The news went unnoticed in the West, but had great visibility on Chinese news. Nine Chinese citizens were killed in the attack launched by a militia in Central Africa, in the prices of a gold mine where they worked. The victims were employees of the Chinese company Gold Coast Group, which manages the extraction of a gold mine 25 km from the city of Bambari. SPresident Xi Jinping intervened in the matter, calling for a «severe punishment for the guilty» and called for the safety of his fellow citizens in the Central African Republic to be guaranteed. The mayor of Bambari has accused a group of rebel militias calling themselves the Coalition des Patriotes pour le Changement (CPC) of the massacre. It is a formation born before the 2020 presidential election to oppose President Faustin-Archange Touadéra.
Armed groups regularly attack the civilian population in the Central African Republic, a country which has rarely known stability since its independence in 1960. But it is not at all common for the victims to be Chinese. The embassy of the People’s Republic in the capital Bangui has launched an appeal to all Chinese to avoid traveling outside the capital itself. In Beijing, the Foreign Ministry has defined the whole of Central Africa as a “red zone” to signal the maximum level of danger. It is a tragic and at the same time emblematic story. Away that China’s presence throughout Africa is being strengthened – as well as in other areas of the global Great South – the Chinese workforce located in these areas increases proportionally. This workforce can become the target of terrorist attacks, as has happened in the past for other ex-colonial or perceived imperialist powers: from European nations to the United States. It is equally foreseeable that China, developing a “global footprint” with its business, will have to give itself an adequate military presence to protect its interests, starting with the life and safety of its fellow citizens.
This theme was signaled by one of the most successful Chinese films, the action-movie Wolf Warrior 2, the sequel to the first installment of the Wolf Warrior saga. The setting in Africa of Wolf Warrior 2 (film directed, produced and interpreted by Wu Jing in 2017), and the plot that includes a Chinese hostage taking, are not accidental. The economic penetration of Chinese companies in the black continent is known; along with the fact that they often bring Chinese labor to construction sites and factories. Equally true is military expansion: after purchasing a part of the port of Djibuti, the Beijing government has multiplied the missions of the navy off the Horn of Africa. Less known, at least among us Westerners, is the fact that Chinese hostage-takings in Africa have already happened (I wrote about it in my book “Stop Beijing”). And in some cases they ended tragically. Sudan at the beginning of the third millennium has come to supply i40% of all foreign oil extraction by state-owned 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 that refinery in Sudan “the pearl of the African continent”.
Such a cumbersome industrial presence has caused various armed Sudanese militias to target the Chinese on several occasions. During the civil war that led to the secession of South Sudan, rebel leader John Garang calls Chinese oil technicians “legitimate targets”. They end up being all over Africa. In 2007, nine Chinese oil technicians from the Sinopec multinational were killed by rebel guerrillas in the Ethiopian region of Ogaden, others were taken hostage and then released on payment. In Chad, hundreds of Chinese employees of the CNPC and Huawei have to be evacuated (in that case by French troops) in 2008. 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. It is that, in 2011, the first time that the Chinese navy crosses the Suez Canal and arrives in the Mediterranean. The Libyan operation 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 of the Radisson chain in Bamako in Mali; when government troops arrive, three Chinese are killed in the final shootout. In 2016, two Chinese soldiers engaged in South Sudan as peacekeepers in a peace mission under the UN flag died in a firefight with the secessionist army. Investigations into that fatal incident reveal that the rebels’ weapons are made in China. The Beijing government reacts angrily: “We need to focus our attention on who fired, not on the production of weapons.”
It is a contradiction that affects all the superpowers and today China is no exception: it is competing with Russia for the primacy of arms sales in Africa. The growing involvement of Chinese military in UN peacekeeping operations also adds them to the “targets”. Just as the film Warrior Wolf 2 evokes, the People’s Republic is grappling with an inexorable gear. Although its global expansion along the New Silk Roads has its beneficial aspects, it is inevitable that to some it will appear as an imperialist and neocolonial power on the same level as America, France, England. If it does not want to abandon its fellow citizens to the mercy of attacks, executions, kidnappings with ransom requests, China must equip itself for an ever more visible, cumbersome, 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 phases of the rise of new imperial powers: businesses and armies go hand in hand in extending influence abroad, and the “defensive” justification will not be accepted by the recipients of the new military missions.
This armed expansionism is claimed by a part of the Chinese population. In some tragic events of killings or kidnappings in Africa, the Beijing government has been criticized on Chinese social media for not having reacted with adequate means. The disappointment was strong, when Chinese victims of attacks in distant lands were not saved by wolf warrior-style military blitzes. To us Westerners, Xi Jinping may seem like a militarist. For some of his own, that’s not enough. There is a domestic constituency that wants a more armed China, to fulfill the double promise made in the film Wolf Warrior 2: The motherland will never abandon Chinese overseas. Actor-director-writer Wu Jing explains the success of the film thus: «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 contradict each other, there is no doubt that the first will prevail.