China Special
Africa's Week in Brief
Dear Africa Brief,
This briefing reaches you as President Xi meets with President Putin. Considering the fast changing geopolitical situation, this special edition takes a closer look at what President Xi’s third term means for Africa. To begin, we start with some instructive quotes.
“It is our African brothers who have carried us into the UN.”
Chairman Mao on the People’s Republic of China’s restoration to the UN, 1971.
“China-Africa relations have today reached a stage of growth unmatched in history. We should scale the heights, look afar and take bold steps. Let us join hands, pool the vision and strength of the 2.4 billion Chinese and Africans and open a new era of China-Africa win-win cooperation and common development.”
President Xi on China-Africa Cooperation, South Africa 2015.
Special Edition: China in Africa
In 1955 Premier Zhou Enlai led a Chinese delegation to meet with six African countries—Egypt, Ethiopia, Liberia, Libya, and soon to be independent Sudan and Ghana. There, at the Asian-African Conference at Bandung, newly independent African states and their Asian counterparts established China as a friend — a foreign power that “could share their experience of colonialism and reject the cold war order.”
Today, China is Africa’s largest trading partner (~$254bn as of 2021). According to Johns Hopkins China-Africa Research Initiative, China has some 200,000 workers on the continent, donates some ~$3bn USD annually in financial aid, and spends ~$45bn each year on construction projects since 2008. The consultancy firm McKinsey estimates that more than 10,000 Chinese businesses operate in Africa — 90% of which are privately owned.
*Credit: The Economist
In terms of military infrastructure, China’s plans to construct its second military base on the continent, the first Atlantic (West) coast military installation. China has an existing base in Djibouti on Africa’s East coast, along one of the world’s most important waterways.
Connectivity
Africans are connected today thanks in large part to Chinese telecommunications equipment and infrastructure. The Atlantic Council found that Huawei and ZTE have developed 80% of the continent’s 3G network with Huawei alone developing 70% of the continent’s 4G network. China Mobile is a major contributor to the laying of the world’s longest subsea cable — the 2Africa Cable — measuring in at 45,000 kms. 2Africa will increase connectivity to 1.2 billion people.
Connecting to the network are Chinese mobile phones (ZTE, Tecno, X-Tigi, and Starlight), which are now ubiquitous across Africa’s 54 states. As for surveillance, many African governments rely on Chinese artificial intelligence systems. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a Canberra-based defense and policy research organization, shows China has built 266 technology projects in Africa ranging from telecommunications networks to data centers, smart city projects that modernize urban centers and education programs. South African legal professor Willem Gravett says that China is using African countries as laboratories to improve its AI-based technologies which are in turn reinforcing authoritarian African states with increasingly illiberal tools for oppression.
*Credit: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Minerals
Apart from its investment in tech, China has massive holdings in African oil and gas projects, particularly in South Sudan (the country has 3.5bn barrels of proven crude reserves). However, since the pandemic and the hastening of the energy transition, Beijing has switched its investment focus from hydrocarbons to minerals (The South China Morning Post). Today, China controls some ~95% of the rare earths market from sourcing to processing. Private, public and state owned Chinese firms have operations extending from the cobalt rich mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), to the bauxite deposits in Guinea and coltan fields of Western Burundi.
The most important of these rare earths is cobalt — the silver-grey metal (symbol Co atomic number 27) is essential for lithium-ion batteries. The DRC produces somewhere between 70-75% of the stuff and 90% of it that is mined in Congo comes from two industrial firms, Glencore, an Anglo-Swiss trader, and China Molybdenum, a Chinese state enterprise.
Longtime Friendship
The Sino-African relationship is not a new one. Chinese merchants have traded with the continent’s east coast since the 15th century. Fast forward a few hundred years to Africa’s early period of decolonisation, the Bandung Conference determined the course of Africa’s liberation thinking and economic planning. The Conference forms the bedrock of the ideological bonds binding the two today. At the Conference, Premier Zhou Enlai convinced the participants to incorporate the PRC’s Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence into the Ten Principles of Bandung. The original five principles remain essential to China’s foreign policy and include: mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, mutual nonaggression, non-interference in each other’s internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence.
A shining testament to China’s commitment to the African renaissance is the Chinese designed and constructed African Union headquarters. The building is made to resemble two hands in embrace — the hand of Africa and the hand of China. (It came to pass that Chinese state hackers secretly redirected surveillance footage from the African Union headquarters so it could be viewed in the Middle Kingdom).
Of late China’s zero-COVID policy—and a property crisis—has battered China’s economy and impacted its relations with the continent. As a result, Beijing has scaled back BRI lending, leaving African economies vulnerable at a time of falling currency values, rising interest rates, and food and fuel shortages. At last year’s Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, China announced a $20 billion reduction in funding for the continent.
What to make of all of this?
Depending on what one reads, China is presented as either a neo-imperial overlord or an economic saviour. The problem with this dichotomy, as with most, is that it obfuscates the true state of affairs. I share the view of Daniel Large, Beyond ‘Dragon in the Bush’: The Study of China—Africa Relations, that positioning the China-Africa question in the context of South-South cooperation better frames the relationship between the parties in the context of a shifting world order. On this score, John Mearsheimer’s Gramscian analysis of China’s claims to hegemony within the African context is particularly illuminating. In his view, power is the currency of international relations and China’s economic and diplomatic efforts on the continent is a means to the end of setting and enforcing the new rules of the game.
In any case, deploying a neocolonial framework to Sino-African relations is too simple and commenters fall, too often, into the trap of false equivalency. It is helpful to remind oneself that where a concept is presented as being ‘everywhere’ it is often ‘nowhere.’ What is true, is that China has bet on Africa’s rise more than any other world power — and this bet may well pay its dividend soon enough.
Warmly,
Joshua