China leads Algeria construction boom

ALGIERS | While still struggling with the aftermath of a decade of Islamic insurgency, oil-rich yet impoverished Algeria is getting a makeover: a new airport, its first mall, its largest prison, 60,000 new homes, two luxury hotels and the longest continuous highway in Africa.

The power behind this runaway building spree is China.

About 50 Chinese firms, largely state-controlled, have been awarded $20 billion in government construction contracts, or 10 percent of the massive investment plan promised by President Abdelaziz Bouteflika for a nation where jobs and housing are scarce and al Qaeda has struck roots.

Algiers, the tense and run-down capital, now has something relatively new to the Arab world: a Chinatown.

The Beijing government has been a supporter of Algeria since the 1960s, after it won independence from France, and today the 35,000 Chinese in the country are the biggest foreign population after the French.

Trade both ways soared to $4.5 billion last year, from just $200 million in 2001, according to Ling Jun, deputy head of the Chinese Embassy in Algiers. China is now second only to France in exports to Algeria.

Algerian exports to China barely top $300 million because China is a latecomer to the North African nation’s biggest asset, the oil and gas under its portion of the Sahara Desert, which is dominated by U.S. firms. “But we’re very active for the prospecting of new fields,” Mr. Ling said.

And meanwhile, they’re earning a hefty chunk of Algeria’s oil money.

The China State Construction Engineering Corp., is building two-thirds of Algeria’s 745-mile east-west highway at breakneck speed and was on the verge of completing it this month after just three years, Mr. Ling said.

The Algerian story mirrors China’s inroads elsewhere in Africa, which are helped not just by its bulging coffers, but by the fact that unlike some Western countries, China doesn’t make human rights and corruption-free procedures a condition for investment.

It has drawn heavy criticism from human rights groups accusing it of bypassing the arms embargo on the embattled Darfur region of Sudan by trading weapons for oil with the Sudanese government. Elsewhere, it is accused of failing to spread the jobs among local workers, and of mistreating those it hires.

Some feel China’s African footprint has gotten too deep.

“Africa shouldn’t have eluded one form of neocolonialism to fall headfirst into Chinese neocolonialism,” Rene N’Guettia Kouassi, the head of the economic commission at the African Union, was quoted as saying in Jeune Afrique, the leading French-language weekly on the continent.

In Algeria, too, that footprint has not been trouble-free.

Last summer Algiers saw its first anti-Chinese riot, apparently touched off when an Algerian got into a scuffle with a Chinese trader in the capital’s Chinese market over a parking space, and the confrontation took on Islamic overtones.

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