2024 FOCAC Summit: How does China view common development with African countries?

Over the last several decades, China-Africa cooperation has grown to unprecedented levels. With the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation conference currently ongoing in Beijing, our correspondent Zheng Yibing examines Beijing’s strategy to cooperative development with African states.

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“China is the largest developing country. Africa is the continent with the most developing countries. Both have long established a community with a common future. In 2018, at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, or FOCAC, Chinese President Xi Jinping said the following.

In 2013, President Xi picked Africa for his first state visit since taking office. During his journey, he stated that both parties should always be true and trustworthy friends.

President Xi was in Tanzania at the time and visited a cemetery in Dar es Salaam in memory of 65 Chinese laborers who died while building the Tanzania-Zambia Railway in the 1970s. Around 50,000 Chinese professionals and technicians arrived at the time to work with locals to construct the 1,860-kilometer-long railway. President Xi referred to them as heroes, and Africans continue to commemorate them to this day.

KHAMIS OMAR, Tanzania’s Ambassador to China, said, “We’ve enjoyed a magnificent six decades, the first cycle of 60 years, the most amazing, warmest friendship between two friendly countries in a very broad domain of cooperation. We share the same ideology, and I would say beliefs, in safeguarding all countries’ freedom, sovereignty, and territorial integrity.

Thanks to African nations’ strong backing, China was able to reclaim its legal seat in the United Nations in 1971. As President Xi stated, China and Africa have been brothers and partners, sharing both prosperity and adversity.

China has responded to the request to play an active role in UN peacekeeping operations in Africa for decades, to deploy convoys to the Gulf of Aden against pirates since 2008, and to give medical aid to help locals combat severe illnesses.

This is a two-way endeavor. In a May meeting in Beijing with his Equatorial Guinea counterpart Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, President Xi expressed heartfelt gratitude to the African country for donations made in 2008 for China’s earthquake relief and in 2015 for the construction of a school for Chinese students in a mountainous area.

President Xi Jinping has visited Africa five times since 2013, promoting China-Africa ties and deepening collaboration in a variety of industries. China has been Africa’s top commercial partner over the past 15 years, thanks to a variety of cooperation programs, initiatives, and projects.

China-Africa trade reached more than 282 billion US dollars in 2023, up about 11 percent from 2021, demonstrating the trade’s robust resiliency.

Several infrastructure and manufacturing projects have been completed, including the Lekki deep seaport in Nigeria, the airport expressway in Nairobi, solar power plants in South Africa, and home appliance manufacturers in Egypt.

TEFERA DERBEW YIMAN, Ethiopian Ambassador to China. “When you look at the collaboration between China and Africa, both historically and currently, it is built on a win-win situation. Many chances have been created for African countries to take advantage of the booming Chinese market.

Under FOCAC alone, Chinese companies have built or refurbished approximately 10,000 kilometers of railways, 100,000 kilometers of roads, 1,000 bridges, and over 100 ports throughout Africa.

By the end of last year, China has constructed 24 agricultural technology demonstration centers in Africa, promoting over 300 innovative agricultural technologies and helping over one million African smallholder farmers.

In July, China and Africa issued the Action Plan for the Development of China-Africa Digital Cooperation. Every new year, the Chinese foreign minister has visited African countries first for 34 years in a row.

As President Xi said, the key to China-Africa friendship and cooperation lies in their sincere friendship and equality of ties, which China highly values. Zheng Yibing, CGTN, Beijing