This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Dr. Joshua Eisenman is a senior fellow for China Studies at the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, DC, and an associate professor at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. His latest book is, “China's Relations with Africa: A New Era of Strategic Engagement.”
Federal Newswire
How did China begin its engagement in Africa?
Joshua Eisenman
The way to think about China in the developing world or the Global South, is that it is a part of China's larger geo-strategy, which is predominantly US-focused. China has a geo-strategy. China in the Global South is part of that strategy. China in Africa is a subset of China in the Global South. That's the kind of nesting Russian doll way you can think of it.
When you look at the structure of China-Africa relations, you could think of it as four interlocking layers.
At the base or foundational layer…the bilateral relationships is where sovereignty lies. That's important to China. Most of the action is taking place on the bilateral level. You can also see it's easy to keep things quiet on the bilateral level because it's just two in the room.
Then you have subregional organizations in Africa, the ECCAS, COMESA, CEN-SAD, and others. China engages all of these at different levels. It's now building, if it hasn't already completed the headquarters of ECCAS. That's the West African Organization at the regional level. China engages the African Union, and it built and bugged the $200 million African Union headquarters. They also created FOCAC, the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, which is also this kind of regional country engagement.
Then at the global level at the UN, IMF, and all these other regions, we see that it is individuals who move across these layers. If we take Mr. Tedros, the head of the WHO, he used to be the foreign minister of Ethiopia. He began on the bilateral level and transcended. Someday maybe he'll join and become part of the COMESA, and then he'll move himself to another level. But the point is, the relationship that was created with him when he was the foreign minister of Ethiopia is now a kind of existing history that he has with China.
Those relationships are something that China pays a lot of attention to. It cultivates them. It considers them an important part of its larger international relations. This is called relationality. I won't bore you with the details of the theory as much as it's to say that this kind of originates with Chinese traditional relationships that date back to Confucianism and the duties and responsibilities between different partners in a relationship.
Federal Newswire
How have China’s policies evolved in Africa over the decades?
Joshua Eisenman
Working with Ambassador Shinn, it took us six years of digging and interviews to get to the bottom of a lot of these questions. I'm not saying we even got to the bottom, maybe we got halfway. That's even an accomplishment, to be honest with you.
But there's one thing I can say, and this is very clear, people ask, “how successful is China's engagement in Africa?” To that, I have to say, over the last 10 years, we have had no African country that has contradicted any of China's core national interests. We know of dozens of countries that have sided with China on its core national interests.
Countries like Rwanda, a landlocked African country, announcing that the South China Sea is part of China. [What] ‘dog’ [do] they have in that fight? Well, their Chinese friends ask them to. Why not? Why do they care? Frankly, if you look at it from a pure, core-interest perspective, for Africans, these are easy giveaways. They don't care about these things. The Chinese care deeply.
From that perspective, China has pushed Taiwan almost completely off the continent. Only Eswatini, formerly Swaziland, recognizes Taiwan.
They've also been quite successful in terms of harnessing this idea of a club of fellow sufferers, where they are the leader of the club. [That’s] very potent in a place like Africa, where people's grandfathers were colonial subjects. It's like confirmation bias. You were oppressed. We were oppressed too, and we got out from under [them].
It is a part of almost every major speech that you hear from a Chinese leader. They'll say the Chinese Communist Party has always had your back and will always. The West is always eating your lunch, and they always will. It's really in this way, the Global South and Africa become a kind of cudgel in what we sometimes call the new Cold War in China.
Federal Newswire
Where has China placed its highest priority in Africa?
Joshua Eisenman
It's evolved substantially. I could start off on what has become called the “debt trap narrative.” ‘Debt trap’ suggests that China intentionally set traps which other countries fall into. But having done interviews with Ambassador Shen at the height of the BRI [Belt and Road Initiative], I can tell you the goal was always to get repaid.
It was to go out, get the contracts, build the infrastructure, get paid back, and get political clout. It was not a, “let's put ourselves in the hole $1.4 trillion.” That was not the plan. That was a bad move that they are now regretting. Now we see changes in the BRI because of it.
There were a lot of people who were saying, “well, we’ve got to get in the game and compete.” I remember John Kerry getting some testimony when he was trying to become secretary of state, saying we had to compete. That would have been the biggest mistake.
I think that the Belt and Road has been, in my opinion at this point, a mistake. They're trying to unwind it, but do so in a politically palatable way because they put it in the Constitution.
Federal Newswire
It’s seen as a mistake from China’s point of view, but do Africans see it as a mistake, too?
Joshua Eisenman
What was funny in 2018, we were there. They knew that the money was drying up. They were doing everything they could to get it and they weren't wrong. If you look at 2022, I don't think there was any lending from China to Africa. It was like $1 billion. It was nothing. It was like $36 [billion] just a couple of years ago, and it would have been unsustainable.
But ultimately, they are going to take a very long time to recoup the lending that they put out, not just in Africa, but in other places, particularly places like Argentina and Pakistan.
Federal Newswire
Should we be viewing China’s role in Africa as extractive and exploitative?
Joshua Eisenman
We're not dealing with colonialism here. We're dealing with, maybe mercantilism to some degree, but these are sovereign nations. They hire Chinese firms, or they take loans from China in order to build this infrastructure. But I know of no instance where a country has essentially outsourced the creation of its infrastructure successfully.
Now setting aside those colonial instances where it was often, with the exception of Taiwan, perhaps more extractive. I think one of the reasons is because if you don't build it yourself, how do you maintain it yourself?
The idea was that coming in and building these public goods, not that the project itself would necessarily generate money, but the increase in GDP caused by the infrastructure would increase the country's wealth and thus allow it to repay the loans.
It's not that if every project fails, that means it was a failure, because if you can see enough wealth generation effects in the economy that you can say, “okay, fine.” [China says,] “we have a longer time horizon. We see this is part of a larger relationship for us. It's not about how soon we can collect.”
I think there is some validity in that, but it's not entirely convincing either.
Federal Newswire
How does this affect the US?
Joshua Eisenman
There are a couple of things going on here that directly affect the United States. First, China's propaganda in Africa is very anti-U.S. It specifically targets the United States, and especially after October 7th, it has done everything it can–especially in North Africa–to link the United States to the loss of life in Gaza.
Basically the US is the punching bag. They have great cartoonists over there, and they've got one really strong kind of guidance, and that is take the pants off the U.S. Sometimes it is actually worth a chuckle, and you wonder how much they're investing in just the cartooning alone.
But the US has become a target of China's propaganda work in Africa and throughout the global South. The idea is that U.S liberal democracy is not successful and it is a failure. January 6th is part of that idea, that chaos of American carnage.
China has just built a $40 million Julius Nyerere Party training school in Tanzania to train African [political] parties from around the continent in Chinese governance techniques. I don't know if any country has ever done that. The whole goal is to teach the Chinese governance techniques, to teach the one party autocracy, the totalitarian surveillance state to Africans.
You've got an effort to make sure that the United States political model is not favored, and that the Chinese political model is. Now, how successful has that been? That's almost a different question.
Federal Newswire
What is Africa’s view on China’s attempts to create an alternative global financial system?
Joshua Eisenman
Africa is a diverse place. People are going to have different views. But BRICS is a good jumping off point and it has just expanded. In many ways that's all it has ever done.
With this whole Red Sea thing going on with the Houthis, the Chinese are losing money hand over fist. The Egyptians are losing money hand over fist, and they're part of BRICS. The Ethiopians, Iranians, Saudis, and the Indians are part of it, and they're all losing money. BRICS is on the scene. They've got the thing surrounded.
You would think that if there was ever an issue that BRICS could get together in a room and solve, it would be this. They haven't been able to do a damn thing. The idea of a BRICS currency, where would you even put the central bank? How would you manage monetary supply between Iran and China? I mean, come on.
Federal Newswire
Do the Chinese have an answer to that question?
Joshua Eisenman
Yes, the digital Yuan. But the funny thing is, it's really a lot of ‘pie in the sky,’ and people get very excited about these things.
I think we need to take things with a grain of salt sometimes, especially with regard to these institutions. We think the Chinese are 10-feet tall, but they are humans, too. They have mistakes and they have bad policies. They, too, have these shortcomings in their political system.
So ultimately, who knows, maybe I'll be eating crow ten years from now and the BRICS will be soaring high.
Federal Newswire
Where can people go to follow your work?
Joshua Eisenman
Well, I'm a professor at Notre Dame, so you can find my bio and a lot of my work at the University of Notre Dame Keough School of Global Affairs website. My new book is “China's Relations with Africa: A New Era of Strategic Engagement” with Ambassador Shen, and that's Columbia University Press.
I work on what we call the China Policy Monitor at the American Foreign Policy Council. That's a weekly kind of summary of China-related events. It's free and comes right to your inbox.
The China Desk podcast is hosted by Steve Yates, a former president of Radio Free Asia and White House national security advisor.
