China Still Courts Africa, Which Is Increasingly Suspicious – Il Foglio

The Forum for Cooperation between China and Africa opens, that is, the Mattei Plan with Chinese characteristics. Between doubts and concerns

It is the Mattei Plan with Chinese characteristics, the real summit with African countries: Focac, the Forum for Cooperation between China and Africa, has reached its ninth edition and opens tomorrow in Beijing. Chinese President Xi Jinping, host who yesterday and today held several bilateral meetings with African leaders, will open the forum with a speech and attend a banquet in honor of presidents and heads of state participating in one of the largest diplomatic events hosted by China “in recent years”, wrote the China Daily yesterday. Last Friday, during a briefing, Vice Foreign Minister Chen Xiaodong said that Focac is a platform of “fairness, practical aspects and efficiency”, which has produced significant results “recognized and celebrated in the world”: “On the basis of a balance and a summary of the results obtained in the past, the summit will define new projects and formulate new plans for the future development of China-Africa relations”. For Xi Jinping’s China, influence on the African continent is crucial, and an essential part of building a world order where the so-called global south is in Beijing’s political interests. But it is also a more purely economic interest: in addition to the exploitation of mineral resources and investments in infrastructure, China is the continent’s main bilateral trading partner and the volume of trade has been constantly growing for years, so much so that last year it reached a record of 282 billion dollars, “but for China, Africa represents only 4.7 percent of its global trade”, according to a Carnegie report. Yesterday, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa raised the issue, and in a bilateral meeting with his Chinese counterpart he asked to reduce the trade deficit with Beijing.

And in fact the festive air of the People’s Republic at the center of a positive and proactive international diplomacy – always in comparison with the Western one described as evil – is shattered by the reality of the new world imagined by Xi: yesterday an article in The Africa Report underlined how until a few years ago the Focac filled the front pages of almost all African newspapers, while this year’s edition is particularly subdued. One of the reasons concerns the trade imbalance, the unfulfilled promises – during the last summit of 2021 China had committed to buying 300 billion dollars of African goods, an increase that never happened – and the danger of being strangled in the trade war launched by China against the West. The Chinese leadership is looking for markets where to direct the products resulting from the government industrial push that America and Europe have started to sanction, such as solar panels and electric cars, and this is a source of concern for African governments. According to a report published the day before yesterday by Boston University’s Global Development Policy, last year Chinese financial institutions approved loans for Africa for a total of $4.61 billion, the largest increase since 2016 and after the drastic decrease that occurred during the Covid pandemic: according to analysts, the meaning of these data is that China “is intent on containing the risks associated with already highly indebted economies”.

In the Chinese press, however, there is naturally no trace of the doubts and perplexities that African leaders are starting to raise regarding Beijing’s promises. Indeed, yesterday the Xinhua press agency published a long article entitled “Why it is absurd to accuse China of engaging in ‘neocolonialism’ in Africa”. The accusation is always the same: the West wants to promote its values, while China only does what is good for common development. And yet, just a few weeks ago, the Hong Kong-based Chinese newspaper South China Morning Post confirmed what had already been revealed by several Western journalistic investigations: the Chinese Communist Party is investing in several political schools to train local government and public administration officials in Africa in order to “promote its development model and its ideology”. Development according to Xi.

• Julia Pompili
  

• She was born on July 4th. A journalist for Il Foglio for more than a decade, she writes mainly about East Asia, Japan and the Koreas, China and its relations with the rest of the world, but also about security, defense and international politics. She is the author of the weekly newsletter Katane, the first in Italian on the Indo-Pacific area, and has written three books: “Under the same sky. Japan, Taiwan and Korea, Beijing’s rivals who are making Asia great”, “At the heart of Italy. How Russia and China are trying to conquer the country” with Valerio Valentini (both for Mondadori), and “Dorningly beautiful. The dark side of K-pop” (Rizzoli Lizard). She is a third dan in kendo.