China Woos Africa While America Lectures

If you were to poll the 50 African leaders who attended this month’s Ninth Forum on Africa-China Cooperation Summit in Beijing which nation they view more favorably, the United States or China, they’d surely pick the latter.

And who could blame them? President Xi Jinping offered them $51 billion in loans and a million jobs while promoting gasoline-powered pickup trucks, minivans, and SUVs by Great Wall Motors. The U.S., by contrast, is requiring them to adhere to American goals for climate change, gender equality and other aspects of American domestic politics.

China is wise to court Africa, the continent with the fastest growing human population in the world. Yes, Africa has the most poverty, the lowest access to energy, the least developed infrastructure and among the lowest levels of industrialization. Yet it also contains vast natural resources to power its growth, and strategically vital minerals needed by advanced economies.

As the Ninth Forum showed, China is ahead of America in engaging and trading with Africa. China’s developmental agenda focuses on providing investment, infrastructure development and trade in return for rights to African minerals, land, food production and strategic assets such as ports, roads and railroads.

An example of the harm that American directives are causing is the 2022 Komati coal-fired power plant closure in South Africa, funded by a $497 million loan from the World Bank. Renewable energy was supposed to replace both lost power and lost jobs, but it hasn’t been built. The plant’s closure has left workers unemployed and, with electricity scarce, commercial activity has dramatically declined in towns in the Mpumalanga Region, where the Komati plant is located.

Western grants of $8 billion (including over $1 billion from the Biden-Harris administration) to the South Africa Just Energy Transition Partnership Investment Plan, which aims to replace coal-fired power with renewables, have been a failure.

A presidential commission in South Africa that the closure of the Komati coal fired plant was mishandled. CEO Dan Marokane of the Eskom Group, which has a monopoly on the provision of electricity in South Africa, said, “There is now no confusion about this. All of us are now aligned that we should not repeat Komati.” The plant produces no power, and the former Komati workers don’t have jobs.

In 2023 South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa, following a report by the , issued a warning over the country’s increasing amount of power shortages. Eskom produced the nation’s worst rolling blackouts on record, shutting down residential areas, disrupting manufacturing, and harming businesses.

But the West keeps pushing clean energy on them. This week the European Union pledged to give South Africa two grants worth $35 million to produce green hydrogen projects, a costly technology that uses twice as much energy to make as it produces in electricity.

China is succeeding in engaging African countries by listening to what they want, rather than telling them what they should be doing. This enables China to buy critical minerals from countries including Mali, Zimbabwe, and Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Through operations in Africa and elsewhere China controls 38% of global rare earth elements and 60% of rare earth mining, 85% of rare earth processing, and 90% of rare earth permanent magnet manufacturing, as well as 80% of cobalt refining capacity. This enables China to have a comparative advantage in producing solar components and batteries.

African leaders appreciate the executive gasoline powered vehicles from GMW and the billions for fossil fuel power promised by the Chinese. No wonder that China has gained influence and America has lost influence in Africa.

To regain this influence America must focus on the needs of Africa, such as improving affordable energy, business and security. This will allow Africa to develop productive modern economies, a secure environment where crime and terrorism is under control, and the rule of law to protect individual and property rights. Not only will this be best for Africa, but also for the national security of the United States.

About the Author

Diana Furchtgott-Roth is Director of the Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment and the Herbert and Joyce Morgan Fellow in Energy and Environmental Policy at The Heritage Foundation. She is an Oxford-educated economist, a frequent guest on TV and radio shows, and a columnist for Forbes. Diana worked in senior roles in the White House under Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. She has served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology at the U.S. Department of Transportation; Acting Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy at the U.S. Department of Treasury; Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of Labor; Chief of Staff of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers; and Deputy Executive Secretary of the White House Domestic Policy Council.