Why China Is Better At Engaging Global South

What China-Africa summit tells about Beijing’s southward long march

China is set to unveil its biggest post-Covid diplomatic gathering in just a few days’ time. At the upcoming 2024 summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), leaders from over 50 African countries are expected to share a giant round table with China’s top leader Xi Jinping in Beijing. The table, over 60 meters in circumference, was specially ordered by China’s foreign ministry when FOCAC was first held as a leadership summit in 2006, because Beijing had never hosted a high-level multilateral event of such a large scale. A retired Chinese diplomat recalled the China-Africa summit was in effect “a rehearsal for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.”

The three-yearly FOCAC, first kicked off as ministerial-level meetings in 2000, pioneers Beijing’s “N+1” dialogue mechanisms that engages a certain region or bloc in the developing world. It was later modeled after by similar forums between China and Arab states, Latin America, and most recently Central Asia. The buzzing of FOCAC, a quarter of a century after its initiation, seems to have validated the U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell’s exclamation “China has outpaced the United States in engaging the Global South.” How has China managed that?

Before Global South’s “Awakening”

The question has been anxiously asked and answered by Western strategists lately, as they fear that Beijing’s alleged southward “charm offensives” might tip the balance of the great-power contest. That picture loomed large as the Russia-Ukraine conflict marked a “moment of awakening” for the Global South, which seemed to have shifted from a silent majority to the vocal non-compliant to the West. In response to such claims, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson the other day commented that despite the commitment to helping Global South partners, “China never seeks to win the Global South.” Interestingly, that is actually the case for FOCAC, which was initiated by Africans, not China.

The idea was first put on the table in 1997, when Benin’s Minister for Planning and Economic Rehabilitation Albert Tevoedjre proposed that some form of China-Africa cooperation mechanism should be established. It was met with hesitance on the Chinese side for the lack of experience in hosting such events. In the following two years, African officials from Mauritius, Egypt, and Madagascar unremittingly advocated a “one-to-multi partnership” to their Chinese counterparts on different occasions.

Africans’ urge for a bigger Chinese role coincided with a “lost decade” for the continent. In the wake of the Cold War, Africa lost its strategic relevance as the arena for power projection, and the Western powers started to pull out their aids and investment. Since the early 1990s, Africa began to feel the pinch as the economy shrank and the debt piled up. The dire situation became so widespread in 1994 that the accumulated debt carried by African nations amounted to over 80 percent of their entire GDP.

“Right at that time, China did not forget its identity as a developing country,” said Liu Hongwu, a professor and the director of the Institute of African Studies at Zhejiang Normal University. In 1997, Liu, along with 16 other Chinese scholars, drafted a report on the imperative of setting up a high-level task force specialized in dealing with African affairs, which caught the attention of China’s then top leader Jiang Zemin and presumably expedited the formation of FOCAC. Just one year before, Jiang became China’s first head of state to visit Africa. The year 1995 also saw 23 visits to African countries by other Chinese leaders and a marked rise in bilateral trade by nearly 50 percent. It even prompted some Western academics to label China’s then foreign policy as “Africa First.”

Almost at the same time, China was engaging two vastly different worlds. In 1999, China signed the agreement on its accession to the WTO, a move that later turbocharged its economic growth through a full-fledged integration into the global economy. In 2000, just as The Economist published the infamous article “Hopeless Africa” as a verdict on the continent’s destiny, China founded FOCAC along with its African partners and did not relent its efforts on connecting with the world south of the Brandt Line, which was left out of the ongoing globalization drive led by the West.

China refused to disengage from the developing world in times of its difficulty for the same reason why the Global South’s recent “awakening” is only a myth. They awoke long ago, of which China has been an active part. China inaugurated its efforts to rally Afro-Asian unity in the 1955 Bandung Conference, the first major diplomatic event without colonial powers’ attendance. Premier Zhou Enlai’s visit to Africa in 1964 registered China’s unequivocal support for the continent’s struggle against colonial rule. When President Xi Jinping announced that China’s vote in the UN always belongs to the developing countries, he implicitly referred to the episode where African countries made up more than a third of the 76 affirmative votes that helped China restore its lawful seat in the UN in 1971.

On the eve of the first FOCAC in 2000, the then South African president Thabo Mbeki, a fervent advocate of South-South cooperation, espoused the passion that drove the Africans to push FOCAC into fruition during the state dinner with his Chinese counterpart. He said, not only did China stand by African nations in their fight against colonialism, but it also worked with them to help rebuild their countries after independence was won.

Joseph S. Nye dismissed the Global South as “a misleading and increasingly loaded term,” and other American scholars attributed the term to a “geopolitical fact” more than a “united bloc.” And this is where China begs to differ. “The ‘Global South’ is a self-identity mutually recognized among the nations of the South, not some label invented by the Northern powers to rationalize their power games,” said Liu Haifang, an associate professor and the director of the Center for African Studies at Peking University. “This identity has been forged in the process of the Global South’s united struggle for national independence.”

China sees the Global South as a self-identity, rather than a footnote to the West-centric order or a new geopolitical reality to be dealt with. Xi Jinping reiterated that China is “a natural member of the Global South,” echoing Mao Zedong’s proclamation that “China belongs to, and will always belong to the Third World.” Long before the so-called Global South’s “awakening,” China ordered a much bigger round table for FOCAC than the West for G7, and their southward paths bifurcated.

A Tale of Interests and Greater Good

By identifying with the Global South, China adopted an engagement approach that has been diametrically opposed to that of the Western powers. The FOCAC summit this year will be themed by “joining hands to advance modernization,” a topic that long eludes the West which has prioritized “anti-terrorism” on the continent. For the past three FOCAC meetings, Beijing successively launched “Ten Major Cooperation Plans” in 2015, “Eight Major Initiatives” in 2018, and “Nine Projects” in 2021, which outgrew the original FOCAC model of simply promoting trade and investment and started to foster Africa’s nearly all segments of social-economic development. The modernization drive mapped out in FOCAC boils down to a three-fold effort: industrialization, agricultural modernization, and cultivation of the talent pool.

“Conditional foreign aid became a driving force in African economic policy, fostering economic dependence on the West rather than the much-needed continental integration,” said Mo Ibrahim, a Sudanese-born British entrepreneur and philanthropist. But China’s participation is likely to help pull Africa out of this rut, and elevate its position in the global division of labor.

Xi Jinping embarked on his first overseas visit as China’s top leader in 2013, and, unprecedentedly, three African countries were among the destinations. It was also on this trip that he proposed “the righteous view in pursuit of greater good and shared interests,” which serves as the official line for China’s Africa policy till today.

The latter part about “shared interests” was easier to interpret. Africa has a young and growing population and enormous land resources, which makes it all but an attractive destination for industrial transfer. The continent is home to over 30 percent of the raw materials essential to the technological revolution that is unraveling around the world. And it has massive untapped potential to become an important overseas market when America and Europe are more poised to resort to their isolationist instinct. Africa makes an ideal partner for China, which is now undergoing an industrial upgrade, and it will boost the long overdue industrialization in the process.

However, it is the “greater good” bid that makes Beijing’s Africa policy fundamentally different from Washington’s. Addressing the 2015 FOCAC summit in Johannesburg, Xi Jinping interpreted the “greater good” as “friendship and justice” that pushes China to “facilitate Africa’s development endeavor with China’s development and ultimately deliver win-win progress and common development through mutually beneficial cooperation.”

What lies behind the seemingly altruistic drive is the fact that China aligns with the rest of the Global South in their vision of the future global order in the form of multipolarity, but the U.S. doesn’t. The very crux of achieving multipolarity is to free the Global South from the clutch of Western powers both politically and economically. Although China’s all-round collaboration with the Global South was sometimes misrepresented as Beijing’s attempt to bring about an “alternative order,” ending the systemic exploitation of the South is exactly what most of the developing world has been bucking for. The collective push for modernization will be a good breakthrough point.

In stark contrast, Washington’s belated wooing of the Global South seems all but instrumental. With a goal of maintaining its hegemonic order, not exactly music to ears for the developing world, America’s southward policy has been incoherent and reactionary at best.

While China-Africa summits based on FOCAC are becoming more frequent and institutionalized, its poor man’s version, which goes by the name the “U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit,” is struggling to stay afloat after two ad-hoc sessions in 2014 and 2022. Washington’s half-heartedness towards Africa is emblematic of its approach towards the entire Global South. To rival China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the U.S. rolled out its own infrastructure investment projects known as B3W and PGII in quick succession, but only to see the pair dead on arrival. At the end of the day, empowering the Global South is contradictory to Washington’s strategic outlook.

Beijing, on the other hand, is genuinely motivated to build up the strength of the developing world with more patience and earnestness. Over the past decade, China has helped Africa build or renovate 10,000 km of railways, 100,000 km of highways, 1,000 bridges, and nearly 100 ports. Those infrastructure facilities are not exclusive to China’s usage. But so long as the effort is conducive to Africa’s modernization drive, which enriches the continent and pushes it to become another pole in the multipolarizing world, then it qualifies as promoting the “greater good.”

Elephant in the Room

Despite China’s readiness to champion the cause of the South, a potential division within the bloc seems to be brewing. About two weeks before the scheduled opening of FOCAC this year, India scurried to hold the third “Voices of the Global South” summit, inviting over 120 developing countries but China. A narrative began to gain traction that the two major Asian powers are vying for the Global South’s leadership. A Foreign Affairs article published last year even tried to spin it as a formal U.S. strategy to leverage India’s heft to “thwart China’s bid to lead the Global South.”

However, China never seeks to lead. The word “leader” or “leadership” hardly appeared in China’s official expressions concerning the Global South, of which Beijing repeatedly called itself “a natural member.” In fact, China has been almost obsessive about inclusiveness and equal status in its southward diplomacy. Not only has this policy prevented rifts among the nations of the South, but it also helps China nurture close and stable ties with other Global South partners.

Since FOCAC’s genesis, China has insisted on having the forum hosted not just in Beijing, but alternately between China and African countries. In contrast, the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summits were only held in America. And the Japan-initiated Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD), which used to take place only in Japan, had to model FOCAC and started the rotation of the event hosting with African countries from 2016.

Uhuru Kenyatta, the former President of Kenya, once said, “Our partnership with China is not a partnership based on China telling us what we need. It is a partnership of friends working together to meet Kenya’s social-economic agenda.” China’s reluctance to assume the leadership also comes with its diplomatic code of non-interference and no political strings attached. It stands testament to China’s vision of a post-hegemonic world where the old hierarchical order will not be replaced by a new one.

Interestingly, this vision was echoed by India’s foreign minister S. Jaishankar, who wrote in his recently published book Why Bharat Matters, “The core of global rebalancing has been the revival of China, India and some others in the Global South that have made their long-standing characteristics count more through national revival.”

The shared view of the future global regime explains why Beijing is not averse to New Delhi’s endeavor to rally the Global South. “China would not ignore India’s contribution, importance, and influence in the Global South,” said Wang Lei, a professor and the director of the Center for BRICS Cooperation Studies at Beijing Normal University. “The ideal scenario would be a perfect collaboration between China and India to provide help for developing countries.”

India took its fair share of credit as Narendra Modi uttered the invitation for the African Union (AU) to join G20 at the New Delhi summit last year. There was nothing but an outpouring of positive press from China, even though it was China that became the first to publicly sponsor the AU’s G20 membership at a FOCAC ministerial conference in 2022.

Committed to the effort of uniting and bolstering the developing world, China does not seek a leadership role, but it takes the lead. China is good at engaging Global South partners not just due to their aligned vision of the world, but also because China has long been an integral part of the bloc. As the world’s biggest developing country stands on the vanguard of a wave of multipolarity, that wave is now sweeping across the globe.

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Xu Zeyu, founder of Sinical China, is a senior journalist with Xinhua News Agency. Follow him on X (Twitter) @XuZeyu_Philip

Tian Zijun is a Xinhua journalist based in Nanning, south China’s Guangxi.

Disclaimer: The published pieces in Sinical China reflect only the personal opinions of the authors, and shall NOT be taken as Xinhua News Agency’s stance or perception.