The People’s Republic of China has once again reaffirmed its solidarity with the peoples of Africa through its continued commitment to mutual cooperation with 53 African countries and the African Union.
On August 18, Wang Yi, State Councilor and Foreign Minister of the People’s Republic of China, addressed a virtual conference of the Forum on China–Africa Coordination (FOCAC), attended by African and Chinese leaders. FM Wang reflected on the progress made in recent years through FOCAC towards shared sustainable development goals, achieving peace and stability, facilitating cultural and academic exchange, ameliorating food crises, and ending the COVID-19 pandemic in Africa, and outlined the Communist Party of China’s vision for “building a China–Africa community with a shared future in the new era.”
FOCAC is the main forum through which China–Africa political, economic, technological, and other multilateral cooperation is facilitated. FOCAC was founded in October 2000, following years of diplomatic coordination efforts between members of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the predecessor to today’s African Union, and the People’s Republic of China. Last month’s meeting concerned the implementation of follow-up actions of the 8th Ministerial Conference of FOCAC, held in November 2021.
Today, all African countries, with one exception, plus the African Union Commission (the central governing body of the African Union) are members of FOCAC.
The one exception is the Kingdom of Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland, currently ruled by Africa’s last absolute monarchy. The reactionary, autocratic monarchy has made the country heavily dependent on Taiwan for capital investments and foreign aid; in order to maintain its close ties with Taiwan, Eswatini maintains no diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China, and does not recognize the PRC as a legitimate state. In recent years, the struggle of the Swazi people for democracy has grown into a rising revolutionary movement, led in part by the Communist Party of Swaziland, that is threatening to overthrow the autocracy and establish a republic. The People’s Republic of China has been accused by the Taiwanese government and the Western imperialist press of supporting revolutionary-democratic forces in Swaziland, but this is highly unlikely, given the CPC’s commitment to non-interventionist international policy. However, the Communist Party of Swaziland has expressed solidarity with China in the face of heightened U.S. imperialist provocations in Taiwan.
A Vision of China–Africa Cooperation for the “New Era”
At the 2021 FOCAC 8th Ministerial Conference, representatives of the 53 African member countries, the African Union Commission, and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) released their joint plan for “mid- to long-term cooperation,” the China–Africa Cooperative Vision 2035. The document ties together the PRC’s own “Vision 2035,” the African Union’s “2063 Agenda,” and the United Nations “Agenda 2030” Sustainable Development Goals. In addition to outlining a plan for multilateral China–Africa fair trade through China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI), and for “promoting a new development paradigm featuring transformation and growth to advance industries in China and Africa,” the China–Africa Cooperative Vision 2035 also makes concrete, practical commitments to “developing a new green growth model for common eco-development,” to sharing technological and medical resources, and to “creating a new chapter in people-to-people exchanges for common cultural prosperity in China and Africa.”
Toward these shared aims, at the FOCAC 8th Ministerial Conference, PRC President Xi Jinping announced the launch of nine programs:
- A medical program. China will donate 600 million COVID-19 vaccine doses to Africa and send 1,500 Chinese medical personnel.
- A poverty reduction and agricultural development program. China will set up agrotechnology centers across Africa, staffed by 500 Chinese agricultural experts.
- A trade promotion program. China will work with the African Continental Free Trade Area to expand the BRI and will broadly remove tariffs for underdeveloped countries.
- An investment promotion program. The Chinese government will encourage businesses to invest in Africa towards African industrialization goals.
- A digital innovation program. China and Africa will expand cooperation in technological development and promote African businesses through e-commerce.
- A green development program. China will support eco-development initiatives in Africa, such as the African Union’s “Great Green Wall of the Sahara and the Sahel” initiative, which, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, aims to reverse land degradation and desertification, improve food security and livelihoods for the populations of more than 20 Sahelian countries, and contribute to climate change mitigation.
- A capacity building program. China will help build and upgrade 10 schools in Africa, provide training to 10,000 African professionals, launch vocational programs for African students, and open 800,000 jobs in African countries.
- A cultural and people-to-people exchange program. China will promote tourism to and from Africa, hold film festivals, and host China–Africa women’s and youth forums.
- A peace and security program. China will provide military assistance to the African Union in ongoing efforts to combat terrorism across the African continent.
Speaking at the August 2022 Coordinators’ Meeting on the Implementation of Follow-up Actions, 6 months after the FOCAC 8th Ministerial Conference, PRC Foreign Minister Wang Yi said,
We are pleased to see that, despite the evolving international situation, rising global challenges and repeated external disturbances, China and Africa have stayed our course in enhancing solidarity and focusing on cooperation. We have made good progress in implementing the outcomes of the conference…
In the face of the various forms of hegemonic and bullying practices, China and Africa have stood with each other shoulder to shoulder. China appreciates the firm commitment of African countries to the one-China principle and your strong support for China’s efforts to safeguard sovereignty, security and territorial integrity. China has also spoken up for our African brothers at the UN and other multilateral settings, upholding justice and opposing unwarranted interference and unilateral sanctions against Africa. In solidarity and coordination, China and Africa have become a pillar force in defending the legitimate rights and interests of developing countries, upholding the purposes of the UN Charter, and advocating multilateralism and international fairness and justice.
The “hegemonic and bullying practices” condemned by FM Wang are a reference to the policies of the Western imperialist powers, led by the United States of America, and can be summed up in one word: Neo-colonialism.
South–South Cooperation versus Neo-Colonialism
FM Wang also promised that China would waive outstanding debts owed by 17 African countries since 2021. The debts arose from 23 interest-free loans issued through China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The promise to waive these loans means that the 17 African countries will not be expected to repay China for its developmental aid.
China has been harshly criticized in the Western press and by Western politicians and economists for its interest-free loans to Africa; some have characterized these loans as “debt-traps,” meant to render Africa dependent on China in the long-term.
The truth, however, is that most African countries are severely indebted not to the People’s Republic of China, but to Western imperialist countries, such as the U.S. and France. For several decades, Western powers have used global financial institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, to issue predatory loans, with extremely high interest rates, knowing full-well that the loans won’t be repaid and that the borrowing countries will only become further indebted, while remaining badly underdeveloped and impoverished. Moreover, the imperialist loans always come with strings attached — conditions forced on the borrowing countries. These conditions are designed to hinder economic development, worsen wealth inequality, eliminate protections for workers and entrench modern slavery, facilitate unequal trade, and cheaply strip borrowing countries of their natural resources — all for the benefit of the highly-developed imperialist countries. For instance, IMF loans frequently require the governments of borrowing countries to cut public spending (funding for transport, education, healthcare, etc.), privatize their natural resources, and allow Western companies to freely buy up their land and to establish mines, plantations, and factories that pay dollar-per-day wages or use slave-labor. In the process, the world’s least developed regions, including most of Africa, have suffered ecological devastation, causing widespread droughts, famines, and desertification.
This process, by which the imperialist powers keep underdeveloped countries and regions indebted, dependent, and indirectly controlled, is known as neo-colonialism.
Kwame Nkrumah, the Marxist-Leninist and pan-Africanist revolutionary, political leader, and theoretician, who served as the first President of Ghana and led his country’s struggle for independence against Britain, characterized neo-colonialism as “imperialism in its final and perhaps its most dangerous stage.” According to Nkrumah, in the introduction to his authoritative 1965 book Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism,
The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.
Neo-colonialism developed in the decades following the end of the Second World War and the establishment of the United Nations (1945), during the wave of decolonization that spread across Africa in the 1950s and ‘60s, when most African countries gained their independence from the colonial empires of Europe. Neo-colonialism is an outgrowth of capitalist imperialism, the contemporary world-system, in which a handful of advanced capitalist countries use their superior economic and military might to conquer and exploit colonies, and to bring less developed, economically dependent countries into their spheres of influence. Capitalism grew out of modern colonialism, and so did capitalist imperialism. From the mid-1400s to the late-1800s, the West-European colonial empires exploited Africa as a source of cheap slave-labor for the trans-Atlantic slave trade, developing their European mother countries and their “New World” settler colonies, while leaving Africa in a pre-feudal, slavery-based stage of development. But as capitalism developed in Europe, the old, indirect mode of exploitation was no longer sufficient to continue expanding and accumulating wealth. During the 1880s, the West-European colonial empires began a campaign called the “Scramble for Africa,” directly conquering every pre-colonial African state, with the exception of the Ethiopian Empire, amounting to 90% of the continent’s landmass. This “Scramble for Africa” was at the heart of the emerging world-system of capitalist imperialism. By the end of the 19th Century, the competing capitalist empires of Western Europe, Japan, and the United States of America had divided up most of the rest of the world into directly ruled colonies and indirectly ruled client-states. This competition resulted in a series of devastating inter-imperialist wars, the largest of which were the First and Second World Wars.
Following the Second World War, however, the U.S. Empire emerged as the unrivaled hegemon, beginning an era of unipolar imperialism that is only now, in the 21st Century, coming to a violent end. With the decolonization of most of the world by the 1970s, the imperialist powers shifted from direct control of their former colonies to indirect control through financial institutions. This is the situation suffered by most African countries, as well as most nominally independent, underdeveloped countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, the Pacific, and southeast Asia.
In stark contrast to the “hegemonic and bullying practices” of the Western imperialist powers and their global financial institutions, the People’s Republic of China issues interest-free loans, meaning that borrowing countries can’t be debt-trapped by high interest rates, and issues loans on a mutual basis, without forcing borrowing countries to bend to conditions imposed by a foreign power. The PRC also frequently waives debts owed by African countries that are unable to repay Chinese loans. FM Wang’s promise to waive the interest-free loan debts owed by 17 African countries to China is not out of the ordinary for the People’s Republic of China; the promise is a typical expression of the Communist Party of China’s cooperative internationalism.
It is true that China, as a politically united and fully sovereign country that has a rapidly developing economy, augmented by some advanced-capitalist centers in its major cities, and maintains a powerful military, is more powerful than the African Union. The African Union, by contrast, has not yet achieved complete political unification, and its member states have not yet achieved true sovereignty, because they remain dominated by the West through neo-colonialism. Moreover, the whole African continent, and especially sub-Saharan Africa, has inherited a far more brutal legacy of colonialism than East Asia, and therefore must overcome far worse underdevelopment. It is also true that, especially since the 2010s, the PRC has taken on a leadership role in global development. However, in contrast to the Western powers, it is clear that the goal of the Communist Party of China (CPC) is not to use its economic and military power to colonize, exploit, underdevelop, and impoverish Africa.
It is also true that there will inevitably arise conflicts between Chinese capital and African labor. Capital and labor are always at odds; we Marxists call this contradiction. However, in those cases where open conflict has arisen from the contradiction between African labor and Chinese capital, the CPC has generally sided with African labor, punishing Chinese businesses that fail to uphold their promises. The contradiction between Chinese capital and African labor will take the form of struggle by the African proletariat against Chinese bosses, and we should always stand in solidarity with the proletariat. But the principal contradiction acting upon the African continent is the contradiction between Africa and Western imperialism.
Finally, it is true that the CPC committed grave injustices during the Cold War, such as invading Vietnam in 1979 and supporting the mujahidin in Afghanistan in the 1980s. These actions stemmed from the Sino-Soviet Split, in which relations between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China deteriorated and turned hostile. The CPC falsely characterized the Soviet Union as “social imperialist” and the “main enemy” of the world’s revolutions; this was the CPC’s justification for entering into an alliance with the U.S. Empire — against the Soviet Union — during the Cold War. During the Cold War, the PRC actively undermined Soviet-backed revolutions in some Third World countries by providing support to counter-revolutionaries. In siding with the U.S. Empire against the Soviet Union, and by inventing and propagating the fiction of “Soviet social imperialism,” the CPC entered into an alliance with actual imperialism, and did immeasurable harm to liberation movements and socialist revolutions across the Third World.
However, since the end of the Cold War, the Communist Party of China has pursued an international policy guided by its Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, enshrined in the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China: (1) mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, (2) mutual non-aggression, (3) mutual non-interference in internal affairs, (4) equality and mutual benefit, and (5) peaceful coexistence. In accordance with these constitutional principles, the CPC has pursued what it calls “South–South cooperation” — a reference to the “Global South,” a broad catch-all for most of the world’s underdeveloped and developing countries.
In sum, the nature of China–Africa cooperation is not neo-colonialism, but mutual development through internationalist South–South cooperation.
The Basis of China–Africa Solidarity
South–South cooperation, as pursued by the People’s Republic of China and partnered countries and intergovernmental bodies through the Belt and Road Initiative, has the effect of weakening the influence of the Western imperialist powers over Global South countries and the world’s markets. This stands to benefit both China and Africa.
The founding mission of the Organization of African Unity, now carried forward by the African Union, was to liberate the African continent from colonialism and to eliminate all surviving vestiges of colonial rule. Pan-Africanists sought to develop a politically united, self-reliant, and prosperous Africa, and to thereby achieve true political and economic independence from the Western imperialist powers that had colonized, exploited, and violently oppressed Africa for centuries. The OAU also sought to end the regimes of white-colonizer minority-rule that then remained in some African countries, such as South Africa and Zimbabwe. Towards these aims, the member-states of the OAU, and now the African Union, have fostered closer cooperation on Africa’s economic development, towards the goals of African self-sufficiency, peace, the elimination of poverty, and the achievement of ecologically sustainable prosperity. Especially during the 1990s, the OAU sought closer cooperation with China. By fostering internationalist China–Africa cooperation, pan-Africanists hoped to free the continent from its dependence on the financial institutions of Western imperialism, and to thereby liberate Africa, once and for all, from neo-colonialism.
The African Union continues to advance the pan-Africanist vision of a sovereign, self-reliant, democratic, pluralistic, and truly United Africa, and therefore objectively represents a progressive force, with immense revolutionary potential. For it is only through pan-African unity that the African continent can self-emancipate, at last throwing off the shackles of imperialism, carry forward sustainable economic development towards the eradication of poverty, secure the right to self-determination for all the indigenous peoples of Africa, repair Africa’s ecology, eliminate war across the continent, and establish a truly democratic African society. It is only by connecting and developing African industry and trade that the continent can break free of its imperialist chains. All the indigenous peoples of Africa have a shared destiny, not because of any “biological” features, but because of a shared history of oppression and a shared future of liberation.
Communists on every continent owe their solidarity to the pan-African struggle and the struggle of all imperialized peoples against neo-colonialism.
At the same time, South–South cooperation, including China–Africa cooperation, is an integral aspect of the CPC’s mission to develop an advanced socialist economy in China, in accordance with the strategy of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. These efforts have become increasingly unified under the Belt and Road Initiative. The 2018 Beijing Declaration, unanimously adopted by the member-states of FOCAC, explicitly centers the Belt and Road Initiative in the future of China–Africa cooperation.
This process has been termed “alter-globalization” by some economists. In actuality, it is nothing more or less than the inevitable decay of unipolar world imperialism, led by the United States of America, giving way to the formation of a multipolar world. As emerging imperialist powers like the Russian Federation and the monarchies of the Arab Gulf increasingly break with and challenge American hegemony, the power of the American imperialist axis will decline, and world imperialism will again become fractured by inter-imperialist competition and war. The post-Cold War order is finally coming to an end, one crisis at a time.
Capitalist imperialism is now on its last leg. New imperialist powers will emerge, but the whole capitalist-imperialist world-system is already crumbling, and its final demise is inevitable. For five centuries, the development, expansion, and accumulation of capital has depended on the opening of new markets through the conquest of new territories, the establishment of new colonies, and the most brutal exploitation of billions of colonially oppressed people.
But we live in a rapidly decolonizing world. The colonial and formerly colonial peoples of the world are pursuing independence and sovereignty through self-reliance; self-reliance, through development; development, through cooperation — this time, on a mutual and internationalist, rather than an unequal and imperialist, basis. Africa is marching towards unification, and united, will never again be conquered or enslaved. Former strongholds of American imperialism across Asia, Africa, and even Europe are daily undermined by the ascendance of China and its Belt and Road Initiative. The oppressed of Latin America are rebelling against a century and more of Yankee imperialism. Even the U.S. Empire, the world-imperialist behemoth, is not safe: The oppressed of this country demonstrated in 2020 our preparedness to bring the enemy state to its knees. The oppressed masses of the U.S. Empire are consciously realizing that in order to secure our own liberation, we must fight for the liberation of the Third World.
The death knell of imperialism has been sounded. Without a world to carve up among themselves, without colonies to plunder, the capitalist empires will be drawn further into competition with each other, and the era of multipolarity, of inter-imperialist wars, will resume. From our historical vantage-point, we can confidently predict that the next inter-imperialist “World War” will be the last.
Death to imperialism!
Long live African unity!
Long live Chinese socialism!
Long live China–Africa cooperation, friendship, and solidarity!
