The Political Economy of China’s Strategic Partnership with Africa

Abstract

The paper takes a critical look at the African strategic partnership with China, anchored on dependency theory and adopting qualitative approach to data collection and analysis, the study argues that the partnership is an alliance of unequal partners. Thus, relying on the dependency’s theoretical prognosis of who gets what benefits and how, the study argued that, it is China that stands to derive maximum benefits as against Africa’s marginal gains. Furthermore, in spite of China’s expressed age long solidarity towards Africa since the era of Bandung Conference of 1955, China’s emergence as a global power has leveraged it to move from exercise of soft power towards Africa to that of hard power with mind boggling implications: First, their new engagement with the African Union (AU) is a gateway to pursue China’s national economic interests. Second, it will not only be used to increase China’s exploitative influence on Africa and elicit the latter’s undue reliance, but will re-enact sort of unequal exchange the continent experienced with the Western capitalist nations. Third, even though China has presented itself as a non-colonizing and true partner nation, there is no guarantee that the partnership with Africa will be fully harnessed to Africa’s economic, political and security interests and advantages. The paper concludes that for Africa not to remain at the lower rung as unequal partner, the African Union should fashion out pragmatic strategies of engagement to mitigate the loses and turn the partnership to that of interdependence partnership.