China, Togo Agree To Deepen Relations as Wang Yi Visits West Africa

China’s foreign minister says the country is deepening relations with the West African country of Togo.

Transcript

00:00 China and Togo have agreed to deepen ties.

00:03 China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi is in Togo as part of a four-nation tour of Africa that

00:09 includes stops in Egypt, Tunisia and Ivory Coast.

00:12 Wang says Beijing will help Togo speed up its industrialization.

00:16 China has been building partnerships in Africa for decades, but its relationship with the

00:20 continent is undergoing a transformation.

00:23 Eric Olander, editor-in-chief of the China Global South Project, says the new focus is

00:28 politics, not economics.

00:32 China's relationship with Africa is undergoing a profound change.

00:35 It's a change that's been underway for quite some time, really since 2016, when we saw

00:39 the peak of lending take place in Africa.

00:43 And since then, lending has really gone down quite a bit.

00:47 FDI is down sharply from 11% of total FDI in the continent now to less than 3% of the

00:54 total.

00:55 It's fallen behind some of the other players like the U.S. and some of the European countries.

01:00 Its trade with Africa, one of the points that everybody's very always happy to tout, for

01:05 the most part is flat when you measure it against China's total global trade.

01:11 In many respects, a lot of the commodities that China bought from Africa, oil, mineral

01:16 and timber, it now buys elsewhere on the Belt and Road.

01:20 The China-Africa relationship today is much more in the realm of politics and great power

01:24 politics specifically, rather than economics, which has traditionally been the role that

01:30 Africa's played with China up until, say, the past four or five years.