The news went unnoticed in the West but had great visibility on Chinese news. Nine Chinese nationals were killed when a militia attacked a gold mine in central Africa where they worked. The victims were employees of the Chinese company Gold Coast Group, which manages the mining of a gold mine 25 km from the city of Bambari. President Xi Jinping intervened on the matter, calling for “severe punishment for the guilty” and for ensuring the safety of his fellow citizens in Central African Republic. The mayor of Bambari has accused a group of rebel militias calling itself the Coalition des Patriotes pour le Changement (CPC) of the massacre. It is a formation formed ahead of the 2020 presidential election to oppose President Faustin-Archange Touadéra.
Armed groups regularly attack civilians in the Central African Republic, a country that has experienced little stability since gaining independence in 1960. But it is by no means usual for the victims to be Chinese. The Embassy of the People’s Republic in the capital, Bangui, is appealing to all Chinese to avoid traveling outside of the capital itself. In Beijing, the Foreign Ministry has defined all of Central Africa as a “red zone” to signal the highest level of danger. It is a tragic and at the same time emblematic story. As China’s presence expands across Africa — as well as other areas of the Greater Global South — the Chinese workforce in those areas is growing proportionately. This workforce can become the target of terrorist attacks, as has happened in the past for other former colonial or putative imperialist powers: from European nations to the United States. Likewise, it is foreseeable that China, which is developing a “global footprint” with its businesses, will need to give itself an adequate military presence to protect its interests, starting with the lives and safety of its fellow citizens.
This theme was signaled by one of the most successful Chinese films, the action film Wolf Warrior 2, the sequel to the first part of the Wolf Warrior saga. The setting of Wolf Warrior 2 (directed, produced and interpreted by Wu Jing in 2017) in Africa and the plot, which involves a Chinese hostage crisis, are no accident. The economic penetration of Chinese companies on the black continent is well known; along with the fact that they often bring Chinese workers to construction sites and factories. Military expansion is just as true: after buying part of the port of Djibouti, the Beijing government has multiplied naval operations off the Horn of Africa. Less well known, at least among us Westerners, is the fact that there have already been Chinese hostage situations in Africa (I wrote about this in my book Stopping Beijing). And in some cases they ended tragically. Sudan came at the beginning of the third millennium to supply 40% of all foreign oil production through the state corporation China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC). This public company has built pipelines, roads and a refinery on the outskirts of Khartoum. Xi Jinping’s predecessor Hu Jintao called this refinery in Sudan “the pearl of the African continent”.
Such a lumbering industrial presence has prompted various armed Sudanese militias to attack the Chinese on several occasions. During the civil war that led to South Sudan’s secession, rebel leader John Garang called Chinese oil engineers “legitimate targets”. They end up all over Africa. In 2007, nine Chinese oil technicians from the multinational Sinopec were killed by guerrilla rebels in the Ethiopian region of Ogaden. Others were taken hostage and released for pay. In Chad in 2008, hundreds of Chinese employees of the CNPC and Huawei have to be evacuated (in this case by French troops). Three years later, China is forced to organize the most colossal rescue repatriation of its fellow citizens by land, sea and air: 36,000 are rescued from Libya. In 2011, the Chinese Navy crossed the Suez Canal for the first time and reached the Mediterranean Sea. The operation in Libya serves as a precedent for organizing another evacuation in 2015, this time from war-torn Yemen. In November of the same year, ten Chinese were besieged by an Islamic militia in an international hotel belonging to the Radisson chain in Bamako, Mali; When government troops arrive, three Chinese are killed in the final shootout. In 2016, two Chinese soldiers serving as peacekeepers in a United Nations-flagged peacekeeping mission in South Sudan were killed in a firefight with the secessionist army. Research into the deadly incident shows that the rebels’ weapons are made in China. The Beijing government reacted angrily: “We must focus our attention on who shot, not on arms production.”
It’s a contradiction that affects all superpowers, and today China is no exception: it competes with Russia for primacy in arms sales in Africa. She also adds the increasing involvement of the Chinese military in UN peacekeeping operations to the “targets”. As the film Warrior Wolf 2 evokes, the People’s Republic wrestles with an unrelenting gear. Although its global expansion along the New Silk Road has its positive sides, it is inevitable that it will appear to some as an imperialist and neo-colonial power on the same level as America, France, England. If it is not to leave its fellow citizens at the mercy of attacks, executions, kidnappings for ransom, China must arm itself for an increasingly visible, clumsy, intrusive military presence in places far from its borders. It is already happening and we will increasingly see its manifestations, including in the Mediterranean. It is a well-known mechanism in the stages of the rise of new imperial powers: corporations and armies go hand in hand in expanding influence abroad, and the “defensive” justification is not accepted by the recipients of the new military contracts.
This armed expansionism is asserted by part of the Chinese population. In some tragic killings or kidnappings in Africa, the Beijing government has been criticized on Chinese social media for failing to respond with adequate means. Disappointment was great when Chinese victims of attacks in distant lands were not saved by wolf-warrior-style military lightning strikes. To us Westerners, Xi Jinping may seem like a militarist. For some of them that’s not enough. There is a local constituency that wants a more heavily armed China to fulfill the double promise made in the film Wolf Warrior 2: The motherland will never fail the Chinese abroad. Actor-director-writer Wu Jing explains the film’s success: “In the past, many of our films were about the Opium Wars or how other countries attacked China. The Chinese have always dreamed of the day when this nation would be able to protect its people and contribute to world peace.” Should the two missions conflict, there is no doubt that the first will prevail.