The main international group bringing China and African nations together marked its 25-year anniversary this month in a display of its unique convening power and influence.
The Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) gathered 51 African heads of state or government alongside President Xi Jinping of China, UN Secretary-General António Guterres, and the chair of the African Union’s commission, Moussa Faki Mahamat. The leaders present represented 27% of the UN’s membership and a third of the world’s population, showing the reach of this tri-annual summit, which has sought to draw the roadmap for relations between China and Africa for a quarter of a century.
Growing significance
The forum has been a source of deep insight into geopolitical and economic changes as African nations’ global significance has increased, and this was its first face-to-face gathering since the pandemic. In the 25 years since its establishment, China has registered transformative economic progress across the continent, including via Beijing’s huge infrastructure investment programme in the Global South: the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
The forum is now seen as one of the most pragmatic and successful of its kind, but although its success is apparent, some wonder whether it is still best-placed to advance African interests, with questions about Western influence on the continent.
The founding idea for FOCAC actually did not come from China, which was not always ubiquitous in African development. Rather, it stemmed from a proposal in the 1990s from a former foreign minister of Madagascar, Lila Ratsifandrihamanana, who said China should emulate other major economies in establishing a means of cooperating with Africa.
Around the turn of the century, the global economic picture was very different. Less than a decade earlier, the US and USSR were still locked in the Cold War. In 1998, China was just catching up with sub-Saharan Africa in terms of economic size. Gross domestic product per capita in China in 2000 was $959, with sub-Saharan Africa at $638. The two were at near-parity in terms of economic development. Both were net exporters of labour and net importers of foreign capital and technology, heavily reliant on Western markets. This meant that, as FOCAC emerged, its members' ambitions were limited to enhancing mutual trade and political support on the international stage. Today, the global economy is very different.
China and Africa's growing stature and influence have, in turn boosted FOCAC's own reputation. By helping members combine their soft and hard power, its scope now spans trade, investment, health, education, politics, security and technology.
The forum has adapted to changing internal and global conditions, shifting its own policy objectives over time, fashioned along the lines of China's well-established Five-Year Plans for the country's own national economic development.
Over the last 25 years, FOCAC's stewardship of relations between China and Africa has evolved from a trade-centric partnership, as globalisation itself has also changed. Five main pillars have been involved in this process: trade partnership, recalibration of supply chains, multi-dimensional infrastructure development in Africa, technology and knowledge transfer, and China's soft power.
Pillar 1: Trade partnership
FOCAC's modest initial intentions were to enhance mutual trade relations and strengthen political and diplomatic trust between China and African nations as peers in the developing world.
In 2000, China was a burgeoning global exporter with very little financial leverage to invest internationally. The size of its economy just about surpassed that of Italy and trade between Africa and China was a meagre $10bn. By 2008, that had expanded by a factor of ten, with China being Africa's largest trading partner ever since. In 2015, trade levels were 20 times higher, at $200bn. In 2023, two-way trade passed $282bn, meaning trade had grown 28 times bigger in 23 years.
Throughout China's rise to become the world's leading exporter, Beijing has placed great emphasis on enhancing its national imports from Africa. As early as 2003, China offered tariff-free imports from Africa's least developed countries (LDCs).
Over time, zero-tariff imports from LDCs that have diplomatic relations with China have grown dramatically. They now cover 100% of imports from 33 of Africa's LDCs. As the numbers clearly demonstrate, trade has been central to the mutual development of China and Africa and will always be a key part of FOCAC's work.
