Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told reporters in Beijing on Friday that his government will step up investment, financial assistance, and diplomatic outreach to Africa, seemingly seeking to exploit an opening created by reduced foreign aid under President Donald Trump, and a joke Trump told this week that has rubbed some Africans the wrong way.
“The stability and development of Africa are crucial to the shared destiny of humanity. The world should listen to Africa’s voice and pay attention to its concerns,” Wang said at a press conference during China’s annual “Two Sessions” political event, a dual meeting of the National People’s Congress and the People’s Political Consultative Conference.
“Africa is undergoing a new awakening, and all nations should support Africa in forging a new path of self-reliance and self-strengthening development,” he said.
To this end, Wang said China would help African nations “speed up the process of industrialization and modernization in agriculture” and develop leading-edge technologies such as “digitization, green sectors, and artificial intelligence.”
“Africa is the land of hope for the 21st Century,” Wang said. “Without the modernization of Africa, there can be no modernization of the world.”
Lauren Johnston, an associate professor of China studies at the University of Sydney, wrote at The Conversation on Thursday that China may hope African suppliers can make up for U.S. agricultural exports halted during the new trade war with America. China was able to make similar use of African business connections to blunt some of the pain from Trump’s tariffs during his first term.
Johnston noted that China began making high-profile efforts to foster increased African trade within a month of Trump returning to the White House. African countries are “responding to the new opportunities from China,” although most of those responses have been symbolic so far, such as opening trade offices in China and attending technology expos.
Semafor spoke to a bevy of China-Africa analysts on Monday who said that for all of China’s talk about supporting Africa, Beijing is very unlikely to replace the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) programs shuttered by Trump.
“The idea that the dismantling of USAID opens the door wider for China in Africa is a misdirection. They don’t give aid in that way, so they can’t “replace” USAID,” said Development Reimagined consulting firm CEO Hannah Ryder.
Another analyst, Ronak Gopaldas of Signal Risk, said that “Trump’s America First approach will create some geopolitical opportunities for China to step into a leadership void in Africa,” but agreed that China does not provide huge amounts of foreign aid like the U.S. usually does.
In fact, as Semafor pointed out, China’s preference for big loans and profit-making investments is fundamentally “transactional” in nature, which is not very different from what Trump’s America First strategy envisions.
“If the Trump administration shifts toward the dealmaking approach that China has prioritized in the Global South, it could potentially increase U.S. effectiveness in its competition with China in Africa,” the Brookings Institution likewise recommended.
The feelings of various African leaders toward Trump could influence the continental chess match between the U.S. and China. During Trump’s address to Congress on Tuesday, in the course of listing some of the wasteful and absurd government programs he is shutting down, Trump made a joke about Lesotho being a country “which nobody has ever heard of.”
The BBC described Lesotho’s government as being “shocked” that Trump would be so dismissive of their country after years of “warm and cordial” relations with the United States.
“To my surprise, ‘the country that nobody has heard of’ is the country where the U.S. has a permanent mission,” Lesotho’s Foreign Affairs Minister Lejone Mpotjoane responded sarcastically.
“Lesotho is a member of the U.N. and of a number of other international bodies. And the US has an embassy here, and a number of US organisations we’ve accommodated here in Maseru,” said Mpotjoane. Maseru is the capital of Lesotho.
Mpotjoane said his government is “not taking this matter lightly,” and would make an official protest to Washington.
“Lesotho is such a significant and unique country in the whole world. I would be happy to invite the president, as well as the rest of the world, to come to Lesotho,” he said during an interview with Reuters.
Lesotho officials were notably less interested in criticizing Trump for shutting down USAID funding for LGBTQ organizations in Lesotho, with Mpotjoane shrugging it off as the U.S. government’s “prerogative to cut aid if they want to.”
Agence France-Presse (AFP) noted that America has given substantial amounts of aid to Lesotho for health and crop production, including medication and other support against HIV/AIDS, a disease for which Lesotho has one of the highest infection rates in the world.
The danger for U.S. diplomatic efforts in Africa is that other nations might feel they could be treated with disrespect even after maintaining good relations, creating an opportunity for China to step in and assure African leaders they would not be insulted if they partner with Beijing.
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