China signals a renewed commitment to Africa

By Cobus van Staden

Photo credit: EurAsian Times

The 2024 iteration of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) was notable in having to navigate contradictory pressures. On the one hand, it had to demonstrate a continuance with the pattern set by earlier summits, and China’s ongoing diplomatic outreach with Africa and the wider global south. This included recreating and extending the optics of a vibrant Africa-China relationship, including numerous bilateral meetings against the background of red-carpet pomp, as well as responding to the precedent of earlier summits being punctuated by the announcement of a big funding target.

On the other hand, the summit also had to respond to a new, tougher, era. Its target commitments had to reflect the damage to the continent’s development plans wrought by Global North interest rate hikes in response to the COVID crisis and the war in Ukraine. The collapse of bilateral lending from Western lenders after the 2008 global economic crisis was coupled with a sharp rise in market-rated Eurobond and other private lending.^[1] What seemed sustainable in the mid-2010s rapidly proved otherwise in the early 2020s and several countries were pushed towards debt distress. Chinese lending, while remaining a smaller proportion of the continent’s debt burden, caused bottom-line headaches in key African economies. One of FOCAC’s political tasks was to balance a commitment to African infrastructure (and other) funding, while finding ways to avoid the narrative of Chinese predatory lending.

Equally important was the need to adapt FOCAC commitments to China’s changed domestic environment, constrained by high levels of provincial government debt, a crisis-ridden construction sector and ballooning youth unemployment.

A key part of this balancing act was finding ways of setting themes for a new era of Africa-China relations, in response to a charged geopolitical climate increasingly structured by open strategic rivalry. This paper focuses on how the summit reset and continued Africa-China relations in the face of these challenges. It first tracks high-level commitments and puts them in the context of those that followed earlier summits. It then focuses on wider themes that emerged from the summit, treating them as clues to how the relationship is evolving in a new era. It focuses on prominent themes like modernization, training, green development, and peace and security. In conclusion, the paper argues that this year’s summit is notable in how it managed to harmonize African development agendas like Agenda 2063 with Chinese global influence-building mechanisms like the Global Development Initiative, Global Security Initiative and Global Civilization Initiative.

Commitments

The full funding commitment announced at the summit came to RMB360 billion ($50.7 billion.) The sum breaks down into RMB210 billion ($29.6 billion) in credit facilities, RMB80 billion ($11.2 billion) in assistance and RMB 70 billion ($9.8 billion) as a minimum target for investment.^[2]

The full funding commitment puts the 2024 FOCAC summit among the highest commitments so far, between the roughly $40 billion of 2021, and the $60 billion of 2015 and 2018. It signals a renewed commitment after the reduction of funding announced in 2021 was widely framed as a retreat from the continent.^[3]

At the same time, the 2024 summit also echoes similar so-called Africa plus One summits in retroactively including earlier deals in the announcements and in the commitment for private sector funding to function as a goal implicitly dependent on as-yet-unconfirmed choices by companies.

Modernization

Modernization emerged as one of the most prominent themes at this year’s FOCAC summit. It was notable that modernization formed the opening theme of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s keynote speech, after the preamble, and that the speech immediately drew a distinction between Western modernization and the modernization pursued through Africa-China cooperation: “Modernization is an inalienable right of all countries. But the Western approach to it has inflicted immense sufferings on developing countries. Since the end of World War II, Third World nations, represented by China and African countries, have achieved independence and development one after another, and have been endeavoring to redress the historical injustices of the modernization process […] China and Africa's joint pursuit of modernization will set off a wave of modernization in the Global South, and open a new chapter in our drive for a community with a shared future for mankind.”^[4]

Positioning China as an alternative model of modernization for Africa has become an increasingly prominent theme in Chinese messaging to the continent, as well as in how its African messaging shapes its rhetorical address to the greater Global South.^[5] Xi’s speech was notable in drawing a more explicit distinction between Western and other forms of modernization than in previous speeches. The direct connection between Western modernization and colonial and imperialist exploitation served a few overlapping goals. First, it delivered a broadside against Western claims to universalist norms, most notably the link in Western thinking between democracy with open markets to development. More broadly, it weakens Western claims to representing a universal development model. In the place of Western claims that its norms can and should be implemented elsewhere, this framing presents a zero-sum view of Western development, where the enrichment of the West inevitably leads to growing exploitation and injustice in the developing world. The pointed use of the Cold War-era term “third world” here makes that theme explicit.

Instead, China is positioned as being both a leader and compatriot in a process of modernization that is co-constituted by an egalitarian community of Global South actors. This, in turn, strengthens China’s own (somewhat ambiguous) position as both representing a useful development model to the Global South, but simultaneously championing the right of each country to chart an individual development path based on its local conditions. It dovetails with a wider commitment to multipolarity, with its simultaneous hat-tip to each country’s individual ambitions, and a tacit understanding that multipolarity also implies hierarchies of power and development, where China’s sheer size and unprecedented development trajectory positions it as a natural leader.

More specifically in the Africa-China context, the theme of modernization also touches on long-running resentment on the continent about the overlap of Western power’s historical planned impoverishment of the continent with these powers’ current role as norm-setters, where development financing is subject to complex conditionality.^[6]

Green Development

If the theme of modernization set the broad terms of the summit, Chinese-led green development emerged as its more specific and concrete implementation. Its prominence was, in part, a reaction to realities on both sides. In China, key sectors like new energy technologies and electric vehicles have seen rapid development in part thanks to targeted support by the central government. For example, about 80% of the world’s solar capacity now comes from China.^[7] This development has been met by growing protectionism in China’s traditional export markets in the Global North, coupled with increasingly geopolitical rhetoric. In response, Chinese companies are increasingly turning to Global South markets, both in pursuit of alternative access to European and North American markets, as well as a way of maximizing benefit from emerging markets in the Global South. The theme of green development, with its implied use of Chinese solar energy, smart grids, EV charging networks and so forth, represents a key pivot in the face of these pressures.

On the African side, demographic pressures are contributing to growing demand for green energy. About 53% of Sub-Saharan populations lack access to stable electricity.^[8] Youth unemployment is also one of the continent’s most pressing challenges, one that puts the purported economic benefits of the African youth bulge in doubt. This has a double impact in Africa-China relations. First, African demand maps on Chinese supply, creating a compelling commercial opportunity for Chinese companies at a moment of constrained domestic growth. In the second place, it also feeds into the broader modernization leadership described above.

The missing link between these potential synergies and their on-the-ground implementation lies in financing. What has become known as China’s “small is beautiful” funding model is aimed at filling this gap without increasing risk on either side.^[9] The “small” refers to budget sizes in the low hundreds of millions (compared to the billion-plus budgets of the 2010s) with shorter repayment windows. These also frequently feature blended finance and public-private-partnership models aimed at reducing sovereign debt burdens. The “beautiful” side implies broad social and developmental benefits and implies a rebuke of the vanity projects that sometimes characterized earlier Chinese-funded projects on the continent.

Power plants designed around renewables, energy storage facilities, microgrids and so forth represent this approach – both widely beneficial and popular, while also being contained in cost and size, and potentially modular.

FOCAC 2024 also reflected a related, but separate development – the growing prominence of African critical mineral reserves in global energy transitions. Chinese control over the extraction and refining of key minerals used in green energy and defense applications (specifically cobalt, but increasingly also lithium, nickel, copper and other minerals) has driven a succession of G7-led projects on the continent aimed at weakening Chinese control over supply chains.^[10]

At the same time, African continental bodies like the African Union and the African Development Bank are formulating continental strategies to use these resources to increase local industrialization. FOCAC documents acknowledged these plans and tried to dovetail them with Chinese initiatives on the continent through commitments to joint laboratories to pursue value addition to raw mineral reserves, to boost skills transfer and to boost African industrialization through the building of special economic zones. This draws on a limited but growing investment in mineral refining on the continent, especially in the lithium sector in countries like Zimbabwe.^[11]  

Training

Training and skills transfer has long played a key role in Africa-China relations. During the 2010s China emerged as one of the most important destinations for African students, especially as visa-related discrimination increasingly kept them out of Global North institutions. However, this exchanged ground to a virtual halt during China’s zero-COVID era.

This year’s summit aimed to broadcast a reversal of this trend via both training and institution-building. In the former sense, there was a commitment to provide 60,000 training slots aimed at youth and women. This was backed up with pledges to establish ten vocational Luban workshops, and an unspecified number of engineering and technology colleges, aimed at accelerating skills transfer.^[12]

This training dovetails with commitments to broadening Africa’s science and technology skills pool, via joint technological and agricultural initiatives, for example by allocating RMB1 billion ($140.8 million) to expanding agricultural demonstration centers, and by deploying 500 agricultural experts to the continent.^[13]

These commitments demonstrate a close coordination with African stakeholders’ goal to broaden the youth population’s skills, especially in science and technology, and feeds into the broader commitment at this year’s summit to create a million jobs on the continent. These pledges also acknowledge the broad demand for employment, with youth unemployment rapidly emerging as one of the continent’s most pressing risks.

Peace and security

The focus on skills transfer extended to the field of peace and security. China committed to training 6,000 military and 1,000 police members, with 500 military officers to receive training in China.^[14]

Peace and security emerged as a FOCAC agenda item at the 2012 gathering,^[15] largely due to efforts from the African side. While China has participated in peacekeeping on the continent, these missions tend to be under the auspices of the United Nations, and mostly via funding and in non-combat and supportive capacities.

This trend continued in 2024 via the training focus mentioned above, as well as through the pledge of RMB 1 billion ($140.8 million) in military assistance, as well as a commitment to joint anti-landmine initiatives and increased shared military exercises.^[16]

One contrast with earlier summits was the increased prominence of the Global Security Initiative, with the many pledges for security cooperation (on counter-terrorism, combating irregular arms trade, curbing environmental and wildlife crime and so forth) being framed as part of wider cooperation under the Global Security Initiative.^[17]

This, in turn, was included in the wider theme of modernization, with “lasting peace and universal security” functioning as a “strong underpinning of modernization.”^[18]

Conclusion

If FOCAC 2024 was characterized by the twin themes of constancy and innovation, it also demonstrated a wider evolution in China’s engagement with the Global South. First, it showed a growing willingness to integrate FOCAC with continental development plans like the AU’s Agenda 2063, as well as African strategic planning for skills transfer, green development and enhanced industrialization.^[19]

At the same time, it also showed how central the Global Development Initiative, Global Security Initiative and Global Civilization Initiative have become as framing mechanisms that shape Beijing’s external relationships, especially in the Global South.

In this context, modernization, and its framing as a distinctly South-South endeavor fundamentally different from the Euro-American experience of development, emerged as an important theme. FOCAC provided evidence that the broader rhetoric of modernization dovetails with the forging of more concrete connections between Chinese supply and Global South demand, especially in the fields of green energy, electric mobilities and data networks.

This may be the most consequential aspect of FOCAC 2024. More than the funding announced, this politico-economic nexus addressing the overlapping issues of development, industrialization, energy and financing in the context of Chinese industrial capacity and African technological backlogs demonstrates the uniqueness of the Africa-China relationship, even in the face of competing attempts from other global powers.