China has made it increasingly clear that, where Africa's concerned, Western donors must take the new kid on the block seriously.

China comes with an impressive legacy of economic growth and a new package of solutions for Africa's problems. But it also comes with different rules, such as not interfering in another country's affairs, and giving massive loans with no political strings attached.

At the same time, China wants to look good on the international stage and boost its role as a world leader - and that's where Darfur comes in.

Competition is rife between China and Western donors, and they strongly disagree on many issues. When China and the United States get together to discuss Africa - as increasingly they seem to do - their main focus is Darfur, experts from the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) told a meeting at London's Chatham House this week.

China had long opposed international plans to enlarge the peacekeeping force in Darfur. But recently it has been the trigger in getting Sudan to adopt aspects of former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan's plan for a larger international force in Darfur, according to Bates Gill and Stephen Morrison, authors of the CSIS report China's Expanding Role in Africa: Implications for the United States.

"We have seen a dramatic alignment with the West on Darfur," said Morrison. "It all remains to be seen as to what that delivers in terms of results."

China's official policy of non-interference isn't just a question of ideology. It's also a question of branding, according to Morrison. "China is going to work very hard as a South-South donor because this is what sets it apart from the U.S. and other Western donors - so the non-interference brand is very important."

Yet the "brand" belies reality, explained Gill, because China does actually interfere when it's in its interests, for example in North Korea. "It intervenes more quietly and differently than other interventionists," he said. "We'll see it probably doing more of this in Sudan in the future."

A big unknown, though, is how far China is prepared to go on Darfur and whether it would back U.N. economic sanctions if current efforts fail to boost the international peacekeeping force to the full 20,000 troops and police proposed in Annan's plan.

A growing tension between China's ministry of foreign affairs - which wants to promote China as a world leader - and its ministry of commerce, which promotes China's state-run companies, is one of the main obstacles to China playing a constructive role in Africa, according to Gill.

Nonetheless, "if you can show strong international consensus, China will come," he said. Convincing China that such gestures don't just suit the interests of one Western country, but fit with its own and the wider international agendas requires a lot of "hard diplomatic lifting".

China's role in Africa overall has expanded rapidly in the last few years. The CSIS report lists some impressive figures.

Chinese loans to Africa totalled $12.5 billion in mid-2006 for infrastructure development alone. In the same year, Angola became China's leading foreign supplier of oil - overtaking Saudi Arabia. And in 2000 China agreed to give debt relief to 31 African countries, worth $1.2 billion.

But China isn't just coming to Africa with financial support, Senegalese Adama Gaye, corporate and government relations manager of regional banking institution Ecobank Group, told the Chatham House meeting.

It's coming with a package of solutions and also with legitimacy. Its own track record is impressive: it has pulled 200 million Chinese out of poverty in the last 20 years and reversed the effects of colonialism.

And it makes promises it can deliver on, said Gaye, in contrast to "grandiose shows" like the Group of Eight summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, in 2005, where big promises were made but are yet to be delivered.

Still, there are problems with China coming to Africa. China only speaks to governments and tends to ignore African civil society - its media, labour movements, environmentalists and other non-governmental groups. And, in a similar fashion to Western governments, the relationship is driven by the donor.

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