China funded buildings in Africa become hotbeds for spying

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Why is China on a building spree in Africa?  Beijing is currently constructing  an ever-growing number of government and parliament buildings, presidential palaces, military housing and police headquarters all across the continent. As a part of  an aggressive diplomatic strategy in Africa, China is paying for the construction of these imposing buildings through grants or interest-free loans.</p>
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Work on the new China-funded USD80 million Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters south of Addis Ababa in Ethiopia began in December 2020 amid protests from the United States. Washington had opposed Beijing’s move to fund and build the project and alleged that it would be used to spy on “Africa’s genomic data”. However, China’s foreign ministry dismissed it at the time as “ridiculous”.</p>
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There were also accusations that China bugged the USD200 million African Union (AU) headquarters in Addis Ababa that opened in 2012, funded and built by China. This claim was also rejected by Beijing as preposterous and baseless. French newspaper Le Monde in a 2018 report cited anonymous AU sources as saying that for five years, data had been transferred from computers in the building to Chinese servers. It said hidden microphones had also been found and the data was transferred to China for backup.</p>
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The Kenyan government announced on 13 May that China is constructing a new foreign ministry building for free and expressed gratitude to Beijing for generous grants. China has made a similar promise to the Democratic Republic of Congo in January. During a recent Chinese Foreign Minister's visit to Africa, Beijing promised to fund the refurbishment of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s foreign ministry headquarters.</p>
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China is funding such buildings across the continent, including in Zimbabwe, where it is paying for the construction of a USD140 ­million six-storey parliament building in the capital Harare. In Zambia, Lusaka last year announced that China had agreed to fund the construction of a new international conference centre that would be used to host the African Union Heads of State Summit in 2022.</p>
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A report by the South China Morning Post quoted a US analyst saying the facilities were being built by China under contract and sometimes they were provided for free. He gave the examples of foreign ministry buildings being constructed as gifts in Mozambique, Sierra Leone and Uganda. When such buildings were provided for free it inevitably created a conflict of interest, he said, and it also raised questions about the potential for the facilities being bugged. “Any sensitive structure, like a presidential palace or foreign ministry, built by any foreign government raises questions of listening devices,” says David Shinn, a professor at George Washington University.</p>
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Another analyst said there were two areas of concern over Chinese-built government facilities – one of them about the buildings being bugged and the second issue was how African nations would pay back China. “Here the assumption is that they will concede something to China in return for this gift. That something is sometimes imagined as a vote somewhere, a favourable deal, or even bigger concessions,” said Lina Benabdallah from Wake Forest University in North Carolina.</p>
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Building foreign affairs headquarters certainly will be frowned upon as it suggests Chinese influence but unless the construction of the building is directly linked to a specific deal in which China is considered in favour, we can’t say it violates the conflict of interest rules,”  said Yun Sun, director of the China programme at the Stimson Centre in Washington.</p>