(CNSNews.com) - A small arms-laden cargo ship making its way around the southern tip of Africa after several countries refused it permission to dock has become a symbol of China's willingness to arm some of Africa's most questionable regimes.

The An Yue Jiang, a vessel in the fleet of China's government-owned shipping giant COSCO, is according to published reports carrying thousands of rocket-propelled grenades and mortar rounds and three million rounds of assault rifle ammunition, ordered by the government of Zimbabwe.

China says the contract was signed last year and that the shipment has nothing to do with Zimbabwe's current political crisis.

But the timing of the shipment's arrival in the region has fed into fears that the government of President Robert Mugabe could use violence to hold onto power after Mar. 29 elections the opposition claims to have won.

The incident also comes at a time when China's policies at home and abroad are under the spotlight in the run-up to the Beijing Olympic Games.

(China's arms sales to another controversial African government, Sudan, also have drawn strong protests from activists concerned about the continuing conflict in Darfur. Human rights groups say Chinese-supplied weaponry has been used by Khartoum both in Darfur and during an earlier, long and deadly north-south civil war. Chinese weapons also found their way into conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in Liberia before the fall of former President Charles Taylor.)

Zimbabwe is landlocked, and any goods shipped from abroad have to travel overland after being offloaded at ports on the Indian or Atlantic Oceans.

But after protests by South African transportation workers and a court ruling, the An Yue Jiang was not allowed to offload its cargo in Durban late last week, and neighboring Mozambique subsequently turned it away.

An international union of transportation workers whose members in South Africa opposed the transfer of the weapons said the ship appeared to be steaming up the south-western coast of Africa heading for Angola.

The London-based International Transport Workers' Federation said the only realistic option was for the ship to return to China. It said southern African governments' assistance should be limited to allowing it to refuel and resupply in preparation for the trip home.

Lloyd's Marine Intelligence Unit said in a statement that it was tracking the ship's movements. The London-based company said the options available to the An Yue Jiang included an at-sea transfer of the cargo onto another vessel. It said there were more than 300 vessels in the area capable of receiving the cargo, including two belonging to COSCO.

The U.S. government on Tuesday confirmed it had been in touch with governments in the region, and it praised the decisions not to allow the vessel to offload the cargo.

"We don't think it's appropriate at this point, given the political upheaval that's occurring in Zimbabwe, for anyone to be adding extra tinder to that situation by providing additional weapons to Zimbabwe's security forces," said State Department spokesman Tom Casey.

He repeated Washington's call for Zimbabwe to release the results of the elections and to honor the will of the voters. The administration's top Africa official, Jendayi Frazer, will hold talks this week with several regional governments, with the crisis in Zimbabwe a "major element of discussions," Casey said.

The opposition Movement for Democratic Change says it won both parliamentary and presidential elections, but three weeks after the simultaneous vote the state's electoral commission has still not released results of the presidential poll.

In Beijing, the foreign ministry bristled at suggestions that anything was irregular about the shipment.

"This is normal trade in military products between the two countries," ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu told a press briefing, adding that it was "irrelevant" to the current situation in Zimbabwe.

She suggested that COSCO would probably have to ship the weapons back to China.

Jiang also reiterated China's long-held stance that its economic dealings with other countries, including the sale of arms, adhered to a strict policy of non-interference in their sovereign affairs.

In its reporting on the An Yue Jiang episode, the official Xinhua news agency cited data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), which tracks arms sales, showing that China accounted for just two percent of the world's arms trade, compared to 30 percent for the U.S.

Xinhua implied that it was wrong for other countries to criticize China when it was a much smaller player in the arms trade - ninth in the world, says SIPRI - than other countries.

China does not publish regular information about its arms exports, but in 2004 Zimbabwe's defense permanent secretary Trust Maphosa told lawmakers in response to media reports that the country was buying armored vehicles and fighter planes from China. The reports said the deal, which included 12 FC-1 jets, was worth $240 million.

Maphosa said the purchase of Chinese equipment was necessary because of a U.S. and European Union arms embargo.

U.S. arms sales to African countries in recent years have been comparatively small - in deliveries of military equipment and services in 2006 the biggest customer was Ethiopia ($3 million), followed by Kenya and South Africa ($2 million each), according to a Congressional Research Service report to Congress last December.

During the 2003-2006 period, the biggest purchaser of U.S. arms was Kenya, which took delivery of equipment and services worth $17 million, the report said.

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