A Silk Road to Africa

China’s Belt and Road – the Silk Road Economic Belt and Maritime Silk Road (MSR) – is generally understood as an initiative to create trading and logistical networks spanning the Eurasian continent. That’s certainly true, but even this ambitious description overlooks the full vision for the “Belt and Road.” Instead, China intends to take the project to yet another continent: Africa.

This point was driven home during Xi Jinping’s visit to Egypt in January 2016. Though billed as a tour of the Middle East, Egypt does double duty as a regional leader for both the Middle East and Africa – it engages with China regularly both in the China-Arab Cooperation Forum and the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC). Thus we shouldn’t only read the deals signed during Xi’s visit as a bridge linking the Belt and Road to the Middle East. Egypt’s enthusiastic participation is one more link in the African leg of the initiative.

Egypt’s participation in the Belt and Road is perhaps more crucial than that of any other state in Africa, thanks to geography alone: The Maritime Silk Road (MSR) is envisioned as passing from the Gulf of Aden through the Red Sea, and then via Egypt’s Suez Canal to the Mediterranean and Europe.  That route comes as no surprise: The Suez has long been the primary shipping channel for Chinese goods to reach Europe. Accordingly, China has been interested in stepping up investment in the Suez for years (former President Jiang Zemin talked about it during his visit to Egypt in 2000). The Belt and Road provides an increased impetus for Chinese investment in the Suez (and beyond), even while Egypt itself is eagerly looking for financial partners to fund mega-projects in the country.

That combination has led to a spate of Chinese deals in recent years, since President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi first visited China in December 2014. Unsurprisingly, given the Suez Canal’s crucial position on the MSR, the most ambitious plan centers around the China-Egypt Suez Economic and Trade Cooperation Zone – according to China Daily, the zone in its final form will cover 9.12 square kilometers and account for a whopping $2 trillion in investment, in fields from manufacturing to logistics to finance.

And with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding to cooperate on the Belt and Road during Xi’s January visit, Chinese investment in Egypt can now officially be viewed in the framework of the MSR. That includes the $15 billion worth of deals for China-Egypt cooperation in “electricity, space, infrastructure, trade, energy, finance, culture, media, technology, and climate change” signed while Xi was in Egypt, according to Xinhua.

Egypt is far from the only African country China wants included on the “Belt and Road,” however. Beijing is also upping investment on another strategically located state: Djibouti, situated at the intersection of the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea. Notably, Djibouti will soon play host to China’s first overseas military facility, a logistics facility designed to provide support for Chinese troops conducting anti-piracy missions in the Gulf of Aden.

Meanwhile, a series of trade and investment deals between China and Djibouti slipped largely under the radar. Djibouti's president, Ismail Omar Guelleh, announced in January that his country and China would be setting up a free trade zone, hopefully by the end of 2016. Another agreement would see Djibouti play a larger role as a middleman in shipping Chinese cargo to other destinations. Both those announcement came less than a month after Guelleh met with Xi on the sidelines of the FOCAC summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, and agreed to work together on the “Belt and Road.”

The FOCAC summit in December 2015 provided more hints for where to look for the next investments on the Belt and Road as it expands into African countries. Xi announced a planned $60 billion in Chinese investment on the continent, and there’s plenty of potential for that investment to be looped into the Belt and Road rubric in the future.

The “three networks” – a trans-African high-speed rail network, highway network, and aviation network – discussed at FOCAC are precisely the sort of infrastructure development China is pursuing as part of the Belt and Road elsewhere in the world. China already has plans to build a $3.8 billion railway that will connect Kenya’s capital (Nairobi) with the capitals of Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and South Sudan as well as with Mombasa, a Kenyan port on the Indian Ocean – which also happens to be a prime candidate for linking the MSR with Africa’s east coast. 

None of these projects have officially been linked to the Belt and Road, but voices outside of China’s government have drawn connections between the two – and called for Beijing to do the same. China’s leaders seem to be moving in that direction; descriptions of the Belt and Road in state-run media now describe the MSR initiative as linking China with Asian, African, and European countries. Meanwhile, Nairobi has always been included as a waypoint on the MSR since Xinhua rolled out its official map back in 2014. However, despite Chinese officials acknowledging there’s a place for the African continent on the Belt and Road, the phrase does not appear once in China’s most recent Africa policy paper.

In many ways, the Belt and Road is a natural fit for Chinese engagement with African countries. China’s strategy, as outlined in its Africa policy paper, include prioritizing industrialization, infrastructure construction, and financial integration on the continent – all areas of priority for the Belt and Road initiative as well. However, officially linking African projects to the Belt and Road would be more than just a rhetorical move. It would up the incentives for Chinese companies to invest in Africa, both politically and economically – official Belt and Road projects are eligible for funding from China’s $40 billion Silk Road Fund.

China’s Africa policy – which emphasizes infrastructure and industrialization – would look largely the same with or without a direct link to the Belt and Road. However, the pace and scale of projects will accelerate if tied to Xi’s signature foreign policy initiative. Right now completing Silk Road projects is China’s top priority – the only question is which projects in Africa will make the cut.