China’s President Xi Jinping and African leaders hailed their shared future as they opened a three-yearly summit, even as debt burdens, tensions over trade imbalances and rising geopolitical rivalries cast shadows over Beijing’s relationships on the continent.
African leaders from 50 countries arrived in Beijing this week for the summit, which ends on Friday with a blueprint for China-Africa relations until 2027.
“On the road to modernisation . . . not a single country should fall behind,” Xi told the leaders in his opening speech to the forum on Thursday.
He pledged Rmb360bn ($51bn) in financial support over the next three years including loans, aid and Chinese corporate investment as well as assistance for African countries to issue renminbi-denominated “panda bonds” in China’s onshore markets. He also laid out a 10-point plan covering trade, agriculture and security, as well as offering “governance” and military training.
Beijing is keen to leverage its dominance as Africa’s biggest trading partner to seal lucrative mining deals and export opportunities to support its struggling economy, according to analysts, while warding off geopolitical rivals on the continent, including the US.
For their part, African leaders want Beijing to address a trade imbalance that has allowed China to consume the region’s raw materials, such as iron ore and oil, while exporting manufactured goods that undercut domestic production. China’s trade surplus with the continent is about $64bn.
“You’re going to see requests [from African leaders] for infrastructure finance, whether it’s for energy or transport and roads or ports, and for support around industrialisation initiatives,” said Zainab Usman, senior fellow and director of the Africa Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
She said this would cover the processing and refining of critical minerals and related manufacturing, such as in clean energy. “This is a huge area right now for a lot of African countries,” she said.
In 2023, China approved loans of $4.61bn for eight African countries and two regional financial institutions — the first time the annual loan amount for the continent has risen since 2016.
But this remains far below the peak of Xi’s signature Belt and Road Initiative, when average annual commitments surpassed $10bn, according to the Chinese Loans to Africa Database of the Boston University Global Development Policy Center. From 2000-2023, Chinese loans to Africa totalled $182.28bn.
For Xi, who earlier in the week hailed China’s “shared future” with African countries, a crucial priority is avoiding further debt problems, analysts said.
With China’s finances already stretched by a deep property sector slowdown, Beijing favours smaller government lending and greater involvement by state-owned enterprises or private sector investors.
Zambia defaulted on its debt in 2020, followed by Ghana and, more recently, Ethiopia, with a dozen other African countries facing debt strains. Angola owes China about $17bn, more than one-third of its external debt.
“Financing is a big theme given the state of debt in the African countries. There’s lots of talk about extending concessional financing, restructuring debt,” said a senior economic official of a Horn of Africa country in Beijing.
The slow debt renegotiations, particularly with Zambia, have sparked criticism of China’s role. But Tang Xiaoyang, a professor and China forum expert at Tsinghua University, objected to the notion that “if a country borrows money and they have problems, that the blame should fall on China” despite the region’s rapid escalation of Chinese debt.
Despite the continent’s debt woes — and the poor record of some BRI projects — African leaders have stepped up calls for more investment in bilateral meetings with Xi.
In Kenya, for example, the $5bn Chinese-funded standard gauge railway linking the port city of Mombasa to the capital Nairobi has been criticised as economically unviable and not benefiting local communities.
But this week, Kenya’s president William Ruto — whose predecessor borrowed heavily from Beijing — told Xi that a projected expansion of the railway to Uganda and beyond was one of “Kenya’s top priorities in the engagement with China”. He also named other projects in need of investment, including highways.
Kenya this week also formally joined the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the Beijing-led alternative to the World Bank.
South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa praised “an increase in our bilateral trade”, but also urged Beijing to import more goods and build more factories in Africa’s most industrialised nation, including a call for China’s BYD and CATL to invest in electric car and battery production.
He added that South Africa “would like to narrow the trade deficit and address the structure of our trade . . . we urge for more sustainable manufacturing and job-creating investments”.
Other countries lodging requests include Nigeria, which is seeking investments in manufacturing and energy infrastructure while Zambia wants new investments in critical mineral processing and copper.
Zambia would also be a beneficiary of a plan to revamp the Tazara railway, one of the highest-profile deals to be discussed at the summit.
The $1bn refurbishment of the line, which was built in the 1970s with Chinese help under Mao Zedong and connects Zambia to Tanzania, will eschew borrowing and raise cash through a concession to Chinese investors as Beijing retools its approach towards more direct investment.
“We are still going to see Chinese investments in infrastructure,” said Cliff Mboya, a fellow at the Center for Africa-China Studies at the University of Johannesburg. But new projects will pursue “innovative ways of funding”.
Looming over the Tazara project is geopolitics. The renovated line will compete with a revamped US-backed railway running from the central African copper belt to Angola’s Atlantic coast — one indication of western countries increasingly courting African leaders for access to critical minerals following a long period where they gave China little competition.
However, while the US and others were becoming more active in the continent, China retained an edge through strong people-to-people ties and its narrative of being a “developing country” assisting its partners in the global south along the path of industrialisation, said Jana de Kluiver, research officer at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria, South Africa.
The US strategy, by contrast, came across as “being more of an anti-China policy than an Africa policy”, she said.
