China in Africa: Partnership, Dependency, or Something More Complicated?

China is Africa’s largest bilateral trading partner, its biggest infrastructure financier, and, depending on who you ask, either its most consequential development ally or its most sophisticated new coloniser. Both framings are too simple. The reality of China’s engagement with Africa in 2025 and 2026 is a relationship of genuine mutual benefit, significant structural asymmetry, and complications that neither side fully advertises.

That complexity matters because the terms in which this relationship is usually discussed — whether in Western capitals warning of ‘debt traps’ or in Beijing’s official framing of ‘South-South solidarity’ — serve political purposes that have little to do with accuracy. Getting the analysis right requires looking at what China has actually done, what Africa’s governments have actually signed up to, and what the evidence says about outcomes for the populations involved.

The Scale of the Relationship in 2025

 The numbers establish why this relationship cannot be dismissed or caricatured. China-Africa trade reached $282 billion in 2023, making China Africa’s largest single trading partner for the fifteenth consecutive year¹. The Forum on China-Africa Cooperation summit held in Beijing in September 2024 saw China pledge $50 billion in financing for African development projects over three years, with commitments spanning infrastructure, green energy, agriculture, and industrialisation²

Chinese investment and loan financing have built or are building roads, railways, ports, power plants, hospitals, and stadiums across the continent. The Standard Gauge Railway in Kenya, the Addis Ababa-Djibouti railway, the Karuma hydropower dam in Uganda, the 

Mambilla power project in Nigeria: these are not abstract financial instruments. They are physical infrastructure that either works or does not, and in most cases it does³.

$282bn	China-Africa trade volume in 2023 — 15th consecutive year as Africa’s largest trading partner
$50bn	Chinese financing pledged at FOCAC 2024 over the next three years
25%	Share of African external debt owed to Chinese creditors as of 2024
10,000+	Chinese-built or financed infrastructure projects active across Africa since 2000

 At the same time, the debt question is real. China holds roughly 25 percent of Africa’s external debt as of 2024, making it the continent’s single largest bilateral creditor⁴. Several African governments — Zambia, Ghana, Ethiopia, Kenya — have faced debt restructuring negotiations in recent years in which Chinese creditors were central actors. The terms of those negotiations, and the outcomes, have not been uniformly favourable to the African side. 

The ‘Debt Trap’ Argument: What the Evidence Actually Shows

The debt trap thesis, popularised largely by American and Indian analysts in the late 2010s, argued that China was deliberately lending to African governments on terms it knew could not be repaid, with the intention of seizing strategic assets when those governments defaulted⁵. The most cited example was the Hambantota port in Sri Lanka, not Africa, where the Sri Lankan government leased the port to a Chinese state company after failing to service its debt.

“The empirical evidence for deliberate Chinese debt-trap diplomacy in Africa is weak. What the evidence does show is poor loan structuring, opacity in terms, and weak African negotiating capacity.” — African Development Bank Research Paper, 2024

The peer-reviewed literature on Chinese lending to Africa has largely failed to find evidence of the deliberate asset-seizure strategy⁵. A 2024 African Development Bank research paper examining 650 Chinese loan agreements across 49 African countries found that the terms were frequently opaque, that collateralisation clauses were more common than in comparable Western loans, but that actual asset seizure had not occurred in any African case. The problem, the paper argued, was not a trap. It was opacity, weak African negotiating capacity, and project selection driven by Chinese commercial and diplomatic interests rather than African development priorities.

Zambia’s debt restructuring, concluded in 2023 after three years of negotiations, illustrated both the real problems and the limits of the debt-trap framing. Chinese creditors were the largest single bloc, holding about 30 percent of Zambia’s external debt ⁶. The restructuring process was slow and the Chinese side was accused of complicating coordination with Western creditors. But the eventual agreement reduced Zambia’s debt burden and did not involve any asset transfer to China. The story was about creditor negotiating behaviour, not colonial acquisition.

 

What China’s Engagement Actually Looks Like on the Ground

 

The most honest assessment of Chinese infrastructure investment in Africa sits somewhere between the Western critique and Beijing’s official narrative. Chinese-built infrastructure exists and functions. It has also frequently generated less local employment and economic spillover than comparable projects by other actors, partly because Chinese firms bring their own labour and supply chains.[3] Technology transfer, which Beijing promotes as a feature of its partnerships, has been limited in practice.

The 2024 FOCAC commitments included, for the first time, significant emphasis on African industrialisation and value-added manufacturing rather than raw commodity export. China pledged to import at least $300 billion worth of African goods over three years and to establish ten ‘flagship’ industrial parks on the continent. Whether this represents a genuine shift in the structure of the relationship, or a diplomatic concession to African governments that have become more assertive in articulating their own terms, remains to be seen.

African governments have themselves become more sophisticated in negotiating with China since the early Belt and Road years. Tanzania cancelled the Bagamoyo port project over terms it found unacceptable. Sierra Leone cancelled a Chinese airport project in 2018. Kenya’s Standard Gauge Railway has been scrutinised extensively by its own parliament over cost overruns and revenue shortfalls ⁷. The narrative of passive African governments accepting whatever Beijing offers is less accurate in 2025 than it was in 2010.

 

The Geopolitical Dimension: China, the West, and Africa’s Room to Manoeuvre

China’s growing presence in Africa has produced an increasingly competitive environment involving the United States, the European Union, France, Russia, Turkey, and Gulf states. The G7’s Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment, the EU’s Global Gateway, and the US’s Lobito Corridor initiative have all been explicitly framed, at least in part, as responses to Chinese engagement ⁸.

“The competition for influence in Africa is real. But African governments are not passive objects of that competition. They are increasingly skilled at playing multiple partners against each other to extract better terms.” — Brookings Africa Growth Initiative, January 2025

This competitive dynamic has, in some respects, benefited African governments. When multiple external actors are seeking partnerships, the terms available to Africa improve. The Lobito Corridor, a railway project linking Angola, DRC, and Zambia that is receiving substantial US and EU financing, would almost certainly not have attracted that level of Western investment without the context of Chinese infrastructure dominance in the region ⁹.

The risk is that the competition for African alignment becomes an end in itself, with external actors prioritising geopolitical positioning over genuine development outcomes, and African governments optimising for short-term deal-making rather than long-term structural transformation. That dynamic is not new in Africa’s relationship with the outside world. It is one of the oldest.

The relationship between China and Africa is not partnership in the full sense, because the structural power is not equal. It is not dependency in the simple sense, because African governments retain more agency than that framing allows. It is a relationship shaped by complementary interests, significant asymmetries, and genuine complications on both sides. It will define African development outcomes for the next generation. Getting the analysis right matters more than getting the narrative clean.

 

  REFERENCES 

[1]  Chinese Ministry of Commerce (2024). China-Africa Trade Statistics 2023 Annual Report [trade volume $282bn; 15th consecutive year as largest bilateral trading partner; commodity breakdown].  http://english.mofcom.gov.cn/

[2]  Forum on China-Africa Cooperation — FOCAC (2024, September). Beijing Declaration and Action Plan 2025-2027 [$50bn financing pledge; $300bn import commitment; 10 industrial parks; green energy and agriculture focus].  https://www.focac.org/eng/

[3]  Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies — China-Africa Research Initiative (2024). Chinese Infrastructure Projects in Africa: Employment, Technology Transfer, and Local Spillover Effects [10,000+ projects; labour import patterns; limited technology transfer evidence].  https://sais-cari.org/

[4]  Debt Justice (2024). Africa’s External Debt and Chinese Creditors [25% share of African external debt held by Chinese creditors; country-level breakdown; Zambia, Ghana, Ethiopia, Kenya restructuring contexts].  https://debtjustice.org.uk/

[5]  African Development Bank (2024). Research Paper: Chinese Loan Terms, Collateralisation, and Debt Outcomes Across 49 African Countries [650 loan agreements reviewed; no asset-seizure cases found; opacity and weak negotiating capacity findings; debt-trap thesis critique].  https://www.afdb.org/en/documents/

[6]  International Monetary Fund (2023). Zambia Debt Restructuring Agreement — Staff Report [Chinese creditor bloc 30% of external debt; restructuring timeline; creditor coordination; no asset transfer outcome].  https://www.imf.org/en/Countries/ZMB

[7]  The East African / Business Daily Africa (2023–2024). Kenya SGR Parliamentary Scrutiny: Cost Overruns and Revenue Shortfall Reports; Tanzania Bagamoyo Port Cancellation; Sierra Leone Airport Project Cancellation 2018 [African government pushback case studies].  https://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/

[8]  European Commission (2024). Global Gateway Africa-Europe Investment Package Update [PGII US framework; EU Global Gateway; explicit positioning relative to Chinese BRI engagement in Africa].  https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/stronger-europe-world/global-gateway_en

[9]  United States Department of State (2024). Lobito Corridor Initiative — Angola, DRC, Zambia Railway Project [US and EU co-financing; geopolitical context; China infrastructure competition framing].  https://www.state.gov/lobito-corridor/

[10]  Brookings Institution — Africa Growth Initiative (2025, January). African Agency in a Multipolar World: Navigating China, the West, and New Competitors [African government negotiating sophistication; competitive dynamic benefits; geopolitical positioning risk].  https://www.brookings.edu/topic/africa/