Chinese President Xi Jinping has pledged US$51 billion in fresh financing for Africa, at a major China-Africa cooperation summit in Beijing. TaiwanPlus talks to Eric Olander of The China-Global South Project about China's new priorities for Africa.
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00:00This forum is meant to set the course of relations between China and Africa for the next three years, what should we expect to come out of it?
00:08Well, there's a lot of focus on modernization. More importantly, what we saw out of the speech today from Xi Jinping and the agenda as a whole is a lot more emphasis on African priorities than what we've seen in the past.
00:22And the whole theme of modernization, which she must have said, I don't know, 30 times in his speech, but that's definitely reflecting African priorities for job creation, for trade, for agricultural development, for infrastructure development.
00:34All right, well, so it sounds good news for African nations. What's China expecting to get out of this relationship going forward?
00:40Well, we got some hints of that in the speech as well, is that threaded throughout the 10 points that Xi Jinping laid out in his speech were references to the global civilization initiative, the global development initiative, the global security initiative.
00:55Also, in the run up to this year's FOCAC, we're seeing a lot more activity with African countries in these institutions that are within China's orbit.
01:05They're not Chinese institutions. So the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank was initiated by the Chinese. It's based in Beijing, but it's not a Chinese institution, nor is the New Development Bank.
01:15But in both cases, we saw Kenya become a new member of the AIIB. Algeria became a member of the New Development Bank. South Africa received $1.2 billion of loans from the New Development Bank.
01:26And so increasingly what we're seeing is this parallel international governance architecture that China is creating with the GCI, GDI, GSI, with these alternative governing institutions all kind of coming together in Africa, playing a very important role in being a very enthusiastic member of these institutions.
01:46All these pledges to focus more on Africa this time, African countries to sort of meet their priorities as opposed to Chinese companies' priorities. What's behind this shift, do you think?
01:59I think in some respects it's a relationship that is less economically important to the Chinese. Remember 20 years ago when China first started going to Africa, they relied heavily on African imported oil, mineral and timber.
02:12Today, now that the Belt and Road is what it is, the Chinese are far less dependent on Africa for those resources.
02:18What's more important to China than the resources that comes from Africa are what Xi alluded to in a speech repeatedly today, was GCI, GSI, GDI, these governance architectures.
02:29This is the coalition that China is building, again, with countries that want to operate outside of the Western system.