IN CRISP white uniforms and standing to attention beneath a fluttering red flag with five golden stars, the sailors on board the People’s Liberation Army ships setting sail for Djibouti on July 11th represent a significant step for China. When they arrive they will open the Middle Kingdom’s first military base abroad since the Korean war.

It is a canny first foray. China has prepared the ground with low-key deployments of blue-helmeted troops to UN operations in places such as South Sudan. And it has placed the base in a country that is likely to cause the least offence.

America already has a large airfield and naval station in Djibouti. From there it conducts counter-terrorism operations, and watches the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, both much used by smugglers trafficking drugs, weapons and people. And China’s main regional rival, India, cannot argue that the installation represents a significant projection of power into an ocean it regards as its own. The base will mostly be a logistics hub for a naval squadron China has long sailed in these waters, escorting commercial vessels. Still, the hoisting of a red flag over African soil will be the most visible sign yet of China’s growing assertiveness on a continent that was once the playground of Soviet and Western powers.

The base represents but the tip of a fast-growing bamboo shoot. The next segment down is a vast effort aimed at enhancing China’s soft power in Africa and at promoting the so-called “China model” of authoritarian, state-driven development as a counter to Western efforts to spread liberal democratic capitalism. Much of this is done through political training programmes whereby members of ruling parties, labour unions and ministries are taken to China to meet the members of the Chinese Communist Party. Its best student is Ethiopia, where the ruling EPRDF party has copied much of what it has seen in China, tightly controlling business and investment, and imitating China’s Central Party School and party cadre system.

China’s attempts at spreading its view of the world go far beyond Ethiopia, albeit with varying degrees of success. In South Africa, for instance, more than half of the members of the executive committee of the ruling African National Congress have attended such schools in China, a country the party calls its “guiding lodestar”.

China is, like the West, strategic about the ways in which it doles out aid. A study by AidData, a project based at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, found that countries that vote with China in the UN General Assembly get considerably more money than those that do not. China has also spread its influence in less visible ways. Victoria Breeze and Nathan Moore at Michigan State University reckon that in 2014 the number of African students in China surpassed the number studying in either Britain or America, the traditional destinations for English-speakers (France still beats all three, however). Much of the growth is because China has given tens of thousands of scholarships to African students, the academics say. If efforts such as these are aimed at burnishing China’s image, then they are working. Afrobarometer, a polling firm, found that 63% of people in 36 African countries consider China to be a positive influence. Nevertheless, it also found that African people still think China’s development model ranks second after America’s. That may change in time, since by far the main part of China’s involvement in Africa is in business. In the past decade, Chinese loans and contractors have, quite literally, reshaped much of the continent’s infrastructure, paying for and building new ports, roads and railways. In many cases, this has been matched by investments in mines and manufacturing plants, shopping centres and corner stores. The scale and extent of China’s business interests are easily visible, whether in a hotel in Rwanda, where the writing on all the fittings, from elevators to shampoo dispensers, is Chinese; or at a roundabout in central Accra, where a crew of Chinese labourers are repairing the road. This flow of Chinese money and workers has prompted some to gush that China is becoming Africa’s most important economic partner, and others to fret that it is the new colonial master. In a recent report McKinsey, a consulting firm, looked at five measures of Africa’s economic connection with the world: trade, investment stock, investment growth, infrastructure financing and aid. It found that China is among the top four partners in each of these. “No other country matches this depth and breadth of engagement,” it enthused.

Yet others are more sceptical, arguing that many overestimate the sums that China is investing in or lending to Africa, because they add up pledges rather than actual flows. A close parsing of the data by David Dollar, an economist, finds that China accounts for only about 5% of all existing investment in Africa, and a similar share of new investments. America’s investment stock is twice as much.

“The notion that China has provided an overwhelming amount of finance and is buying up the whole continent is inaccurate,” he argues. That matches with work by Deborah Brautigam, who leads the China Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins University. She found that little more than half of announced Chinese loans to Africa actually materialised.

Yet look beyond official loans or the work of big Chinese state-owned companies, and there are signs of a deeper Chinese involvement. McKinsey’s work suggests that there are as many as 10,000 Chinese companies operating in Africa, 90% of them privately owned. Many also reported earning juicy returns, in some cases enough to pay back their investments in less than a year. Many said they planned to keep investing because of the plentiful opportunities to make money.

Yet even as those small firms make money, it is far less certain that Chinese investments in big infrastructure such as the railway line linking Mombasa’s port and Nairobi in Kenya will ever show a return; there is even less chance of recovering the cash sunk by Chinese state-owned firms into poorly governed places such as Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In this China seems to be repeating many of the mistakes made by Western donors and investors in the 1970s, when money flowed into big African infrastructure projects that never produced the expected economic gains. In a decade or so China may find itself in the position the West once did, of having to write off many of their loans to African governments. Unless of course those sleek navy ships in Djibouti are ever put to use collecting overdue debts.