How Washington dealt a blow to the years-old diplomatic push for a US-China alliance in Africa

The US government’s adoption of a strategy that aims to counter China’s rapidly expanding economic and political influence in Africa deals yet another blow to a years-long diplomatic effort to promote China-US collaboration on the continent, analysts say.

Around the same time as US National Security Advisor John Bolton was detailing America’s “new African strategy” in a speech at a Washington think tank two weeks ago, a group of former Chinese and American diplomats and policy experts were gathering in South Africa in a renewed effort to push for cooperation on development projects in Africa.

That meeting, part of a trilateral consultation project led by the non-profit Carter Centre since 2014 and hosted by the South African Institute of International Affairs, was aimed at building confidence and seeking common ground to address some of Africa’s pressing challenges, people familiar with the discussions told the South China Morning Post. 

It was not the first time that diplomats, government advisers and think tanks from both countries had tried to set up official and unofficial channels to test the possibility of collaboration in other countries. But with Africa in the forefront, there has always been a secondary focus behind these efforts: namely, preventing often tumultuous China-US relations from going off the rails amid growing hostility and rising geopolitical tensions.

Nevertheless, such activities have received relatively little public attention.

In recent years, they may have been drowned out by global media coverage of other matters, such as China’s extensive investment programmes in Africa and US President Donald Trump’s criticism of the “debt-trap diplomacy” in Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative.

In fact, for more than a decade, numerous quiet, behind-the-scenes diplomatic efforts have gone virtually unnoticed. But they have fallen even farther into the shadows since Trump, a year ago, declared that a new era of “great power competition” with China was under way.