China-Africa summit seeks to boost trade, 'brotherhood'

China has over the past decade paid for dams, power stations, football stadiums across Africa and scooped up copper, oil and other fuel for its breakneck economic expansion from Algeria to Zimbabwe.

It has invested billions of dollars while raising eyebrows in the United States and its allies by pursuing the hunt for oil and other resources in Sudan, Somalia and other nations that the West has shunned.

Many African leaders praise China however for not preaching about rights and corruption. So despite neo-colonialist qualms, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao can expect a warm welcome from Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak and finance and foreign ministers from 50 countries when the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation starts in the Egyptian resort of Sharm El-Sheikh on Sunday.

FOCAC is held every three years and this will be the fourth since it started in 2000.

Ever-eager for raw materials and markets to sell its products, China has said the new meeting will lay down a “road map” to further boost cooperation between 2010 and 2012.

Direct Chinese investment in Africa leapt from US$491 million in 2003 to US$7.8 billion in 2008. Trade between the two has increased tenfold since the start of the decade.

Last year, China-Africa trade reached US$106.8 billion — a rise of 45 percent in one year and on a par with with the United States, which estimated its two-way trade with sub-Saharan Africa at US$104 billion for 2008.

Chinese imports from Africa last year were worth US$56 billion, dominated by oil (US$39 billion) and raw materials.

Its US$56 billion of exports in 2008 consisted mainly of machinery, electrical goods, cars, motorbikes and bicycles.

Some in the West have accuse China of worsening repression and human rights abuses in Africa by supporting countries such as Sudan and Zimbabwe.

U.S. intelligence director Dennis Blair told a Congress committee in March that U.S. agencies are keeping close tabs on China's expanding influence in Africa, especially in oil-producing countries like Nigeria.

China ploughed seven billion dollars into Guinea's mining sector just days after the massacre by the army in September of 150 opposition supporters in the capital Conakry.

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