Africa presence part of globalization

"I went to London and did a few arbitrary jobs in order to get enough money to go hiking in the Karakoram mountains in Pakistan. After a few months there I crossed the border and came to Xinjiang. I had no real interest in China but this just blew me away," he says.

After doing a master's degree in English literature at the University of Cape Town (where he admits to reading only books on China and not syllabus novels, such was his new interest) he returned to China, ending up as a lecturer in English at the National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan.

He then won a Bill and Melinda Gates Scholarship, which enabled him to study social anthropology at Cambridge, both for an M Phil and a PhD.

His doctorate focused on how political events since the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) had affected the urban space of Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang.

"I was looking at the interface between politics and urban development and how the various political regimes since the Qing Dynasty had affected the social organization of the city."

Urbanization remains one of Anthony's strong research interests at Stellenbosch.He believes the Chinese are different from many Africans in seeing city living as some form of ideal lifestyle.

"If there is a vision of contemporary China, what you might call a collective fantasy, it is urban.

"It is unlike Africa. We are constantly moving from the countryside to the city and back. The exception in China might be Uygurs. When they retire, they too want to move back to a nice house in the countryside."

Anthony says the Chinese are beginning to export some of their urban planning ideas to Africa, particularly in such areas as the Chinese Eastern Industrial Zone near Addis Ababa, where a number of Chinese companies are based.

"As soon as you enter these zones it is like entering a slice of modern China from the way the flower beds are organized and all these slogans put up on the walls."

Anthony does not think these Chinese zones will prove successful in the long run.

"When I first visited one, I thought they might be a possible future model for African development but they are no longer flourishing. There are a lot of issues and they are not taking off. There are five or six across Africa now and by the time I die I doubt whether there will be 50 or 100."

Anthony believes that generally China gets unfairly criticized for its role in Africa.

"I think China has got a ridiculously bad rap in terms of its presence in Africa. It is shameful the way the West covers this, especially the left-leaning newspapers."

He believes the Africa market might be more open to China because it doesn't have the colonial baggage some Western countries have.

"They came in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) and they didn't do anything. They left and took just a few giraffes. They didn't colonize, although they did take African slaves to Guangzhou."

He insists China is not neo-colonialist in Africa but says there is an inevitable imbalance in the relationship.

"You almost have to take more than give, otherwise it is not a sustainable relationship," he says.

"The Chinese, have done some brilliant things here, however. You have only got to go to Angola to see the transformation that has taken place by the construction of infrastructure."

Anthony says there is very little difference between China's involvement in Africa and that of the West and it is in large part just about the spread of global capitalism.

"I think anxieties about this are misguided," he says.

"China is sometimes presented as some enemy but actually it is a country very much integrated into the global economic system. Any differentiation between China's engagement in Africa and that of the West is a false one."