With an enormous delegation of top Chinese business leaders in Cape Town, it was hardly surprising that the role of China in Africa's economic development should have emerged as a key topic at the TIME/FORTUNE/CNN Global Forum.
As Trevor Manuel, Minister in the South African Presidency and former finance minister, reminded the conference, Chinese investment in Africa is hardly new — the famous Tan-Zam railroad, designed to take Zambian ore to the coast in Tanzania, was funded by the Chinese as long ago as the 1970s. But the scale of recent Chinese investment in Africa — encompassing everything from resource extraction to agriculture to finance (China's ICBC owns 20% of South Africa's Standard Bank, for example) has been extraordinary, making sessions on China at the Forum a palpable hit. It isn't just Chinese investment that won the attention of delegates, however. It was also the sense that China — with its enormous parastatal companies and strategic direction of the economy by state agencies — offered an alternative model for growth from the market fundamentalism which, as economist Ken Courtis agued, had held sway since the collapse of the Bretton Woods world some 30 years ago.
(See pictures of China's investments in Africa.)
