PINK FLOYD, so the tale goes, lost their brilliant but troubled frontman Syd Barrett when they were driving to a concert and forgot to pick him up on the way. One year on from Live 8, when the band re-formed to play to an audience of two billion people, it’s clear that the organisers were similarly forgetful. By focusing on the G8, they ignored a country that is not in that group, but which holds Africa’s future in its hands: China.

China makes the G8 look like, well, a bunch of ageing musicians re-forming for one last gig. That weekend, as Pink Floyd sang Wish You Were Here, a Chinese company called Great Wall quietly announced it was to blast Nigeria’s first communications satellite into space. Selling Nigeria to investors is a tough job: insurgents, bandits and corruption are endemic. But here is Mustafa Bello, head of the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission: “The US will talk to you about governance, about efficiency, about security, about the environment,” he says. “The Chinese just ask: ‘How do we procure this licence?’”

Something extraordinary is going on in the developing world: everywhere you look, there is China. Its foreign minister, Li Zhaoxing, begins each year with a trip around Africa. It helps that he speaks fluent Swahili, which isn’t, say, Margaret Beckett’s forte. Trade between China and Africa grows at dizzying speed. Chinese firms are drilling for oil, mining metals and logging timber across the continent. They are also building everything from railways to football stadiums, in an unorthodox mix of hard business logic, soft loans and aid.

It is not only Africa. There is a similar story in Latin America, where China is buying natural resources from just about anyone; to sweeten the deal, President Hu Jintao has pledged up to $100 billion of aid over the next decade. China is even getting friendly with places such as Belarus. Belarus? The clapped-out Stalinist throwback in Eastern Europe with approximately no economic activity whatsoever? Or a “full market economy”, with which China has a relationship of “ strategic co-operation”, as President Hu dubbed it in December when President Aleksandr Lukashenko was treated to a three-day state visit? China has strengthened its ties with Cuba, Yemen and Zimbabwe.

China’s foreign presence is ambiguous, hard to adore, difficult to dislike wholeheartedly and all-pervasive: the diplomatic equivalent of tofu. Analysts say it is open to debate on its role abroad, far more so than on domestic policy. But on the other hand, China will deal with anyone, and pariah states are a gap in the market. Despite US concerns, China treats these countries as it wishes to be treated itself: be they corrupt, inept, or genocidal, it doesn't get involved. Put aside whether this is a recipe for a new Cold War — what does it mean for Bono?

Britain’s “development community” has been searching its soul recently. In particular it seems to have gone off aid. The idealistic, hippy talk of the redistribution of wealth is now passé as the penny drops that the billions given to Africa have only kept tinpot elites in power. “I think Africans must have been smiling and cringeing at times when they saw us just thinking that money could solve their problems,” said Bono earlier this year. “Aid is not a magic bullet,” says Duncan Green, Oxfam’s head of research. “The real drivers of change are internal.”

The new buzzword is governance. Growth will come only when accountable governments establish property rights and weed out corruption. Tricky though it is, the Department for International Development is now trying to encourage good governance, by cutting back aid to countries that persecute opposition leaders and supporters. The latest approach makes sense. But, sadly, the game is up: China makes it irrelevant. It is giving billions of dollars of loans to Angola, for example, with no strings attached in return for oil contracts. Raddled old kleptocrats such as President José Eduardo dos Santos can now raise two fingers to the West.

Unlike those wussies at the IMF and the World Bank, China doesn’t make aid conditional on respect for human rights. Privately, its leaders think that the West’s claim to the moral high ground is self-serving cant. Nor does China push a model of economic development — although its new friends are welcome to learn from Beijing. That’s a worry, too, as countries on a path to democracy may think again. After decades of following one faddish Western policy after another with little to show for it, whom would you trust on reform — China with its red-hot growth rate or creaky old Europe?

Bono et al are back at base camp. From now on they’ll need to pressurise China to pressurise African leaders to allow themselves to be voted out of office. It’s a tough sell in a country where charity rock concerts are pretty thin on the ground and no one’s heard of Bob Geldof.

Too late the US is realising what is slipping through its fingers. A recent report by the Council on Foreign Relations called for treating Africa strategically: “The United States should engage China on ‘rules of the road’ in Africa, to end support for egregious violators of human rights, reduce incentives for corruption, protect the environment, improve the long-term prospects for stability, and reduce unfair business practices.”

Sorry, but it is just not going to happen. Africa is not a road for foreign powers to drive on. For good or ill, its leaders can choose whose rules to follow. We can engage with China or try to pick a fight. But a world in which the West can single-handedly lay down democracy and good governance? That’s just hippy talk.

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