What Do the US and China Want From Africa?

It is often unavoidable that discussions involving relations between Africa and the United States or Africa and China trigger questions of implications for all three regions. Since the November 3, 2020 U.S. elections, commentators looking to understand the implications of the new Joe Biden-Kamala Harris administration for Africa have accordingly factored in what the new administration would mean for Africa-China relations.

Notably, Chinese and U.S. interests in Africa may not always align well with African interests toward China or the United States. But that is a discussion for another day.  

Under the Biden administration, it is expected that the United States will design a new policy framework for Africa. That might mean China also reviewing its own Africa policy. What are some of the issues and factors that will influence the Biden and the Xi Jinping administrations’ approaches to their competition in Africa? The broad pillars of consideration can be segmented into public diplomacy and soft power, as well as economic, political, and security interests.  

Public Diplomacy and Soft Power  

As the United States and China continue to vie for close economic and political ties with Africa, the image, credibility, and influence of each of the two powers has come into sharp focus. A few examples suffice. 

Probably the biggest source of U.S. soft power on the continent are the American news and entertainment industries, which act as major disseminators of U.S. culture. Broadcasters such as CNN and Voice of America appear to be far more influential than recent Chinese entrants, such China Global Television Network and China Radio international. This ties into language: 24 African countries use English as their official language as well as the lingua franca in the general population. French is also a popular language in the United States, providing links with the 21 French-speaking African countries. China does not have this linguistic advantage as Mandarin is used at a miniscule level on the continent. In some instances, as in South Africa, the introduction of Mandarin in schools has even been opposed. Nonetheless, Mandarin as an alternative foreign language may grow in the coming years as Confucius Institutes – counted at 54 in 2019 – on the continent are established and gain traction. 

China, however, makes up for the comparatively lower traction of its language by being the largest provider of government-sponsored university scholarships for Africans. This is an area of public diplomacy and soft power in which the United States and other Western countries such as the U.K. and France were ahead of China only a couple of years ago. Currently, in cumulative terms, there are more African alumni of U.S. scholarships, such as Fulbright and Hubert Humphrey fellowships, among others, than Chinese alternatives. American scholarships for Africans have been in place since the 1960s and earlier, while the Chinese ones are a 21st century phenomena. However, the pace at which Chinese scholarships for the continent are growing suggests that the cumulative number of African alumni of Chinese scholarships will, with time, catch up with the total number of U.S.-educated Africans if things remain the same.

Religion is yet another area of soft power consideration. American Christian evangelicals have strong ties with their Christian counterparts in Africa, as seen in the odd popularity of former President Donald Trump in places like Nigeria and Kenya. On the other hand, Chinese religious concepts and practices simply do not register on the African religious map.           

Economic Interests

Perhaps the utmost Chinese interest in Africa is access to raw materials. Most of China’s imports from Africa are raw materials, mainly energy or mineral resources. China imports minerals such as copper, cobalt, manganese, tantalum, and others from the continent. This is a major cog in the Chinese industrial wheel, although such imports started declining from the mid-2010s, with a further decline in the COVID-19 period.

Although the United States has an interest in maintaining access to raw materials in Africa, the stakes are higher for China. With regard to oil, for instance, the United States used to import a lot from Africa but is now self-sufficient after the rise of fracking technology. In fact, the United States is now an oil exporter.

Since China’s forceful re-entry into Africa from 2000 onward, exporting goods to the continent has become a major interest in the broader Africa-China trade engagement. In part, the pull factor is that the continent’s population has ballooned, reaching over 1.3 billion in 2021. An attendant development is an expanding middle class across the continent, which now constitutes a sizable consumer market with expendable income. Moreover, Chinese goods are much friendlier to African pockets than those from the West.     

Like China, the United States has an interest in exporting goods and products to Africa. However, unlike China, it seems not to have gotten its strategy right. U.S. trade with Africa lags behind China’s by a wider margin than a comparison of their respective global trade balances. It is with the continued use of the dollar as the currency of trade, as opposed to the Chinese renminbi (RMB, also known as the yuan), that the United States has an upper hand on China in Africa. The RMB is gaining ground as a foreign currency on the continent but the uptake remains quite low compared to the dollar.  

Financial relations between China and Africa are hard to nail down because figures are hard to find – and where they are available, sources are often difficult to verify. However, we can get a rough picture from studies undertaken by research entities such as AidData at the College of William and Mary and the China Africa Research Initiative at the Johns Hopkins University. If interests motivate strategic engagement, then foreign aid is one such instrument. Going by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) definition of aid – unbundled from other deals – the United States is ahead of China. This is interesting because the general perception is that China provides much more aid to Africa than the United States. 

Analyses also hold that the U.S. outperforms China in terms of foreign direct investment (FDI), a result of the longevity and global reach of American capital. It is in the area of loans and financing, especially of infrastructure projects, that China leads the U.S. by a massive margin. The magnitude of Chinese loans to Africa has also meant that Chinese infrastructure development companies – in roads, railways, seaports, airports, and housing – win by far more contracts compared to their American counterparts. In fact, the heft of China’s financial incursion into Africa has triggered narratives of a debt diplomacy or debt trap diplomacy in places such as Zambia, Kenya, and Angola. 

Political Interests   

The political imperatives are particularly important for China in the United Nations system where Beijing seeks to the support of 54 African nation states, which make up over a quarter of the 193-member state body. Indications are that the African bloc in the U.N. often votes in closer proximity to the Chinese position on key issues compared to the U.S. and Western positions. In return, African countries have come to rely on China’s veto power in the United Security Council whenever they seem to fall afoul of Western powers.  

A somewhat related interest is that China wants African countries to adhere to the One China policy, a euphemism for non-recognition of the Republic of China government in Taiwan. This particular factor has waned over the past decade and may no longer constitute an important interest, as only the Kingdom of eSwatini recognizes Taiwan presently (Sao Tome and Principe switched ties from Taipei to Beijing in 2016, followed by Burkina Faso in 2018). The United States does not seem keen to lean on African countries to recognize Taiwan as might have been the case in the past.

It would appear that Beijing has an advantage over Washington in terms of diplomatic agency. Face-to-face interactions between the Chinese Communist Party and state officials in Africa – from the president down to local government levels – have become the norm over the past two decades. Bilateral, state-to-state visits between African countries and China have become a constant. The political structure in the United States hamstrings contacts of this nature. The last time a U.S. president visited Africa was July 2015 when Barack Obama went to Kenya and Ethiopia; China’s President Xi Jinping has visited the continent two times since then. Visits to Africa by U.S. secretaries of state are comparatively infrequent as well. For instance, in February 2020, then-U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Senegal, Angola, and Ethiopia, more than a year after his predecessor Rex Tillerson’s visit in 2018. By contrast, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has visited the continent in January each year of his tenure, as part of a tradition in place since 1991. 

Additionally, China hosts the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), bringing together heads of state and government from China and nearly all the African countries, once every three years with the event expected in 2021 in Senegal. The last time such an event was held between Africa and the United States was the rare 2014 U.S.-Africa Summit in Washington, D.C. 

Nonetheless, U.S. diplomacy cannot be dismissed out of hand, with mechanisms such the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), the work of State Department and USAID diplomats at embassies and consulates across the continent, and programs such as the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFER), among others. Most observers reckon that the United States has a clear edge over China in terms of engagement with civil society organizations, where China is on the backfoot.

Security Interests

An area where Chinese and American interests converge is in ensuring the safety of their contacts and engagements with Africa. Both want to protect their people and assets in Africa from terrorism, armed conflicts, and crime. Both want to ensure that pandemic diseases and narcotics trafficking emanating from or passing through Africa do not reach their borders. They want to secure maritime commerce from piracy. The United States is particularly concerned with the white collar crime of money laundering, perhaps more so than China.

When it comes to security concerns, the United States has a far greater interest in Africa than China. With the objective of combating terrorism in parts of Africa and the Middle East, the U.S. wants military and naval access to African seaports and access to airspace for military planes. While China is starting from a low base in these respects, it has in recent times established a military base in Djibouti following the trail of the United States’ Camp Lemonnier. Nonetheless, the U.S. has many more military outposts in Africa than China. While Washington has a specific African Command (AFRICOM), which is based in Stuttgart, Germany, China does not have an equivalent organizational structure. 

Reports, however, indicate that China is working on establishing military bases on the continent as part of its Belt and Road Initiative. In the 2010s, China started making naval port calls to Africa and became involved in the anti-piracy efforts in the Gulf of Aden. In 2019, China initiated the China Africa Peace and Security Forum following on the China Africa Defense Security Forum in 2018, both indications of broadening security interests. The United States does not have a similar continent-wide arrangement, although, it should be noted, African military officials often attend courses at U.S. military academies. China has also deployed a far larger regiment of boots-on-ground for U.N. peacekeeping operations in conflict-wracked or post-conflict African nations than the U.S. On the flip side however, the United States provides more money to the U.N. peacekeeping budget, which helps manage African and other conflict situations, whereas China’s monetary contribution is less (although still significant). 

Conclusion

If the news and information emerging from Washington as the Biden administration gains steam is anything to go by, it is likely that the United States will work on and release a comprehensive strategy toward Africa in the coming months. This suggests that soft power, economic, political, and security imperatives will “speak” to each other. For instance, in the recent past, Sino-American competition in the African information and communication technology (ICT) sector has also emerged, touching on political, economic, and security interests.

Should the anticipated policy be announced, and implementation commence by the second half of 2021, we can expect that the 2021 FOCAC action plans will feature explicit or implicit responses. As alluded to earlier, African leaders and thinkers will be keenly observing this policy space to determine how to react.