Chinese President Xi Jinping accompanies South African President Cyril Ramaphosa during the China-Africa Cooperation Forum in Beijing, September 4, 2018. Photo: Reuters/file photo.
By Jason Hickel – Jan 12, 2026
Western claims are contradicted by empirical evidence
Western politicians and journalists often claim that China is doing “colonialism” in Africa. This narrative has roots in US government discourse going back nearly two decades, and is exemplified by a US Congressional hearing that was held under the headline “China in Africa: The New Colonialism?” In the same year, the US business magazine Forbes claimed the purpose of China’s involvement in Africa is “to exploit the people and take their resources. It’s the same thing European colonists did… except worse.”
Certainly there are reasons to criticise the activities of Chinese firms in Africa, but to claim that China is exercising colonial power within the continent — drawing a direct equivalence to Western colonialism and imperialism — is empirically incorrect, stretches these terms into meaninglessness, and amounts to denying the violence of actually-existing colonialism.
What is colonial power?
First, let us consider the stakes of the accusation. What constitutes colonial and neocolonial power?
European colonialism was predicated on invasion and military occupation, forced dispossession, and systematic violence, including policy-induced famines, concentration camps, and genocide. In Africa alone, the British, Germans, French, Belgians and Italians all perpetrated genocidal crimes, in separate instances. German colonisers exterminated the majority of the Herero and Nama population in Namibia. Belgian colonisers killed some 10 million people in the Congo.
Africans achieved political independence in the middle of the 20th century, but the core states have continued to exercise coercive power on the continent in the decades since. The US currently has 58 active military bases in Africa. The US has intervened in many national elections, distorting the democratic process in favour of US interests, and has conducted some 20 regime-change operations. The US has imposed economic sanctions on most African countries (all except for 9).
France, for its part, controls the currency of 14 West African countries, and has tens of thousands of troops stationed in its former African colonies. France has a longstanding record of rigging African elections and propping up dictators, and has collaborated in assassinations against several political leaders in Africa since formal decolonisation. As for the UK, it has invaded nearly every African country (except for 5), and currently maintains 18 military bases on the continent.
Western states have orchestrated coups against dozens of progressive governments across the global South. In Africa, this includes Patrice Lumumba in the DRC, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, and Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso, among many others, all of whom were replaced by right-wing dictatorships or juntas more willing to serve Western interests. Western states also actively supported the apartheid regime in South Africa.
Neocolonial power is also exerted through international financial institutions. In the IMF and World Bank, the US holds veto power over all major decisions and the core states control the majority of the vote. They have used this power to impose structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) across the global South, forcibly reorganizing Southern production away from local human needs and instead toward exports to the core in subordinated positions within global commodity chains. In Africa, SAPs caused decades of economic recession and de-development in order to ensure that African resources remain cheaply available to the West.
Nothing that China has done in Africa comes anywhere close to any of this. The moral and material difference is vast. China does not maintain military occupations in Africa. It does not perform regime-change operations, assassinations and coups. It does not control African currencies. It does not impose sanctions or structural adjustment programmes on African economies. China has not perpetrated genocide in Africa. It has never invaded an African country.
Indeed, China has not invaded any country anywhere in the past 46 years. During this same period, we have watched Western states invade and bomb a long list of global South countries, with spectacular violence, including seven countries in 2025 alone.
To equate China’s activities in Africa to European colonialism and contemporary Western imperialism is not only empirically incorrect, it trivialises the extraordinary violence of the latter. It is effectively a form of colonial denialism.
Assessing the allegations
Claims of China’s “colonialism” in Africa hinge on three main allegations. The first is that Chinese firms perpetrate labour abuses and cause social and environmental conflicts in Africa. The second is that China dominates extractive industries in Africa. The third is that China puts African countries in “debt traps”.
To the first claim: yes China has capitalist firms operating in Africa, which exploit workers. But this is how all capitalist firms operate, regardless of where they are headquartered. A recent study on Angola and Ethiopia found no systematic difference in the wages paid by Chinese firms compared to Western firms. If exploitative behaviour by capitalist firms becomes the definition of “colonialism”, then the term is stripped of all analytical value. We may as well say that Indonesian or Brazilian firms operating in Africa are colonial, but then the term clearly loses all meaning.
As for Chinese firms causing conflicts, a recent study on Chinese mining firms operating abroad found they do not create more conflict than other foreign-owned firms. In fact, a study of over 3,300 environmental justice conflicts around the world found that, where foreign-owned companies are driving conflicts in Africa and the rest of the global South, these companies were overwhelmingly headquartered in the West rather than China. In the same database (the Environmental Justice Atlas), French firms are responsible for 50x more environmental conflicts in Africa than Chinese firms on a per capita basis.
To the second claim, about resource extraction: the narrative that China dominates Africa’s extractive industries is not supported by evidence. In 2022, 72% of mining exploration funds focused on Africa were owned by Canadian, Australian, and British companies, with only 3% from China. Data from 2018 shows that Chinese companies controlled less than 7% of the total value of African mine production — less than half of the value controlled by a single British multinational, Anglo American.
Zooming in on fossil fuels, Western companies’ plans for expanding oil and gas extraction in Africa outstrip those of Chinese companies by a factor of nine. Of the 23 largest institutional investors in fossil fuel expansion in Africa, 92% of investments are held by the West; meanwhile 74% of expansion financing is provided by Western banks. These figures indicate it is the West that overwhelmingly controls and profits from the extraction of fossil fuels from Africa.
The DRC provides an interesting case. In 2008, Chinese firms signed a deal with the DRC to undertake infrastructure development in exchange for minerals worth up to $50 billion over 25 years. Western institutions represented this as “Chinese colonialism”. Later, in 2025, the US signed a deal with the DRC to obtain $2 trillion in mineral rights in exchange for ending attacks by Rwandan-backed militias against the DRC; attacks that the US had allegedly been supporting. The US deal is 40x larger than the China deal. But Western institutions do not accuse the US of colonialism; on the contrary, they have tended to go with the narrative of a “peace agreement”.
Finally, to the question of “debt traps”. Existing data shows that only 12% of Africa’s external debt is owed to China, whereas 35% — three times more — is owed to private Western creditors, and Africa’s debts to Western creditors carry double the interest compared to its debts with China.
A comprehensive study of China’s loans to Africa during the period 2000-2019 found that China never seized assets and never used courts to enforce payments. Furthermore, during the Covid pandemic, China suspended a substantially larger volume of debts owed by lower-income countries than Western creditors did.
Perhaps most importantly, China does not attach structural adjustment conditions to finance. By contrast, Western creditors have a record of leveraging structural adjustment programmes to force African governments to sell off public assets.
China in world-system perspective
It is important to maintain perspective here. Imperial power means the US and its allies can and regularly do destroy entire states halfway across the world, violating international law with impunity. They can and do bomb any individual or movement they don’t like, anywhere on the planet, for any reason. They can and do impose crushing sanctions, killing millions of people and bending governments to their will.
China simply does not project this kind of power. It is a semi-peripheral economy, with a GDP per capita that is 80% less than that of the core, equal to that of the Latin American average. Its military spending per capita is 40% less than the world average, and 1/20th that of the USA. China can resist the dictates of the core states to some extent, but it cannot and does not impose its will on the rest of the world as the core states do.
None of this is to say that Chinese firms do not exploit workers and resources in Africa. But this cannot be described as colonial or imperial power without rendering these terms analytically meaningless, and denying the violence of actually-existing colonialism.
Semi-peripheral countries like China play an intermediating role in the capitalist world-system. They provide cheap manufactured goods to the core in highly-competitive industries with razor thin profit margins. Capitalists operating in these industries are under pressure to obtain material inputs as cheaply as possible, which drives them to exploit resources in the periphery (like Africa), where imperialist interventions by the core states have weakened governments and cheapened labour and resources.
Within this system, the core extracts value from the semi-periphery — including from China — as well as from the periphery via the semi-periphery. The behaviour of semi-peripheral capitalists in the periphery must be understood primarily as a function of the imperialist world-system rather than as an expression of imperialism itself.
(Substack)
