The strong growth in China-Africa trade, in part, pushed China’s two-way world trade level (exports and imports combined) to a world record $6.3 trillion in 2022, which drives forward world development, recent figures reveal. China accounts for carrying out one-seventh of all world trade, and is the top trading partner for 120 nations.
China’s development thrust in Africa is best understood by comparing it with the failure of the United States in the same continent; each country employs a radically different economic strategy, which accounts for the opposed outcomes. In the year 2008, China and the United States each had the identical amount of two-way trade with Africa, amounting to $100 billion.
China employed a dirigist, Confucian-Hamiltonian approach to economic growth in Africa, in the Belt and Road Initiative launched in 2013, which governed its trade policy. Under this policy, China built, in collaboration with Ethiopia, the 752 km Addis Ababa-Djibouti Ethiopian standard gauge railway, a $5.3 billion project for facilitating regional integration and prosperity. Over the years, China has helped build and upgrade, with African nations, more than 10,000 km of railways, nearly 100,000 km of roads, nearly 1,000 bridges, and nearly 100 ports. To finance this myriad of projects, Chinese government agencies and banks extended $153 billion to African borrowers between 2000 and 2019, according to SAIS-CARI data. This enabled the building of the projects, and for Africa to import the machine tools, steel, rail-laying equipment, locomotives, port-dredging equipment, transmission lines, etc., that go into the projects.
China imported from Africa crude oil, copper, cobalt, iron ore, agricultural produce, and so forth. In order to balance trade, China has enabled dozens of African nations to begin exporting goods, such as textiles, duty free.
