The recently concluded 9th summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FCAC), which was attended by leaders of over 50 African states, has once again highlighted the level of relations between China and Africa.
The importance of the summit itself, which got branded by Chinese media as the “biggest diplomatic event” organized by Beijing in recent years, stems from “the significance of its outcomes and the optimism generated by its final declaration and action plan for cooperation in a China-Africa Community with a Shared Future,” said Prof. Alexis Habiyaremye from the University of Johannesburg.
“The elevation of China-Africa relation to the level of an all-weather strategic partnership is testament to the shared understanding of the unique importance of a strong connection between China and African countries in an increasingly multipolar world,” said Habiyaremye, a senior researcher at the DSI/NRF South African Research Chair in Industrial Development. “One in which a strong China can rely on a strong Africa to face common threats emanating from other poles.”
Commenting on the practical outcomes of the summit, the professor mentioned an “action plan for cooperation covering knowledge exchange, industrialization, connectivity, trade links and security,” as well as Beijing’s commitment to “a considerable budget of $50 billion to implement the related projects.”
According to Prof. Habiyaremye, what makes China the major, if not the main, trading partner of the majority of African countries is “the actual win-win outcomes of the Sino-African trade as opposed to exploitative trade with Western trade partners that established monopolies over natural resources in secret military cooperation arrangements with former colonial powers.”
“Trade with China enables those countries to break established extractive monopolies and gain better deals for their products and resources,” he said.
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Meanwhile, “trade between African countries and the West is usually structured as extractive monopolies intended to keep Africa down and unable to produce anything else than raw materials for Western corporations,” Prof. Habiyaremye
He also pointed out that, “as the most important global manufacturing powerhouse, China offers more affordable products with a higher value-for-money ratio.”
China has become the largest bilateral trading partner of sub-Saharan Africa, with the total trade volume reaching $282 billion in 2023, CNBC Africa noted this June.
Some 16% of the African countries’ imports today arrive from China which also serves as the destination of about 20% of the African exports, the media outlet adds, citing the data from IMF.
(Sputnik)
