Xi Jinping delivered a unique message to dozens of visiting African leaders: Choose China

Beijing
CNN
—

In welcoming delegates from more than 50 African countries to Beijing this week for a major summit, Xi Jinping had a clear objective: to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that China is the continent’s leading foreign partner.

The Chinese leader made his point with ceremony on Thursday when, flanked by dozens of African leaders and the U.N. secretary-general in the Great Hall of the People, he vowed to elevate China’s ties with the continent to an “ironclad community with a shared future” — a status Beijing reserves for its most trusted diplomatic allies.

He also made a series of promises to the continent, to be fulfilled over the next three years: more than $50 billion in financial aid, the creation of one million jobs, tens of millions of dollars in food and military aid, while pledging to “deepen cooperation with Africa in industry, agriculture, infrastructure, trade and investment.”

Leaders including South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa, Kenya’s William Ruto and Nigeria’s Bola Tinubu gathered in the Chinese capital this week for the three-day forum that Beijing has hailed as its biggest diplomatic gathering in years.

Xi’s outreach to African governments comes as China appears set to rein in its previously free-flowing financing for African development – amid an economic slowdown and criticism that its lending there has contributed to countries becoming saddled with unsustainable debt.

Today, other powers like the United States are stepping up efforts to strengthen ties with the resource-rich continent as they seek to counter China’s political influence and secure access to resources critical to fueling the green energy transition.

The triennial forum on China-Africa cooperation, which ended Friday, was a key opportunity for Xi and his officials to signal their commitment to the continent, whose support has only grown in importance for Beijing in the face of its growing friction with the West.

Here are the main takeaways from Xi Jinping’s speech on the continent this week.

Xi Jinping and Chinese officials appeared eager to show that Chinese investment, particularly in African infrastructure, was not over – even though data shows that Chinese lending for African development and major infrastructure has declined significantly in recent years.

The Chinese president announced his commitment to support 30 infrastructure connectivity projects in unspecified countries and his ambitions for “a land-sea network.” He said China would launch 30 clean energy projects, seen as part of an initiative by Beijing to make the African market a destination for its green technologies such as solar panels and electric vehicles that are currently subject to tariffs in the United States and Europe.

Agreements reached at a series of bilateral meetings this week also focused on infrastructure. China, Zambia and Tanzania signed a memorandum of understanding on Wednesday to “revitalize” the existing railway line linking Tanzania and Zambia, and Nigeria and China discussed developing the West African country’s “transport, ports and free zones” in a joint statement.

However, such plans and China’s overall commitment of around $50 billion in financial support to the continent, while larger than those at the last forum in 2021, remain less robust than those of the previous decade, observers said.

“It’s not insignificant, but if you look at the details, it’s not as striking as before,” said Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center think tank in Washington, noting that the amount would be spread across many countries and a number of areas of cooperation ranging from health to green technology.

“It also means that funding for physical infrastructure will be reduced across the board. There may be a few major projects, but the more funding they take, the less there will be for other things,” she said.

African leaders have come to China seeking investment, trade and support for industrializing their raw materials sectors to create jobs. They are likely to watch closely for Beijing to follow through on its promises in the coming years, with analysts saying that fulfilling past commitments is difficult to track.

This year’s meeting also took place against the backdrop of a debt crisis in a number of African countries, which have been struggling with heavy external debt, including from Chinese loans, as a result of the coronavirus pandemic – and raised questions about China’s role in exacerbating the problem.

Analysts have widely dismissed previous claims that Beijing was deliberately seeking to saddle countries with debt to gain leverage on their assets, as it lends for the construction of highways, railways and power plants across Africa under Xi Jinping’s flagship Belt and Road Initiative.

African leaders also pushed back on this assumption during their visit to Beijing, with South African President Ramaphosa rejecting “the idea that when China (invests) it is with the intention, ultimately, of putting these countries into a debt trap or a debt crisis” in comments to reporters.

China is also not seen by observers as the main cause of African debt in most cases, with debt to its creditors accounting for a relatively small share of the continent’s overall public debt.

But the influx of Chinese loans has increased the debt burden, and while Beijing has defended its lending practices and efforts to ease debt repayments, observers suggest it has moved too slowly or been inflexible in cases where it has helped heavily indebted countries obtain relief.

These realities, along with China’s economic slowdown, appear to have reduced China’s appetite for such lending. Even before the pandemic, Chinese lenders had already been scaling back financing for large-scale infrastructure projects and touting a shift toward so-called “small but beautiful” investments, with more modest budgets and less environmental or social impact.

Xi Jinping highlighted these projects when presenting Beijing’s plan to support the region in the coming years, but did not address the issue of the countries’ debt in his public remarks.

Instead, the Chinese leader looked to history to portray the West as the driver of challenges for both China and Africa — a move observers see as an attempt by Beijing to portray the continent as firmly on its side when it comes to its broader geopolitical rivalry with the United States.

China, Africa and other developing countries have been “striving for decades to redress the historical injustices” of Western modernization, Xi told visiting delegations, in an apparent reference to colonialism and exploitative practices of centuries past.

Now, Xi predicted, China, together with African countries, would “trigger a wave of modernization in the countries of the South.”

Beijing sees the continent’s support as essential to Xi Jinping’s goal of positioning China as a champion of the Global South – and an alternative global leader to the United States, analysts say.

According to observers, highlighting this support is likely also a motivation behind China’s elevation of its diplomatic relations with participating African countries to a “strategic” level and its designation as an “ironclad China-Africa community with a shared future for the new era.”

The United States and its Group of Seven (G7) allies have launched their own effort to finance infrastructure in developing countries, with U.S. officials saying African countries should have “choices” when it comes to their partnerships.

Noting that “more countries” were paying increased attention to their ties with African nations, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said Thursday that Beijing “welcomes” such support for the continent – ​​provided it is not done with a “patronizing approach.”

Leaders at the summit also rejected the idea of ​​competition defining China-Africa relations. Speaking on the sidelines of the summit, Senegalese Foreign Minister Yassine Fall said there would always be global competition, but noted that “Africans today say that China is on their side.”

However, it is unlikely that African leaders will be willing to choose between Washington and Beijing.

“Overall (at the forum), the African side gave the impression that China remains a central player,” said Paul Nantulya, a senior China specialist at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies in Washington.

“That doesn’t mean they’re going to abandon the United States and other countries. They clearly don’t want to isolate themselves from opportunities and multiple engagements and partnerships,” he said.