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China-Africa relations
ChinaDiplomacy

Why China gives Africa’s leaders the red-carpet treatment – and a chance to ask for favours

  • Often snubbed in the West, African officials are feted during trips to Beijing, giving them opportunity to secure mega-project funding and debt deals
  • However, observers say China is increasingly conservative in its promises to the continent’s politicians

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Illustration: Lau Ka-kuen
Jevans Nyabiage
When Eritrean President Isaias Afewerki visited Beijing last month, President Xi Jinping was there to greet him with a guard of honour, a 21-gun salute and a welcome banquet at the Golden Hall of the Great Hall of the People.
It was a sharp contrast to the United States in December when Afewerki was not even invited to the US-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington.

Eritrea is heavily sanctioned by Western nations for alleged human rights abuses but Xi told Afewerki that Beijing “opposes external interference in Eritrea’s internal affairs and the imposition of unilateral sanctions”.

Félix Tshisekedi, president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), received similar treatment when he met Xi in Beijing last month. When he visited Washington in 2019, he met Mike Pompeo, US secretary of state at the time, but it is not clear whether he met then US president Donald Trump.
When African leaders make state visits to China, Beijing pulls out all the stops to make them feel welcome, important, influential and listened to – treatment they rarely receive when visiting the US or many European nations.

The grand receptions in Beijing are not just a show of hospitality but a chance for African leaders to secure support for major infrastructure projects and push for resolution of debt and trade issues, though analysts say the trips now bring more modest benefits than in the past as China pares down its promises to the continent.

Rolling out the red carpet for leaders is part of a tradition that dates back to China’s dynastic era. In this practice, which has been called “Qiying’s diplomacy”, Chinese emperors went out of their way to engage in elegant displays of hospitality – even personally serving their guests.

All of China’s modern presidents – Xi included – have fine-tuned this into a diplomatic art form to foster positive sentiment, cultivate feelings of reciprocity, and win favourable agreements, according to Paul Nantulya, a China-Africa expert at the Africa Centre for Strategic Studies at Washington’s National Defence University.

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