In the introduction to the special blog-issue based on Africa and China, editors Ying Chen and Corinna Mullin introduce scholars and practitioners from Africa, Europe, China, and the US to present counter-hegemonic perspectives on the relationship between China and the African continent. The special issue challenges the stereotypical, orientalist and racist accounts of China and its relationship with peoples and states comprising the African continent.
By Ying Chen and Corinna Mullin
This special blog issue emerged from a symposium we organized last December at The New School, titled “The African Continent and China: Counter-Hegemonic Narratives.” The symposium gathered scholars and practitioners from Africa, Europe, China, and the US to share their work with an audience interested in counter-hegemonic perspectives on the relationship between China and the African continent.
Our symposium critically assessed the reductionist, orientalist and often racist depictions that dominate mainstream media and scholarly spaces on China-Africa relations. Numerous examples were presented throughout the symposium challenging prevailing narratives and stereotypes, which, as many symposium participants argued, contribute to a resurgent McCarthyism, a new Cold War atmosphere, and growing anti-Asian racism in the US. The symposium aimed to present diverse perspectives challenging dominant discourses and fostering generative discussions on alternative development paths.
Although we intentionally used the plural form ‘narratives’ in the symposium title, acknowledging that nuanced analysis yields various interpretations of the historical and contemporary political-economic implications of China-Africa relations, we also made clear from the beginning our own perspective that China’s relations with the African continent cannot be compared with those of hegemonic Western states nor characterized as imperialism. Making such false equivalences is in fact a form of imperialist projection and a way to avoid accountability for centuries of oppression and exploitation. It is not China, after all, that enslaved, colonized, and drained wealth from the African peoples and nations for hundreds of years. China has itself been a victim of colonial and imperialist interventions and surplus value drain. Furthermore, if we look at the question of underdevelopment on the African continent today, it is clear that, in addition to these historical legacies, the immediate structural causes are found in policies imposed by western dominated multilateral institutions like the IMF and World Bank under the neoliberal “Washington Consensus”. These policies were part of a broader counter-revolution on post-colonial African sovereignty, leading to deregulation, financialization, deindustrialization, disarticulation and denationlization of economies. China’s role on the continent today can only be understood dialectically in relation to this longue durée perspective.
A pivotal starting point for analysis of China’s relations with the African continent is the mid-20th century when post-revolution China, led by Mao Zedong, positioned itself as a champion of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism, supporting African liberation movements through the 1950s to the 1970s. Fast-forwarding to the contemporary landscape, Africa grapples with mounting public debt and dependency, caused by colonial legacies of surplus value drain exacerbated by decades of neocolonial structural adjustment. The continent’s public debt has doubled since 2010, with half of African states facing debt distress or high risk, posing substantial challenges to sustainable development and the ability of African states to mitigate the impacts of the climate breakdown.
Connected to this are deteriorating living standards, marked by escalating poverty and inequality, exacerbated by the COVID-19 health crisis and the war in Ukraine. Many African scholars, movements, and some heads of state are contemplating how to break from the colonial-capitalist model of development that led to dependency and the transfer of surplus value to the capitalist core. Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains a lodestar of critical analysis, highlighting the relational approach needed to understand Africa’s underdevelopment as a prerequisite for accumulation in the capitalist core.
Today’s struggles in many ways echo those of the 1960s and 1970s, with many African scholars, political actors, and social movements challenging unequal relations and devising alternative development models. China’s heterodox development trajectory, emphasizing a nuanced and gradually established economic opening, allowing for a higher degree of productive competitiveness, consistent growth in its industrial sector, and the ability to limit the role of speculative capital in directing its national economy (Enfu and Xiangyang, 2011, Weber 2021), is often held up as a model more suited to post-colonial African states seeking to break with the conditions of unequal exchange. China’s expressed support for Pan-African “unity and integration,” loans for infrastructure, advanced technology transfers and increased investment across the African continent, even if as, Prashad and Erskog maintain, “motivated by the desire to strengthen its role in the global commodity chain, and by political imperatives such as the need to gain African support for Chinese foreign policy positions (on Taiwan, for example),” understandably make it an attractive alternative to the (neo)colonial relations with western states mediated through violence, exploitation and surplus value extraction.
Eric Olander opened the first panel with a presentation that debunked many Western media tropes, including the portrayal of China as the primary source of Africa’s debt problems. Olander explained that only 12% of Africa’s public external debt is owed to Chinese creditors, with the majority attributed to private creditors with higher interest rates and shorter repayment terms. “Africa does not have a Chinese debt problem…Africa’s debt problem is a private creditor debt problem, mostly in Euro bonds, more than it is a Chinese debt problem,” Olander emphasized.
Symposium participants went beyond reductionist accounts to explore the role of class formation within African states, discussing how Western-oriented African elites have often contributed to under-development by aligning their interests with imperialist core states, undermining class struggles within Africa. Furthermore, while the contemporary Chinese state differs from its earlier incarnation following the Chinese revolution, many symposium participants argued that a multipolar world order with China as a central actor will benefit African national liberation, opening policy space and providing material means for alternative development projects that can help to achieve economic sovereignty and dignity for the peoples and states of the African continent.
A crucial aspect discussed was the potential positive impact of Chinese direct investment as an alternative to western investment, emphasizing the need for African states to leverage such investments to prioritize working-class needs, dignity, and visions of liberation long denied by neocolonial development models and interventions. This includes, as Fadhel Kaboub argued, structural transformation of economies to achieve food and energy sovereignty, avoiding the ecological devastation of the colonial capitalist model.
In her symposium contribution, Mikaela Erskog employed a dialectical approach to understanding China’s development trajectory and its implications for global South economies. She emphasized significant improvements in productive forces and living standards in China that took place from 1949 to 1978, but also noted substantial growth since then. She criticized the obsession of western leftists with categorizing and naming China’s political-economic model. “China’s economy has seen huge amounts of growth, and it should be a priority for us to understand what that is and not get stuck in this conversation about did they stop being Socialists? Are they now market capitalists?” Instead, Erskog suggested that “The real question is, how did they do it? And how has people’s standard of living improved?”
Erskog highlighted the importance of learning from the history of Afro-Asian solidarity and of reviving the “Bandung spirit of 1955” as well as the “spirit of the Tricontinental… and thinking about what we can learn from China’s model.” She emphasized the shared histories of colonialism between Africa and China and the potential for solidarity in their contemporary struggles.
Picking up on the theme of the alternative to the western colonial-capitalist development model offered by China to global South States, in this special issue Max Ajl discusses the profound impact of China’s post-revolution agrarian centered development model on Arab development planning, particularly in Tunisia, during the mid-to-late 20th century. Ajl points out how Tunisian planners and intellectuals were inspired by Chinese approaches to collectivization, rural industrialization, and self-reliance, seeking to adapt these strategies to address local challenges of poverty, unemployment, and agrarian reform within the broader context of decolonization and national liberation struggles. He argues, “These ideas were not just of interest as curios but as methods for rethinking not yesterday’s development but todays, where amidst the dead-end of export-oriented industrialization, many are reconsidering the agrarian question as again central to achieving well-being and development for the nation, its poor, and its ecology.”
As several presenters and contributors to this special issue have argued, China’s development model, its successes and limitations, cannot be grasped outside of a broader world system framework that understands China’s domestic political economy in relation to its semi-peripheral status, unequal exchange and constant US imperialist military aggression. As Erskog pointed out, the US/western bloc makes up essentially 74% of global military spending, which is around $ 2.8 trillion. It is difficult to sustain arguments of inter-imperialist rivalry on the African continent given such disparity between military and economic interventions.
Despite US largesse and spending on imperialist military buildup, Navid Farnia points to the growing resistance on the continent, helped in part by new alliances being formed with China. This has not been lost upon US policy makers such as congressman Mike Rogers who candidly stated: “At the end of the day, it is critical for the U.S. to have a [military] footprint on the continent… We can’t let China or Russia become the preferred security or business partner.” In his piece, Farnia cites the formation of the Alliance of Sahel States by Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger as an example of growing resistance, noting increased engagement with not just China but also other anti-systemic states such as Russia and Iran. Farnia cites the significant infrastructure contributions by China, such as building over 100,000 kilometers of roads and railways and creating nearly 400,000 jobs annually between 2000 and 2020 as well as South Africa’s lawsuit against Israel’s settler colonial genocide in Gaza as examples underscoring the increasing autonomy of African nations from Western influence. Farnia notes that China’s emergence “pose[s] an existential crisis for the states that police and benefit from the white world order.”
Farnia demonstrates how the increasing alignment of African states with China and Russia, marked by mutual development initiatives like the Belt and Road Initiative and BRICS, showcases a departure from neocolonial dependencies, empowering African nations to pursue their interests. The U.S. reaction, seeking to penalize such autonomy, reflects its diminishing influence and fear of losing control over global dynamics as multipolarity enables Third World countries to navigate beyond Western dictates. As noted, “China’s emergence… threatens the very structure of global power as we have known it since the fifteenth century,” highlighting the profound impact of these shifting alliances.
Yan Hairong and Barry Sautman explore the example of Ethiopia as a case exemplifying the positive impact of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) through significant infrastructure and industrial investments. Despite challenges such as US sanctions, China’s involvement, they argue, has helped to accelerate Ethiopia’s economic growth and industrialization. For example, from 2006 to 2018, China lent Ethiopia $14.83 billion for 70 mega-projects, creating over 5,000 job opportunities and involving numerous local subcontractors. Hairong and Sautman contrast the negative and racist representations of the African continent prevalent in western news outlets with Chinese media where one finds “reporting on the continent is more abundant, positive and diverse.”
Bringing in examples from North Africa, Oussama Dhiab offers a slightly more pessimistic although still nuanced analysis of China’s relations with the region arguing that while the BRI offers significant infrastructure improvements and economic opportunities for North African countries, it also reveals deep imbalances in trade and investment. “This initiative tends to boost the tourism market in Tunisia and Morocco,” Dhiab argues, yet simultaneously, it fosters dependency on Chinese economic interests and does not substantially alleviate local unemployment or transfer technology and expertise. The BRI’s implementation, Oussama contends, reflects China’s shift from ideological South-South solidarity to a more pragmatic, utilitarian approach driven by the interests of state-owned enterprises and private companies.
In his piece on the impact of China’s investment on Africa’s “industrialization aspirations”, Carlos Oya touches on another key theme in the presentations and articles in this special issue, the role of African agency. Introducing the concept of “contingent industrialization” to explain how African countries’ industrial progress depends on specific national and global dynamics, Oya highlights the role of Chinese infrastructure investments and manufacturing FDI in facilitating significant growth in countries like Ethiopia. Oya notes that “The combination of infrastructure financing and Chinese FDI has likely contributed to better conditions for Africa’s manufacturing revival” but that “the long-term impact of these engagements is largely mediated by African agency.”
Farwa Sial assesses the West’s increased investments in Africa through the lens of increased anxieties around China’s deepening relations with the region and specifically as a counter to China’s BRI. In her article, Sial argues that the G7’s new investment strategy, focused on expensive infrastructure projects reminiscent of the 1970s “white elephants,” fails to grasp the region’s evolving political landscape and the backlash against US-led imperialism. Sial compellingly argues that imperialism must be understood as “embedded in a historical structure of global capitalism,” and while Chinese investments should be critically examined, China’s external investment strategy ultimately differs from Western models of imperial extraction, emerging instead from its success in domestic poverty alleviation. Similar to Oya, Sial stresses that African countries must strategically navigate these relations to strengthen their bargaining power and domestic capacities. “African agency in between such powers lies in securing the interests of its people through a combination of strategies including stronger criteria for partnerships, de-linking with US-led imperial conduits and an enhanced focus on perpetually increasing its bargaining power through strengthening its domestic productive capacities.”
Michael Kpade argues for a nuanced analysis that disentangles the so-called “The Chinese Problem”, which presents China as responsible for the ills of African states, from the systemic issues associated with capitalist expansion on the African continent. Although Kpade holds that Chinese investments help to accelerate capitalist development and its attendant crises, he tempers this analysis with an acknowledgement that African states have the agency to navigate these challenges. Kpade emphasizes that transformations in the world system mean African states have “more agency… than they may have ever had before” to adopt policies promoting economic sovereignty and development, contrasting this with the “passive agency” more characteristic of the neocolonial era, which facilitated wealth drain and underdevelopment.
While there may be differences of opinion concerning the significance and impact of China-African political-economic relations, there are two areas of common ground that unite all symposium participants and contributors to this special issue: First, that reductionist, stereotypical, orientalist and racist accounts of China and its relationship with peoples and states comprising the African continent undermine scholarly analysis and our ability to address pressing political, economic, and ecological issues; Secondly, that our shared goal is sustainable and sovereign development for African states and economies in a manner that aligns with the needs, liberatory visions and rights of African peoples—rights long denied by a global order dominated by western, capitalist core states.
Ying Chen is Associate Professor of Economics at the New School and holds a Ph.D. in Economics from University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her work explores the contradictions within capitalism and how they exhibit themselves. Topics she has studied include economic development, labor, and climate change, with a special focus on the global south. She has published in journals including Environment and Development Economics, Economics and Labor Relations Review, Journal of Labor and Society, Review of Radical Political Economics, International Review of Applied Economics, and so on.
Corinna Mullin is a professor of Political Science and Economics at John Jay College and Brooklyn College, City University of New York (CUNY). Her research examines the historical legacies of colonialism, the role of capitalist expansion and imperialist imbrications in shaping global South security states, with a focus on unequal exchange, peripheral surplus value drain/transfer and national liberation. She is currently working on a monograph for Brill: Race, Class, Empire and the (Re)making of the Tunisian Security State.
