On China
There is too much bluster in the U.S. approach to China in Africa. We need more honesty.
When I was in government, talking about China in Africa was a fraught endeavor. It was beset with policy complications and political risks. If you repeated conventional (and often false) narratives about Chinese engagement, you struggled to enact effective policies. If you communicated a more nuanced (albeit still critical) portrait of Chinese activities, you risked being dismissed as soft on China. And, if you tried to split the difference, you found yourself stuck with a policy that satisfied no one, confused the bureaucracy, and frustrated African partners.
As special assistant to President Biden and senior director for African affairs at the National Security Council, I became acutely aware that we had become trapped in a dilemma of our own making. The China echo chamber had become loud, insistent, and indiscriminate—blaming every current and future problem on Beijing. It was not effective.
I recognize that this post may seem slightly past its prime. After all, the Trump Administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS) has further confused U.S. priorities regarding strategic competition with China, and U.S. policies toward sub-Saharan Africa appear to have narrowed to migration and critical minerals. With ad hominem attacks on South Africa and Nigeria, coupled with a devastating retrenchment of U.S. humanitarian and development programs, it may seem naïve to talk about the future of U.S. partnerships in this moment. But, as always, I see merit in thinking out loud about what has and hasn’t worked in U.S. policy—and identifying what, perhaps at some point in the distant future, we can do differently. That entails challenging conventional assumptions and returning to the basics: what does China want, what do Africans want, and what should the United States want?
What China Wants
I’ll start with China. To be sure, there are already reams of scholarship and long-running debates on this topic. My goal here is not to adjudicate but to simply add my perspective as a former analyst, researcher, and policymaker. In my opinion, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is seeking to reorder the world to its benefit. Sub-Saharan Africa is not only an integral part of this pursuit, but it has also been a testing ground for many of the PRC’s most important initiatives. In March 1972, the U.S. intelligence community published the following assessment:
The Chinese are again offering aid, bidding for diplomatic recognition, and throwing lavish receptions for visiting African delegations. The current initiative suggests that China’s leaders attach considerable importance to their relations with Sub-Saharan Africa — if not for its intrinsic worth (if you “win” Black Africa, what have you won?), then as a place where easy points can be made in pursuit of larger objectives lying outside Africa.
Putting aside an offensive non-sequitur, the IC’s judgment more than four decades ago continues to have resonance today. The PRC views Africa as a source for allies and votes (“Even so unpromising a state as Equatorial Guinea has a vote in the UN General Assembly and can take a position favorable to Peking,” the IC sniffed in 1972.) This matters for securing support regarding Taiwan and the South China Sea, as well as constructing an alternative architecture of global institutions at the expense of U.S. leadership.
Even though Africa is China’s second smallest regional trade partner, ahead of only Oceania, Beijing has found value in the region’s commercial markets and essential resources, in part to power the Chinese economy.
African imports of Chinese goods this year have surged by 25 percent to $122 billion, a growth rate faster than any other major market, according to a recent analysis by Bloomberg. This includes construction machinery, passenger cars, and steel, as well as a sharp increase in orders for solar panels.
African exports to China overwhelmingly consist of critical minerals and oil. Two-thirds of Africa-China exports were concentrated in just four commodities: petroleum crude oil (41 percent), refined copper (15 percent), iron ore and concentrates (5 percent), and aluminum ores and concentrates (5 percent) by trade value.
Beijing also has realized that Africa offers a playing field for its soldiers to gain experience and real estate for its military to preposition itself along major sea lines of communication and trade. From 2013 to 2023, China dispatched peacekeepers to Mali in part to test their mettle in a hostile environment, as well as try out new military weapons and equipment. In 2017, the PRC established its first overseas military presence in Djibouti, and it has tried to curry favor with Gabon and Equatorial Guinea to obtain permission to build naval bases on the Atlantic Ocean.
The hard part, at least in Washington, has been acknowledging that China’s role in Africa is not uniformly negative. What China wants and does can benefit the region, even as many aspects of its engagement challenge U.S. interests. Back in December 2018, I testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, noting that Chinese activities consist of security, commercial, diplomatic, and strategic dimensions. And, “this blend of objectives, consequently, makes it difficult to separate malign activities from benign behavior.”
Moreover, the PRC often adjusts its approach to Africa. It has substantially reduced its lending in recent years from a high mark in the 2013-2018 period; shifted to more clean energy investments, including electric vehicles; and tapped its provinces (e.g., Hunan, Shandong, Guangdong) to play a much larger role in China‑Africa engagement. And while the PRC’s constant evolution is largely a response to African pressure (and domestic Chinese demands), its multifaceted and adaptive approach has repeatedly rendered Washington flatfooted and out-of-touch. U.S. criticism of Africa’s ties to China tends to come off as deaf to the lived experience of many Africans—and it is often dead wrong about some of its accusations. I had to twice correct a senior U.S. official that Beijing no longer imports significant numbers of Chinese labor. (Don’t get me started on the tenacity of the so-called “debt trap diplomacy” narrative.) To borrow a Chinese talking point, it has become a win-win situation: Beijing advances its goals while Washington keeps getting in its own way.
What Africans Want
Opining on what Africans want is even more problematic than interpreting Chinese motives in Africa. Of course, I can’t possibly speak for the region’s diverse governments, elites, and publics. My only recourse, therefore, is to share what I’ve learned from African friends and colleagues. What has consistently come through is that Africans want to be accorded with respect and dignity, and they welcome investment from all foreign partners, including from China. These are the top priorities, but many Africans also are wary of becoming overly dependent on one external power, especially China.
A majority of Africans view Chinese influence in their country as positive. This has been the case for more than a decade, according to polling by Afrobarometer and surveys conducted by Gallup and other reputable firms. It is obvious why: African countries require significant investment to achieve their socioeconomic and security goals, and China has been largely ready to help. The African Development Bank in 2024 indicated that the region’s infrastructure needs amount to $181-$221 billion per year, while Bloomberg analysis has concluded that another one billion Africans will enter the job market between now and the end of the century. With such massive needs, China’s largesse makes it a very attractive partner.
African leaders, in particular, value China’s persistent and high-level courtship. Beijing stages the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) every three years, its foreign minister travels to the continent at the beginning of every year, and President Xi Jinping regularly telephones or hosts African counterparts with the kind of pomp and circumstance that is often lacking in Washington, London, or Paris. Africa’s ruling elite believe they can rely on the PRC for grants, loans, weaponry, surveillance equipment, and other offerings. As Djiboutian President Ismail Omar Guelleh explained in a 2017 interview: “The reality is that no one other than the Chinese is offering Djibouti a long-term partnership.”
But scratch beneath the surface and it is more nuanced than it appears. Africans have long held a balanced view of Chinese engagement, being as critical as they are welcoming. There have been protests over treatment of Africans in China during the COVID-19 outbreak, and recurring anger over Chinese racism toward its African employees and customers—many of these stories and videos inevitably become viral internet memes. Chinese businesses also have found themselves in trouble for causing severe environmental damage, such as recent acid spills in Zambia and Democratic Republic of the Congo. China’s role consequently has been contested by African opposition politicians seeking to challenge incumbents’ cozy ties with Beijing, as well as by African scholars presenting serious critiques.
My experience has been that Africans want to continue to engage with and benefit from Chinese ties. Despite what some U.S. officials claim, I don’t believe many Africans prefer the United States over China (or vice versa). What they don’t want is to become too dependent on one external partner because it limits their leverage, options, and opportunities. When Angola, for example, became more open to U.S. engagement, as it did during the Biden Administration, it was not because the Angolans wanted to sever or downgrade ties to China. Angola, like many of its neighbors, wanted to diversify its relationships. (Side note: this is why the U.S. refrain about being “partner of choice” completely misses the point. Africans want a “choice of partners.”)
What the U.S. Should Want
Where does this leave the United States? When I worked in the Biden Administration, we repeatedly underscored that our interests in Africa were broader and deeper than a narrow focus on checkmating China. It was a genuine and serious reflection of our intent. And while we insisted that our policy shouldn’t be defined by our rivalry with Beijing, we argued that it couldn’t be divorced from strategic competition either. That’s why I made a conscious decision to include our concerns about Chinese activities in Africa in the U.S. Strategy Toward Sub-Saharan Africa.
One of the many problems we faced, however, was the disconnect between what we said and what others said on our behalf. Media outlets wrongly framed our approach as about targeting China, while Congress and think tank commentators repeatedly pointed to PRC activities as the top priority in Africa. It engendered a negative feedback loop in which the U.S. bureaucracy hyped every engagement or investment as part of great power competition—a ploy, in my opinion, to extract as much time, attention, and resources as possible. Some of our African partners made a similar calculation, reviving the old Cold War game of playing rivals off one another to win concessions.
And yet, these maneuvers failed to attract a significant influx of U.S. resources. In fact, I often struggled to prevent personnel and funding from being moved from Africa to the Indo-Pacific region. China may have been characterized as the pacing threat to the United States, but it was clearly not important enough in Africa. This was true in the Biden Administration, and it is even more true in the Trump White House which has shrugged at “previous arguments for maintaining aid, such as humanitarian responsibilities or the threat of a Chinese imprint.” The NSS doubles-down on this instinct, refashioning China primarily as an economic competitor and relegating Africa to the bottom of its to-do list.
Even still, I suspect that the policy whiplash on China in Africa will continue. While the Administration softens its language on Beijing, the draft National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), for example, includes directives to map PRC investments in strategic ports and counter PRC malign influence, including Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects. President Trump may claim that “we treat Africa far better than China or anybody else,” but the White House has dismantled USAID and blacklisted more than two dozen African countries from traveling to the United States. He made this assertion, by the way, in the same meeting where he instructed his African counterparts to cut their remarks short and praised Liberian President Boakai for speaking good English.
Reinvention By Necessity
I continue to believe that the United States is at our best when we pursue an affirmative policy vision, defined by who we are and not by who we oppose. When the United States does seek to counter discrete PRC activities, it should be focused and clear about what poses the greatest potential threat to U.S. interests. In my congressional testimony, I recommended that we closely monitor and mitigate Chinese engagements that undercut U.S. military access and operations, U.S. information and communication platforms, and U.S. relations with current and emerging African leaders. Seven years later, I continue to view these as the priority areas, as well as the critical minerals sector.
So, my advice is simple. To effectively meet the challenge posed by China, we need to first redefine our relationships with our African partners and repair some of the recent damage, especially from the last couple of months. It may seem like an impossible task, but that’s what happened in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In response to the end of the Cold War and resulting wave of instability across the region, the United States reinvented itself. It ushered in new policies that benefited Americans and Africans. President George W. Bush was a driving force in this effort, overseeing an unprecedented expansion of our contributions to the continent from the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) to major efforts to reduce conflict through training of African troops, supporting African-led peacemaking, and establishing Africa Command. It’s no coincidence that U.S. popularity across the continent peaked by the end of his administration.
Post Strategy
I am convinced that our approach toward China in Africa needs more honesty about U.S. intentions and more understanding about what Africans want from their external partners. It will certainly require some candid self-appraisal about how the United States is perceived across the continent, especially in the aftermath of recent U.S. policies. The only way forward is to reprioritize our relationships with Africans first and pursue our rivalry with China second.
Thanks for this, Judd. For many years I expressed some of the same concerns you have that China's role in Africa was being misunderstood by US policymakers. Anyone who has spent some time on the continent can see what the Chinese presence looks like, that it is not entirely malign. The Afrobarometer polling supports this. But as you observe, it was not a popular point of view.
This was a great read. It answered a lot of questions I had about the shaky US-Africa relationship.