The flags of dozens of African countries were flying above Tiananmen Square on Thursday morning while inside the Great Hall of the People Xi Jinping was greeting more than 50 leaders from the continent.
They were in Beijing for the Forum on China-Africa Co-operation, a summit that has been held every three years since 2000 and the biggest international meeting the Chinese capital has seen since the coronavirus pandemic.
Xi pledged more than $50 billion in financing for Africa over the next three years, and promised to help to create at least a million jobs there by deepening co-operation in industry, agriculture, trade and investment. And he said that China would open its market to 33 least developed countries in Africa, offering them zero-tariff access for all products.
Chinese lending to Africa ticked up sharply last year after a steep decline from its peak in 2016 but the focus is no longer on large infrastructure schemes and has moved on to less expensive “small and beautiful” projects. There was a change too in the way Xi framed the relationship between China and Africa, describing it as a shared journey in modernisation and contrasting it with the western approach.
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“Modernisation is an inalienable right of all countries. But the western approach to it has inflicted immense sufferings on developing countries. Since the end of the second World War, Third World nations, represented by China and African countries, have achieved independence and development one after another, and have been endeavouring to redress the historical injustices of the modernisation process,” he said.
Beijing will step up its military assistance to African countries, providing training for 6,000 military personnel and 1,000 police and law enforcement officers, while also taking part in joint military exercises.
In a joint declaration China and the African countries said they would support each other on their core issues and major concerns, with China backing a call for reparations to be paid for slave trafficking, colonialism and racial segregation.
For their part the African leaders said they remained committed to the “one China principle”, although South African president Cyril Ramaphosa used the more nuanced “one China policy” formulation in his speech in the Great Hall of the People. They said they firmly supported “all efforts” by the Chinese government to achieve reunification with Taiwan, and described issues related to Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Tibet as “China’s internal affairs, as observed in international law and the non-interference principle”.
In his remarks Xi was scrupulous in presenting China’s partnership with Africa as one between equals despite the asymmetry evidenced in a record trade imbalance that shows no sign of narrowing. And the 10 measures he announced reflected many of Africa’s priorities, including health, agriculture, employment and training.
“Nobody’s paying attention to Africa in Washington. Getting on the agenda in DC about Africa is next to impossible,” said Eric Olander, co-founder of the China-Global South Project. “Europe is consumed with wars in Gaza and then also in Russia, as well as domestic politics and immigration. Africa has fallen back to a very low priority for the US and Europe, back to almost where we were in 2000 when the Chinese first came to Africa and the US and Europe had largely disengaged.”
Alarmed by the success of China’s Belt and Road Initiative in promoting Beijing’s economic and diplomatic interests across the Global South, the EU launched its own Global Gateway Initiative in 2021. The idea was to offer African countries a more transparent and sustainable alternative to Chinese infrastructure financing but so far it has made little impact.
Olander suggests the Belt and Road Initiative is no longer the main organising structure of Xi’s foreign policy and he has found support for other global initiatives among countries eager to embrace a non-western architecture of global governance. He says the relationship between China and the Global South was never as transactional as it was characterised in the west, and that the reduction in Chinese lending to Africa has not led to a loss of influence.
“In many ways I would say that in the midst of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and the great power competition with the US and the disenfranchisement that many of these countries feel with the western-led system, China’s standing politically has probably gone up, if anything,” he said.
“In terms of these frustrations that are shared across these regions with the status quo, with the US and European-led international system, when they see China punching and slapping the US on certain things that does resonate. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they want China to be the leader of the Global South.
“What we see is actually a drive towards following the Vietnamese example, and the Angolan example, and the Kenyan example, which is to have robust relationships with all sides. Strategic autonomy is probably the strongest current that we see in these countries more than aligning with China, India, the US or Europe. Countries right now don’t see any benefit of fully aligning with one side or the other.”