Chinese president ends oil safari, to mixed reactions - Yahoo! News
NAIROBI (AFP) - Chinese President President
Hu Jintao wrapped up his trip to Africa after clinching oil deals that highlight Beijing's search for fresh energy sources to power its booming economy.
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As Hu headed home after a five-nation tour that ended in Kenya, analysts and critics argued that China's demand for energy and other resources is helping unsavoury African governments heavily criticised by the international community.

Under one of the deals, the state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) will explore six blocks off the coast of Kenya, a country grappling with graft, and will buy a 45 percent share in an oilfield in Nigeria, where oil-related clashes have intensified in recent months.

In addition, Hu proposed a strategic petroleum reserve with Riyadh, and the Chinese company Sinochem agreed to buy a large but undisclosed amount of phosphates from Morocco in 2007.

Earlier in the day, the Chinese leader and his wife Liu Yongqing visited the Lari viewpoint, about 55 kilometres (34 kilometres) outside the capital, to view the Great Rift Valley, a popular site for tourists.

Kenyan officials said his visit would boost the number of tourists visiting Kenya, which is increasingly reliant on the Asian nation for tourism revenue in light of travel advisories issued by the west.

During Hu's energy-shopping spree, China inked deals to improve his host countries' floundering economies and shoddy infrastructure, prompting a cautious welcome from the Kenyan Standard newspaper.

"This might be an answer for the parsimony and intrasigence shown in the recent years by our traditional development partners who have often used aid as a form of blackmail," the paper said.

"Our interests are best served in a multipolar world such as the Chinese are making it possible," the English-language newspaper said.

"These agreements (between China and Morocco) will certainly benefit the relationship between the two countries that are determined to defy the laws of nature," a Moroccan news agency said, referring to the geographical distance between the two nations.

But angry critics have accused Beijing of doing business with undemocratic regimes, notably Sudan, an oil-rich nation that has for several decades used oil revenues to wage deadly successive wars on dissent.

"When Western governments try to use economic pressure to secure human rights improvements, China's no-strings rule gives dictators the means to resist," Human Rights Watch's executive director Richard Roth said recently.

"Chinese investment and aid can still sometimes help fight poverty, and it is not as if Western governments always have human rights foremost in mind. But as China's quest for new markets and natural resources spreads around the world, its de facto support for repression has become increasingly common," Roth added.

While in Kenya, Hu mantained that China would respect the independence of partner states and that this policy "serves the fundamental interest of China and African countries and contributes to peace, stability and development in the world at large."

"In our dealings with African countries, we have always followed the principle and we need to respect the development and political model chosen by African countries and people," he told reporters in Nairobi on Friday.

China pursues "a policy of non-interference in others' internal affairs," he added.

Chinese oil consumption is expected to rise from 6.59 million barrels per day in 2005 to 6.95 million this year as its once largely agrarian economy continues its rapid industrialisation.

Last year China bought 38.47 million tonnes of African oil, representing about 30 percent of the country's total imports, and nine percent more than in 2004.

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