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Despite the arrogance and condescension in such words, they do reflect some hard truths. China may be a willing partner to many of the regimes and countries the rest of the world won’t touch, but that hardly means Africans are always satisfied with their arrangements. In a country like Angola, which has raked in $100 billion in five years and has posted one of the highest growth rates in the world since 2002, newfound economic success often means they can begin to dictate the terms of their own deals. And often, those new deals don’t include the Chinese.

Ironically, because of early help from the Chinese, Luanda may now have the means to avoid getting trapped in a relationship with a partner as voracious and demanding as China. The oil refinery in Lobito is expected to be awarded to the American firm kbr, and the regime of José Eduardo dos Santos has just reconciled with France after an eight-year tiff. And Angola isn’t the only country beginning to feel comfortable saying no to China. In Nigeria, an April 2006 agreement in which China would have paid $2 billion for first access to four oil blocks was canceled. A similar agreement that involved cnooc, the state-owned Chinese oil company, fizzled out. In Guinea, a billion-dollar financial package involving a bauxite mine, an aluminum refinery, and a hydroelectric dam was called off.

In some cases, such contracts have been canceled or failed to materialize as a result of a deliberate strategy on the part of African rulers. Spectacular announcements of Chinese contracts have beenmade with the intention of frightening Western partners into offering better terms. In meeting after meeting with African officials, I heard the following plea:

“Write in your magazine that the Chinese do not have a monopoly here, and we would love to have the French or anybody else doing work here, if they make a competitive offer.” Niger, for instance, dangled uranium rights in front of Chinese companies and even went so far as to expel an official from the French nuclear concern Areva in an apparent effort to persuade it to increase its bid for a mine in Imouraren, which has one of the world’s largest untapped deposits of uranium in the world. Areva signed the contract in January 2008, and it was considered a triumph for the regime of President Mamadou Tandja. When China feels betrayed by African governments, it can’t easily fall back on public opinion.

Despite all its talk of brotherhood and lack of a colonial past, China remains unpopular. From Congo to Angola, taxi drivers, street sellers, even locals working on Chinese construction sites complain about the influx of Chinese. “They are like the devil,” “They do not respect us,” “They are here to take everything from us” are the common refrains. Perhaps the relationship is too recent—and one that really only exists between officials—to have given personal ties the chance to form. It’s rare to see Chinese and African workers at the same construction site go and drink a beer together at the end of the day.

Grass-roots resistance to the Chinese has sprung up. In 2004, in Dakar, Senegal, the powerful lobby of Senegalese and Lebanese shopkeepers’ organized several protests against the Chinese boutiques, whose prices they said were undercutting them. Shops were set on fire. President Abdoulaye Wade was given an ultimatum by the shopkeepers union to kick all Chinese nationals out of the country.

Although he didn’t go that far, he forced through a near total moratorium on visas issued to Chinese citizens from his country’s embassy in Beijing. He then finagled a more open policy toward visas from the Chinese Embassy in Dakar. This enabled Senegalese storeowners to establish connections in China and maximize their profit margin on Chinese imports to Senegal. In October 2007, China’s state-owned news agency had to admit that “the Senegalese doing business in China far exceeds the number of Chinese doing business in Senegal.”

Undoubtedly, though, the country with the most intense anti-Chinese sentiment is Zambia. When an April 2005 explosion in a Chambishi copper mine killed at least 50 people, the Chinese owners were accused of ignoring basic safety regulations. The miners demonstrated against their employer, and their protests struck a chord in the capital, Lusaka. Opposition leader Michael Sata made the Chinese the focal point of his presidential campaign in September 2006 by accusing them of destroying the country. He even charged the Chinese Embassy with supporting his opponent, incumbent President Levy Mwanawasa. Although he briefly led in the polls, his bid was unsuccessful (and likely the result of voter fraud). Five months later, while touring the continent, Chinese President Hu Jintao was forced to abandon plans to visit the “Copper Belt” due to fears that the workers would revolt again. Never before had a Chinese leader experienced such an affront in Africa.

Generally, China seems to have difficulty maneuvering in countries more democratic than itself. Zambia is not a perfect democracy, but, unlike in China, its press is relatively free, unions exist, and public opinion matters. During a major China-Africa summit in Beijing in November 2006, organizers at the Chinese press center distributed the short book, China and Africa 1956-2006, by historian Yuan Wu. It presents democracy as a scourge because it “exacerbates” tensions inside African countries. “Fortunately,” the author concludes, “the wave of democratization has started weakening.”