China’s Gambit for Soft Power Supremacy in Africa

>> Jendayi Frazer: So moving on from that, today's great power competition. China is the main rival and essentially China's expansion. And I think you can see this in one of the readings that I assigned from Howard French and when he talks about the Tanzara railway. And you could get a feel for just how rapidly this grew their expansion under Hu Jintao, who was mainly a mercantilist interest.

Africa was seen as a source of natural resources and provided markets for Chinese exports, I'm sorry. China also exported weapons to rogue regimes in Sudan and Zimbabwe, but it didn't have really a military footprint on the continent. After Xi Jinping's rise to power, there was a dramatic expansion of engagement.

And Africa seen as part of China's aspiration to become a great power. Much more ambitious in its global aspirations, Xi Jinping sees himself as the leader of the global south. He sees China as an alternative model of development and governance, and talks about how many people China has lifted out of poverty, and therefore has a more relevant model to African countries than western countries that have been rich for quite a long time.

His desire is to replace the liberal economic order. And he sees the United States, it's viewed very much as a clear strategic competition to the US. So Africa is a theater for geostrategic competition. Africa is a source of political support, and Africa is a market for Chinese ideology export.

The vehicle through which this expansion has taken place is the China Belt and Road Initiative. It's tremendous heavy investment in Africa's ports, rails, roads and energy sector and this has commercial, security and strategic consequences for US foreign policy. China's rapid expansion was juxtaposed with US global retrenchment and so the two things worked in concert.

Huge expansion over the last 20 years for China and sort of drawing back on the United States, especially marked by the former administration of President Trump, who didn't see Africa as strategic at all. I mean, if he doesn't think NATO is strategic and our European allies are not doing very much, then Africa had no place in his foreign policy.

But it's not just those last four years, there's really been a lack of consistent engagement across administrations. And so, it's up and down, up and down, and even within administrations. The Obama administration, in its first term, did very little on Africa, didn't pay very much attention to Africa, felt that the key issue was a global economic crisis, and that's where he was gonna focus his attention.

And also didn't want to be as associated with Africa, giving questions about his citizenship, where he was born, etcetera. So he sort of backed away from Africa until the second term. The Clinton administration did the same, the first term, not significant engagement, the second term, much more engagement.

But this undermines us reliability and its predictability for African governments and citizens. So that's the Belt and Road, you can see that pretty much all of the African countries are part of China's Belt and Road Initiative. If we go to the United States under the Biden administration, when they first came in in January 2021, they had very early promising engagement, or at least promising rhetoric.

They set out their policy priorities as global health, climate crisis, inclusive economic growth, democracy promotion, peace and security. This really became framed as build back better, which was really about, repairing global relations and reestablishing friendly engagement with Africa. There were a number of initiatives announced, including 1.9 billion COVID assistance, 3 billion every year for climate change, there was the democracy summit.

There was a build back better initiative under the G7 that was supposed to be an alternative to the Belt and Road Initiative. A partnership for Global Infrastructure has now replaced that in 2023. But the idea, again, was to foster future focused relations with African countries. And during the Trump administration, Africa was mentioned one time, no, actually, no times.

In the Africa section of the National Security Strategy, only China and Russia were named in the National Security Strategy. Biden administration just put out a new National Security Strategy towards sub Saharan Africa in August 2022. And it's fairly comprehensive, talking about fostering openness and open societies, delivering democratic and security dividends, advancing pandemic recovery and economic opportunity, and supporting conservation, climate adaptation and energy transition.

Those are the priorities and the objectives and then again, all of those new initiatives that I mentioned. The challenge with the Biden administration's, Africa strategy is it's so comprehensive, but it doesn't tell you where the priorities actually lie. So it's real nice and it feels good, right. And it's very positive language about the friendliness of African countries, the importance of mutual engagement on equal partnership terms, about the understanding that Africa has to be part of solving global challenges.

But as soon as the African leaders go to Russia and to Ukraine and say, let us be part of the solution, the United States looks like, what are you doing here? This has nothing to do with you. And so it's a lot of fuzzy good talk, but not a lot of strategic focus to how, in fact, Africa meets America's strategic interests in the context of global great power rivalry.

If you go to our military, this is AFRICOM's strategic interest and goals, as it states it, you get much more of a sense of how Africa is considered strategically. And this has everything to do with lines of communication, the size of the continent, it's the second largest in the world.

It talks about protecting our facilities and our personnel, ensuring access and influence on the continent, really about basing and staging in overflight requirements. You can't really do Iraq or some of these Middle East contingencies unless you have overflight rights in Africa, and in some cases even basing rights in Africa.

So on the military side, you get much more of a strategic orientation. On the State Department and the National Security Council side, you get much more of a good feel approach to Africa policy in the Biden administration. So what are our interests? Why should we be involved in this global competition?

First of all, it's the number of African countries, it makes up the largest block within the United Nations, it's 28% of the UN members. And this is where the fight over the global rules of governance is taking place, is within the United Nations. And so we need those votes on the various different councils, this is where standards are set, rules are being decided, and so that active engagement is absolutely necessary from our African partners.

And our UN ambassador, we are very fortunate to have a UN ambassador in, Ambassador Linda Thomas Greenfield, who actually was also the assistant secretary for Africa and has spent a lot of time on the continent and therefore knows many of the members. Also, you have the BRICS, which is trying to, that's Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, which are trying to set themselves up as an alternative or Rival Global Coalition to the Western Alliance.

They've established a new development bank in 2015 to do financing, to get around the rules of the World Bank and its conditionality and the IMF. They're talking about establishing a new global currency to the US dollar, basically to get around the fact that the US has used sanctions on many of these countries and they want to get out of that system.

And at the last BRICS summit in South Africa, they're welcoming new members. South Africa, frankly, doesn't want a lot of new members because this association elevates South Africa. But if Nigeria comes in and this country and that country and Pakistan and that, South Africa's influence goes down. And so it's not that interested, and it's trying to set what the rules will be for new entrants, but there are a lot of countries that are interested in getting involved in the BRICS.

You also have the rivalry of summits, FOCAC. China is way ahead of us in terms of the rivalry of summits, in terms of diplomatic, in terms of personal diplomatic engagement. FOCAC was first established in 2000, and it's had forms every two years ever since. Xi Jinping meets with all the African leaders personally.

The United States has just gotten into the game with the US Africa summit, which was first, we first had our first summit in 2014 under President Obama, and then we didn't have another summit until 2022 under President Biden. And President Biden did not meet with every one of the African heads of state, in fact, he met with none of the African heads of state personally.

He had a couple of group meetings with African leaders, but not the same level of personal engagement that Xi Jinping has brought to these forums. You also have a Chinese forum, a Turkish forum, a Russia forum, that just happened. The Russia forum was a big failure recently, just 19 countries, and several of them coup leaders showed up, they weren't invited to the US summit.

So why does it matter? Again, we talked about the votes in the UN, we talked about alternative coalitions, which are political, economic and potentially military coalition. Then you also have to look at demographics, I think this is probably one of the most important factors that is being underestimated today.

Africa is one of the fastest growing continents, it's second only to Asia, but it's gonna overtake Asia in just a few years. The median age of African countries is just 19.7, 60% of Africa's population is younger than 25, and so it's gonna make up the workforce of the future, it's gonna make up the market of the future.

And you can see the distribution here of how young the population is, 1.3 billion total population right now. Africa is expected to be 4.5 billion by 2100, by the end of this century. It really is the workforce of the future. You also have young people who are rapidly urbanizing.

They're gonna be the global consumer market. They're digitally connected, they're gonna be technology innovators and consumers. You have extensive, abundant natural resources. This is what's been fueling China's growth, its manufacturing growth, it fueled the colonizers growth as well. Right now, Russia is taking gold out of the Sahel countries, Mali, now it may be getting uranium out of Niger.

That gold is helping fuel the war against Ukraine. So vast natural resources, including oil and gas. It's interesting that when we talked about the green transition before the Ukraine war, the European countries and the United States involved and the World Bank and others, because they were looking for a green transition, said that they were gonna no longer fund African gas production, all right.

So Africa has significant reserves of gas. But as soon as the war happened in Ukraine, they reversed their mind and said, actually, we need that gas now. So that leads to a certain degree of resentment in African countries. Also, the strategic minerals that are necessary for a green transition are in Africa.

If you look at significant cobalt for our EV batteries and lithium, Congo has 70% of the global reserves of cobalt today. Guess who owns most of those mines, if not, pretty much all of them have investments in them China and China has the rest of the strategic minerals.

And so they're basically locking in these strategic minerals, which are gonna be absolutely essential for having some type of green transition. Africa also has a force, it has the second largest force in the world, so it's really absorbing carbon dioxide. The Congo basin is the second largest tropical rainforest on earth.

And then the size, in terms of this, as I mentioned before, you can just get a perspective about how large the African continent is. And it's key to trade links across the world, the Indian Ocean. And I said before, if you're gonna do overflight to the Middle East or basing stage, later on, I'll show you a slide that shows you how many militaries are actually based in Africa, and you'll see the reason why.

Because of these strategic lines of communication, as I said, this is what AFRICOM is very aware of.