FRIENDSHIP OR EXPLOITATION?
Friendship or exploitation?
Angana Guha Roy assesses the nature of Beijing’s growing and evolving relationship with the resource-rich African continent
China’s strategic and diplomatic footprint is growing in Africa. Beijing’s five-year plan, outlining an elaborate connectivity framework, positions Africa as a pivotal link in China’s global trade trajectory.
Three of the six trade corridors outlined in the plan run through East Africa, Egypt and the Suez region, and Tunisia. Demonstrating its deepening engagement, China has invested in 78 out of 231 port facilities in 32 countries across the continent. The Chinese engagement drive in Africa is driven by the Belt and Road Initiative and Beijing’s ‘go out policy’ and ‘New Historic Mission’ that led to the foundation of the Forum of China-Africa Cooperation(FOCAC).
Three major concerns about China’s deepening engagement in Africa are: unbalanced and unfair trade equations;the militarisation of Beijing’s Africa policy; and China’s growing political influence in the region.
‘Unbalanced’ trade transaction
In the frontline of China’s engagement in Africa are Private Enterprise Companies (PSCs). In 2022 the China-Africa Business Council published a report titled ‘Market Power and Role of the Private Sector’, which pointed out that Chinese private sector companies’ involvement in Africa has transitioned from ‘going to Africa’ to ‘settling in Africa’ to ‘setting down roots in Africa’. However, these PSCs, an integral part of China’s development support narrative in Africa, have been instrumental in practising unfair transactional deals to access Africa’s strategic natural reserves.
Criticisms of Chinese investments in Africa further include debt-trapping, economic dependence, and asymmetrical promotion of Chinese interests over local needs. Although Africa’s debt burden is not solely due to Chinese loans, development financing under China’s Belt and Road Initiative, based on short term limited economic benefits, has evoked concerns of perpetually driving the beneficiary countries into debt traps .From 2000-2023, Chinese loans to Africa totalled $182.28 billion across 1,306 loans.
Critics argue that China accrues more benefits from these trade partnerships and that the highly unbalanced economic ties are transactionally used to access strategic natural reserves. A case in point: China’s inroads into Africa’s critical mineral reserves sector in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).The DRC produces 80 percent of the world’s cobalt. Of the ten largest cobalt mines in the DRC, half are owned by Chinese companies, while 67.5 percent of China’s refined cobalt comes from the DRC.
China is utilising its military training exercises with African forces to advance its own geostrategic ambitions
Going back to 2008, the ‘Sicomines deal’ signed between the DRC and Chinese investors for a copper and cobalt joint venture, with the goal of financing infrastructure projects in the DRC, has become symbolic of complexities in the DRC-China relationship. In 2023 it was revealed that the mines at issue had been undervalued and the DRC state auditor called for infrastructure spending to be raised to $20 billion from roughly $822 million.
In 2024, China announced plans to spend $1 billion to modernise the Tan-Zam railway in return for obtaining operational control, which has the potential to increase critical mineral exports to China exponentially, particularly from the DRC’s isolated southern Katanga region.(Of the ten largest cobalt mines in the world, nine are in southern Katanga). China has also taken steps to modernise shipping from Tanzania. These far-sighted Chinese investments, mapped strategically, could eventually comprise a sophisticated network of Chinese transport sites, refineries and mining sites that guarantee secure access to natural resources.
Militarisation of China’s Africa Policy
Furthermore, China is utilising its military training exercises with African forces to advance its own geostrategic ambitions.
FOCAC, earlier focused on the China-Africa trade trajectory, has increasingly taken on military dimensions. Credits for military sales, military training quotas, and counterterrorism and peacekeeping capacity-building come from FOCAC allocations. FOCAC also hosts regular security dialogues like the China-Africa Peace and Security Forum and the China-Africa Police and Law Enforcement Forum. FOCAC also operates a fund for the African Union’s Africa Standby Force and promotes China’s Global Security Initiative.
There has been strong demand for CCP engagement from some African ruling parties.
China’s expanded African engagements reflect its global ambitions.When FOCAC was launched in 2000, China had no peacekeepers in Africa. Also, it was far behind the United States and Europe in the domain of capacity building for African students, civilian and military professionals. Chinese security assistance was nonexistent, and China was absent in African security debates.Yet today, the PLA’s largest overseas deployment is in Africa.
The PLA’s growing involvement in FOCAC illustrates the militarisation of certain aspects of China’s Africa policy. From 2000 till December 2024, China’s armed forces have conducted 19 military exercises, 44 naval port calls, and 276 senior defence exchanges in Africa.
China’s two-week military exercises with Tanzania and Mozambique, ‘Peace Unity-2024’, in July and August last year marked a significant expansion of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) engagement in Africa. Peace Unity-2024 exhibited the PLA’s improving capability to project infantry, armour, artillery and support units to cover vast geographical distances. It has also underscored Africa’s importance as a proving ground for PLA operational readiness, power projection, and war-fighting capabilities.
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China’s growing political influence
Contrary to China’s longstanding rhetoric vis-à-vis the principle of non-interference in other countries, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has escalated its training of African party and government officials as part of CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping’s ‘new model of party-to-party relations’ in Africa. Beijing has been promoting its governance model – based on party supremacy, fragmented authoritarianism, political meritocracy and party-led economic governance – in Africa via a suite of training programs through institutes such as Chitepo School of Ideology, Julius Nyerere Leadership School and the China-Africa Institute, as opposed to Africa’s preferred multiparty democracy model.
However, there has been strong demand for CCP engagement from some African ruling parties.After the Nyerere and Chitepo schools opened, countries including Burundi, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Morocco, and Uganda approached the CCP to build their schools and enhance their party building.Algeria, Ethiopia, Kenya, and South Africa are among the African countries whose governance academies maintain year-round training partnerships with China’s National Academy of Governance (CAG), the external name for the CCP’s Central Party School.
China’s party exchanges have increased alongside party school training programs through efforts like ‘Brainstorming summits’ for party leaders, the CCP and World Political Parties Summit and the Beijing International Forum for Democracy, as well as CCP briefing delegations consisting of top CCP leaders, who are sent to brief their foreign counterparts about the outcomes of major CCP meetings.
Over time, China’s engagement with Africa has evolved into a multifaceted relationship. Amidst Beijing’s domestic economic troubles and widening trade gap with the US, chances are that Africa’s footprint in China’s narrative-building exercise to lead the Global South will deepen, owing to greater market accessibility, building strategic leverage, extracting strategic reserves, and holding stakes in a less volatile strategic sphere of influence.
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Dr Angana Guha Roy is a foreign policy research analyst based in New Delhi