The huge investments, mentioned earlier, into the Democratic Republic of Congo, will help build 3,840 km of roads, 3,200 km of railway lines, 32 hospitals, 145 health centers and two universities.
Unlike others in the region, the Chinese have a reputation for paying promptly and well. Nor are their interests in the Congo particularly new. In the 1970s they built a parliament building there and in the 1990s they built the national stadium.
Chinese trade and investment merely mirrors Western patterns of activity but on a smaller scale and in only a handful of African countries. Notably, the Swiss and the Belgians operate significant concerns in the Congo too, and the Chinese stake in the copper industry there is one-third the size of that owned by the US giant - Freeport.
But it is not just Western governments that the Chinese appear to be upsetting. For years Western NGOs have sought to teach their domestic audiences that all that is required in Africa is small-scale and sustainable development.
Oxfam continues to encourage people to buy Africans a goat, some seed, condoms, a toilet, or even dung as a fertilizer for Christmas. And, of course, all of this comes with a great deal of moral hectoring about aids and the need for population control.
No wonder the Chinese, with their no strings attached investment policies have been so welcomed across the continent. Chinese loans come with few demands, benchmark conditions, requirements for risk audits and environmental impact assessments. But they do get things done.
China itself is still a developing country with a population currently moving from rural poverty into urban squalor. To be middle class there means to earn about 1,500 pounds ($3,008) a year. This emerging economy may not translate into world political power as we know it.
China is Africa's third largest trading partner behind the EU and the US. In investment terms it stands lower still. Only countries that have been ostracized by the West, such as Sudan, have China as their main commercial partner, but others, such as India, do business there too.
