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As African leaders prepare to meet with their Chinese counterparts at the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in Beijing in the first week of September, all eyes will be on the dynamics of this relationship. The summit has been a cornerstone of Sino-African diplomacy over the past two decades and provides important insights into the trajectory of China’s engagement with Africa.
Many people believe that China’s relationship with Africa is primarily based on access to natural resources. While this is true in some cases (such as cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo), the significance of the China-Africa relationship is much broader than mineral relations. The African continent is at the center of a growing network that Beijing has established in the developing world, designed to consolidate support as China faces increasing geopolitical and geoeconomic pressure from the United States, the European Union, and its allies.
The reasons why China remains committed to Africa are highlighted by Africa’s 54 votes in the United Nations, its growing youth population, and the fact that Sino-African cooperation strengthens China’s image of building a global community of developing countries. These factors are crucial to China’s efforts to carve out space for its global rise and push multilateral systems and institutions away from Western dominance.
On the other hand, Africa is beginning to be more confident in its relations with China. Many African countries are having difficulties restructuring their debts to China, Chinese loans in exchange for raw materials and the Africa-China trade pattern is still characterized by the export of raw materials, which has a negative impact on Africa and Africa’s negative view of relations with China.
The 2024 FOCAC in Beijing will therefore lay the foundation for a renewed Africa-China partnership. As the world’s attention turns to this high-stakes diplomatic event, the outcomes of the FOCAC summit will provide important insights into the future of Africa-China relations and China’s changing role on the global stage.
This year’s FOCAC is likely to highlight China’s uniqueness as a model for modernization and development in Africa, with three key themes set to feature on the Chinese agenda.
Green Energy
In the 2010s, China-Africa infrastructure cooperation was dominated by large-scale projects, which often supported large-scale infrastructure projects implemented by Chinese state-owned enterprises. This brought two side effects: first, power projects in this phase of the Belt and Road Initiative tended to focus on traditional factories, which were partly dominated by the expertise of Chinese state-owned enterprises. This, in turn, led to huge debt burdens in recipient countries.
This year’s FOCAC summit will be the first in the reformed Belt and Road Initiative era, with the slogan “Small is Beautiful”. This reform was featured particularly prominently at the October 2023 Belt and Road Forum and is expected to influence this year’s FOCAC commitments as well. “Small” refers to projects with wider scope, smaller budgets and shorter payment windows. “Beautiful” refers to projects with low environmental and social impacts and large development benefits.
Global Connectivity
Since its inception in 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative has sought to promote connectivity between China and the rest of the world. Initially, this led to a focus on physical infrastructure and building links between China and key markets (e.g. between China and Europe via Central Asia). While this remains a core objective of the Belt and Road, the initiative has expanded to include many other forms of connectivity, including building closer ties between China and other countries along the Belt and Road, through trade and regulatory integration, and leveraging training and personnel exchanges. Although FOCAC predates the Belt and Road Initiative itself, it has become a key platform for engagement with the Belt and Road Initiative, shaping China’s interactions with the wider Global South.
Unlike the United States, which promotes a generally open internet dominated by large corporations and global surveillance agencies, China is promoting the idea of internet sovereignty. This emphasizes local data storage and a strong oversight role for national governments, which in turn raises concerns about government intervention to suppress local dissent. Some African governments have expressed support for this approach. China’s activities around these issues have a larger goal of making the global system more sensitive to Chinese actors and regulation. Africa plays an important role in this process because many of these systems were built from the ground up, providing Chinese companies and regulators with unique opportunities to increase their influence.
Strengthening China’s leadership in the Global South
This year’s FOCAC comes as China faces growing opposition from a US-centric coalition that includes the European Union, Australia, and major East Asian economies such as Japan and South Korea. In response, China is building relationships with the Global South. Emerging markets and emerging global political communities are becoming an important counter-strategy for China. China’s important role in the formation and expansion of the BRICS group (originally Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) is one of many examples of China’s efforts to build alternative institutions and platforms in different regions to engage with countries in the Global South.
FOCAC is one of the oldest of these platforms and has influenced the formation of others. Aligning China’s international message with the priorities of the Global South remains critical. In a year marked by widespread political uncertainty, FOCAC could be a space to highlight and showcase the stability of China’s relations with developing countries.
Fundamental to achieving this goal is China’s positioning itself as a developing country and an integral member of the Global South. While China’s developing country status as the world’s second largest economy is increasingly under attack by Western policymakers, parts of the country still face the same systemic underdevelopment issues as the rest of the Global South. Beijing is strengthening its position as an emerging superpower in the Global South by politically aligning itself with the Global South around geopolitical and geoeconomic issues and the need to reform global governance institutions such as the UN Security Council and the IMF.
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