China woos Africa, casting itself as global South's defender

Beijing: African flags have been flown over Tiananmen Square. Leaders of African nations have been greeted by dancers, honor guards and children waving flags. They have been escorted in extensive motorcades past banners celebrating "A Shared Future for China and Africa" and giant, elaborate flower arrangements.

China has pulled out all the stops for a gathering of leaders and top officials from more than 50 African nations this week in Beijing, welcoming them with pomp and pageantry.

"After nearly 70 years of hard work, China-Africa relations are at the best period in history," China's leader, Xi Jinping, told the gathering Thursday.

Xi has cast his country as a defender of the developing world, one that can push the West to listen to the voices of poorer countries. He hosted a banquet for the leaders at the start of the event Wednesday, after three consecutive days of back-to-back bilateral talks with nearly two dozen leaders of nations ranging from impoverished Chad to the continental economic powerhouse of Nigeria.

The three-day forum is meant to demonstrate Beijing's global clout despite rising tensions with the West. Xi's courtship of African countries is part of a great geopolitical competition with the United States that has intensified in recent years over Russia's war in Ukraine and China's aggressive posture toward Taiwan.

China is "trying to take advantage of the space left by the US and Europe, which are increasingly disengaged with Africa," said Eric Olander, the editor-in-chief of the China-Global South Project website. "China sees an opportunity to really step up its engagement, and not necessarily just with money."

And Beijing's diplomatic push is more urgent this year as China, faced with slowing economic growth at home and accusations of dumping excess production abroad, seeks new buyers for its goods.

"As China's relations with the US and Europe deteriorate, African markets, as well as other parts of the global south, will become even more important for Chinese goods," said Yunnan Chen, a research fellow at the Overseas Development Institute in London who has studied cooperation between China and Africa. That is particularly true of new technologies like solar panels or electric vehicles, she added.

Even so, some African leaders have indicated that they would prefer a more balanced relationship, one in which China bought more finished goods from the region, for instance. "We would like to narrow the trade deficit and address the structure of our trade," South Africa's president, Cyril Ramaphosa, told Xi on Monday during talks held on the sidelines of the forum, according to an official transcript.

The event is also an opportunity for China to defend its engagement in Africa. It has come under criticism for offering financing without environmental, financial or human rights conditions, leading to projects tainted by corruption, pollution or labor abuses. China, one of the world's largest creditors, has also been reluctant to offer debt relief to most countries despite the crippling load that some are carrying.

The meeting, held once every three years, has historically been a platform for China to pledge large, multibillion-dollar packages of financial and technical aid to Africa. President William Ruto of Kenya, for instance, hopes to get funding to finish a railway line from the Rift Valley to Malaba town on Kenya's western border with Uganda. He is also looking for more investment to build roads and dams and set up an industrial park for pharmaceutical companies.

China has adjusted its approach to new aid for the region. Instead of large railway and other infrastructure projects, Beijing is now emphasizing less costly commitments, like digital skills training -- a useful contribution on a continent with a youthful population -- and what it calls "small and beautiful" projects.

"We are in a period of recalibration, where African governments and Chinese banks are both more sensitive to risks," said Deborah Brautigam, director of the China Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.

Chinese lenders last year committed $4.61 billion to African countries and banks, the highest amount since 2016, according to data from Boston University. But that is still a fraction of the nearly $30 billion a year that they pledged in 2016, at the peak of Chinese financing in Africa.

The shift is driven in part by changes inside China, where the property sector is in crisis and local governments are overextended, and by higher interest rates post-pandemic, which raise the cost of debt for African countries. Angola and Zambia now owe billions of dollars to Chinese state-owned banks.

"The world's financial situation does not allow large-scale loans to developing countries," said Tang Xiaoyang, an international relations scholar at Tsinghua University in Beijing, referring to the higher interest rates. "The cost is too high."

Critics have said that past meetings led to bloated loans that African countries could not pay back. (African countries also owe significant amounts to the World Bank and other international lenders.)

And while Chinese lenders financed crucial infrastructure on the continent, they also backed coal-fired power plants and other projects that contributed to greenhouse gas emissions.

In the run-up to the summit, Chinese state media outlets have highlighted projects backed by Chinese lenders in African villages, like solar panel installations and soybean-planting techniques, as bringing direct benefits to communities.

The emphasis on smaller, greener initiatives may help assuage concerns in Africa about unprofitable megaprojects, said Jana De Kluiver, a research officer at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria. "It has this aspect of making sure that the China-Africa relationship, at least on a global scale, doesn't look predatory," she said.

Even as the scale of Beijing's cooperation with Africa has shifted or declined, "the fact that China has maintained these triannual summits over two decades is a huge political achievement," said Chen, of the Overseas Development Institute.

Such meetings are a way for Beijing to demonstrate China's commitment to Africa. The United States, by contrast, held one such summit with African leaders in 2022, after eight years.

Brautigam said that the summit follows months of behind-the-scenes diplomacy between Chinese and African officials. "You can contrast this with how we do things in the US, where engagement is far more ad hoc," she said.

China has officially asserted that it does not see Africa as a region where major powers compete for geopolitical gains, insisting it is interested in working with the region toward so-called "win-win cooperation." At the same time, China's aid, investments and diplomacy have helped secure African backing for China at international organizations like the United Nations.

China has also won support on the African continent for the position it has taken on the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip. Beijing has brought rival Palestinian factions together for talks as it has sought a bigger diplomatic role in the Middle East. It has asserted its long-standing support of Palestinian statehood and criticized Israel's bombardment of the region.

That position aligns China with countries like South Africa, which has called Israel's policies toward Palestinians an "extreme form of apartheid." A joint China-South Africa statement released Monday cited the two countries' shared interest in an "immediate cease-fire and end to all fighting" in Gaza.

"China's full embrace of the Palestinian cause has fully aligned it with almost the entire global south," Olander said. For many Africans, he added, the war "closely resembles the colonial wars that ravaged their countries."