IN the past seven months, Chinese dealers have bought 30 tons of ivory from Zimbabwe’s Parks and Wildlife Management Authority — representing the tusks of some 2,250 elephants.

“It’s an incredibly profitable trade,” said one game ranger. “They’ve not only run the parks’ stockpile right down, but elephants are now being poached across the border from Botswana and other neighbouring countries to fulfil the demand, which seems to be bottomless.”

The purchases are typical of China’s rapacious scramble for Africa, in which oil, minerals and all manner of raw materials are being eagerly snapped up. Opportunities for deal-making are swiftly exploited, sometimes with detrimental effects on the continent.

Under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, which controls the world’s ivory trade, President Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe has a special concession that allows it to sell lots worth £270 or less. This loophole has allowed the burgeoning trade to develop. Chinese money is now fuelling widespread poaching. Two months ago Zimbabwe police caught Chinese dealers with seven tons of ivory, of which four tons came from illegal sources.

“They deliberately mix legal and illegal stuff together as a disguise,” the ranger said. “Of course, the case hasn’t come to court and probably it never will, given President Mugabe’s ‘look east’ policy and his passionate enthusiasm for all things Chinese.”

In recent months Mugabe has been exhorting Zimbabweans to learn Mandarin and take up Chinese cuisine. Beijing’s voracious appetite for raw materials to sustain a fast-growing economy has seen Chinese trade and investment pouring into Africa in the past few years. In 2003 the total China-Africa trade was £6.6 billion. By 2005 it had reached £22 billion.

Human rights activists are appalled at the way Beijing has ignored scruples that have made many western investors wary of dealing with regimes like those of Zimbabwe and Sudan. “Wherever there are resources the Chinese are going to go there,” says Peter Takirambudde, head of the Africa division of Human Rights Watch. “They see no evil. They hear no evil. That’s very bad for Africans.”

Indeed, the Chinese go out of their way to ingratiate themselves with dictators such as Mugabe, donating the blue tiles that adorn his new £7m palace in Harare. They have also decided to foot the bill for a large Namibian presidential palace in Windhoek.

The rhetoric of the China-Africa relationship is different, with China claiming to be the champion of all Third World countries, offering them a new relationship that will free them from their dependence on the northern powers of the G8.

They are adept at high-profile gestures such as a donation of four endangered white Siberian tigers to Zimbabwe for a captive breeding programme.

They have also succeeded in getting African states to accept large numbers of Chinese experts and workers as part of their investment packages: 28 “Baoding villages” have been established, each housing up to 2,000 Chinese workers, in various parts of Africa.

In Nigeria, a Chinese-language newspaper now serves 50,000 immigrants. At no stage in Britain’s colonisation of Nigeria did the British numbers reach such a figure. As one opposition figure in Zimbabwe observed: “If the British were our masters yesterday, the Chinese have come and taken their place.”

At grassroots this is highly unpopular. Chinese goods sent to Africa are notorious for their poor quality. None of a shipment of 50 buses to Zimbabwe is still working and an order for 250 more has been suspended.

Of three MA60 passenger jets the Chinese sent to Mugabe, one has never managed to fly, one had to make an emergency landing at Victoria Falls, injuring many passengers, and the third caught fire on take-off in Harare last week. All are now grounded.

Moreover, as Eldred Masunungure, professor of political science at Harare University, puts it: “The resentment of the Chinese is not only widespread, it’s deeply rooted.”

The Chinese are generally viewed as loud, uncouth, prone to spitting and openly derogatory towards Africans. Worse, the copper mines they have opened up in Zambia and Zimbabwe are renowned for low wages, ferocious labour discipline and a sky-high accident rate. “That’s how they run things at home, after all — and on top of that, they despise blacks,” said one Zimbabwean engineer.

As with the ivory traders, many Chinese technical experts develop other ways of making money. In Harare, some are already a force in the drugs trade. In Botswana, Chinese workers brought in by construction companies now own hundreds of shops in the capital, Gaborone. Most worrying of all, however, is the way Chinese imports have largely wiped out budding African industries.

Professor Laurence Schlemmer of Witwatersrand University’s business school in Johannesburg, said: “In effect, China is forcing Africa back into the role of raw material suppliers — undermining its textile industry and importing raw cotton instead.”

Such concerns were raised with President Hu Jintao, who recently toured Africa. But for the moment the tidal wave of Chinese money is carrying all before it. “The Chinese are getting away with claiming that they aren’t like the other colonialists, but Africans aren’t fools,” a South African economist commented. “The Chinese are far more ruthless than the Brits ever were.”

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