing in farming, manufacturing and retailing. Many depend on cooperation with a wide array of increasingly unhappy locals. In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania's commercial capital, Chinese are banned from selling in markets. In South Africa, their factories face closure at the hands of enraged trade unions.

Problems can spread globally

Moreover, China's investments spread far beyond Africa. Stains on China's reputation are harming its commercial plans elsewhere -- and governments in other continents will be keener than African politicians have been to find reasons to put obstacles in China's way. A Chinese construction firm got an ear-bashing when bidding for a Polish highway contract, in part because an Angolan hospital the company had built fell apart within months of opening its doors.

China's government says it can do little about bad eggs among its expatriates. In fact, it can do plenty. It might start by enforcing the many sensible international rules it has signed up for, such as the U.N. Convention Against Corruption. Some Chinese officials and businessmen are punished for bribery at home; the same should apply abroad. Treating financial dealings with African governments as a state secret, as China does, aids embezzlers and fuels suspicion.

Expecting much more than this, you might say, is hopelessly naive. For a start, the Chinese government has a foreign policy doctrine of not interfering in the internal affairs of other countries. Even such an apparently modest step as training African officials in enforcing business rules could fall afoul of this. When China so often seems indifferent to the rape of its own countryside or to working conditions in factories and mines at home, there may be no reason to expect it to foster better conditions abroad.

Yet China's rulers may find that it is increasingly in their country's interest to demand better behavior from its companies. As an economic giant with global ambitions, it may have little choice -- as America learned a century ago.