customContents

entityId

entityUuid

articlePageQuery

filter

article

articleBaseAdvertisingInfoArticle

articleListArticle

articleSeoArticle

helpersCheckIsPostiesArticle

hooksArticleAcknowledgementGateOverlayArticle

hooksTrackPageViewArticle

hooksContentInterestArticle

articleLinkingDataContent

articleSchemaContent

liveArticle

advertZone

sentiment

contentLock

topics

types

sections

moreOnThisArticles

urlAlias

commentCount

sponsorType

authorLocations

authors

paywallTypes

corrections

displaySlideShow

multimediaEmbed

printHeadline

seriesContainer

socialHeadline

headline

flag

firstTopic

glossary

flattenTypeIds

publishedDate

additionalInfoBoxes

images

image

relatedLinks

relatedNewsletters

__typename

createdDate

sponsor

factSheets

series

knowledgeQuestion

disableOffPlatformContent

published

updatedDate

summary

subHeadline

body

keywords

copyrighted

customTimezone

liveContents

Jevans Nyabiage

China is on a mission to recreate the ancient Silk Road to East Africa – through air, railroad and sea links under its Belt and Road Initiative.
Beijing is also increasingly promoting the interconnected development of transport links and industrial parks built and operated by Chinese companies in Africa.
Its latest pledge involves a multimodal sea-rail transport network connecting Africa to China’s central and western regions, under the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) action plan issued earlier this month.
The September 4-6 FOCAC summit in Beijing saw Chinese President Xi Jinping hold separate meetings on the sidelines with his counterparts William Ruto of Kenya and Tanzania’s Samia Suluhu Hassan, as well as Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. The talks focused on prioritising ports and rail connectivity projects for the coming network.


China and Kenya should “build an East African connectivity hub and industrial belt”, Xi told Ruto.
To Abiy, Xi said China supported Ethiopia in leveraging its edge as a regional transport hub, promoting the interconnected development of infrastructure and industry, and building a sea-rail combined transport network in East Africa.
China funded the more than 750km (466-mile) Addis Ababa-Djibouti railway, linking the capital of landlocked Ethiopia with the Horn of Africa nation where Beijing built its first overseas military base back in 2017.
Strategically positioned on the Bab el-Mandeb Strait – which connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and is one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes – Djibouti is home to major Chinese-funded projects such as the Doraleh multipurpose port and the Djibouti free-trade zone.
Lauren Johnston, a China-Africa specialist and an associate professor at the University of Sydney’s China Studies Centre, said Xi’s language on the China-Africa land-sea links and coordinated development was straight from the belt and road and the “Hunan model” playbook, named after the central Chinese province.
Landlocked Hunan is among the emerging drivers of China- Africa cooperation. The province has already built a land-sea corridor for better trade and port connections, the Hunan-Guangdong-Africa rail-sea intermodal logistics route. Launched in 2021, the route transports goods by rail from Hunan to ports in the southern coastal province of Guangzhou, where the cargo is then loaded on to ocean freighters bound for destinations including Africa.
Streamlined customs and transport procedures have reduced shipping time between China and Africa by 15 days. In Africa, the logistics route covers nearly a dozen seaports and 20 roads and railways to landlocked inland destinations.
“There’s a push to connect landlocked provinces up to international trade in China [through] more dynamic provinces along the coast like Zhejiang and Jiangsu,” Johnston said.
The plan was to replicate this in Africa, she said, but where the provinces were countries.
A 2022 study co-authored by Johnston said East Africa was important for China’s belt and road ambitions. Kenya is important as an African frontier with a strategic coast and ports, and also because it shares important borders with landlocked countries including Ethiopia, Sudan and Uganda, the study said.
African projects completed under Beijing’s multibillion-dollar belt and road strategy include the Addis Ababa–Djibouti Railway and the Mombasa-Nairobi-Naivasha Standard Gauge Railway (SGR).
Following his meeting with Xi on September 3, Ruto said the proposed SGR extension from the Kenyan town of Naivasha westwards to Uganda, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Congo Brazzaville would connect the Indian and Atlantic oceans.


According to Deborah Brautigam, a professor emerita in international political economy at Johns Hopkins University’s school of advanced international studies, African leaders see the East African rail network as an important long-term programme.
She said Chinese planners incorporated the railway in 2013 into what was then the newly announced Belt and Road Initiative.
“Chinese leaders visiting East Africa in recent years have called for the continuation of the ‘two axes plus two coasts’ plans,” she noted.
Visiting East Africa in January 2022, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi called for the faster development of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean to develop a framework of “two axes plus two coasts … [to] accelerate the building of industrial belts and economic belts to create more jobs.”
He said the two axes, the Mombasa-Nairobi-Naivasha and Addis Ababa-Djibouti railways, should be enlarged and enhanced with the aim of expanding to neighbouring countries at an opportune moment.
In both projects, Beijing has tried hard to better integrate the belt and road with national development plans and African ambitions to industrialise, according to Tim Zajontz, a research fellow in the Centre for International and Comparative Politics at South Africa’s Stellenbosch University.
He said this appeared to be the key ingredient of Beijing’s new concept of a “high-quality” belt and road cooperation.
“Kenya and Ethiopia are prime candidates for Chinese investments in light manufacturing which China pledges to pair with continuous efforts to improve the necessary economic infrastructure,” Zajontz, who is also a lecturer in Global Political Economy at the University of Freiburg, said.
Zajontz said Xi’s bilateral meetings with Ruto and Abiy showed there was a much stronger emphasis on the regional dimension of cooperation projects.
“Beijing has learned from previous mistakes when [belt and road] flagships such as Kenya’s SGR suffered from a lack of regional planning and coordination,” Zajontz said.
“We can also clearly see China’s efforts to establish intermodal transport and logistics networks across East Africa to smoothen trade flows from and to China.”




Kai Xue, a Beijing-based corporate lawyer who advises on foreign direct investment and cross-border financing, said the proposed East African railway-sea transport network was another intercontinental initiative comparable to the Middle Corridor.
The trans-Caspian multimodal transit network, also replicating the ancient Silk Road, connects China to Europe via rail and port operations across Central Asia, the Caspian and Black seas and Turkey.
Addressing more than 50 African leaders at the FOCAC summit in Beijing, Xi pledged 360 billion yuan (US$50.6 billion) in new financing over the next three years to “help turn China’s big market into Africa’s big opportunity”.
However, Mark Bohlund, a senior credit research analyst at REDD Intelligence, said China’s commitment to the “FOCAC big lending figure” was considerably weaker than it was during summits in the mid-2010s.
He said with many African countries close to, or in some cases beyond, the level of debt they can sustain, a considerable share of Chinese lending to Africa was likely to go through regional organisations such as Afreximbank.
“While Beijing will seek to maintain good relations with Ethiopia and Kenya given their regional importance, I expect the majority of the new lending for the East African interconnection hub to go to Tanzania, which currently has very low borrowing from China,” Bohlund said.


Why China’s sea-rail transport link plan for Africa is an echo of the ‘Hunan model’

How China is sharing its development and governance experience with Africa

Why China is succeeding in Africa where the US is failing

China’s investment in Africa is getting a shake-up as the next belt and road phase beckons

China-Africa relations

Cargo containers stacked at Yantian port in China’s Guangdong province. It is one of the southern ports where goods bound for Africa arrive on the Hunan-Guangdong-Africa rail-sea intermodal logistics route to be loaded on to ocean freighters. Photo: AFP

China is shifting its African focus away from the mega infrastructure projects that have dominated the last decade, instead towards agriculture, manufacturing, green energy and critical minerals. Photo: Bloomberg

A Chinese expert shares his knowledge at the China-Aid Agriculture Technology Demonstration Centre in Brazzaville, Republic of Congo. China has promised to send 500 agricultural experts to Africa. Photo: Xinhua

Chinese President Xi Jinping has pledged to encourage two-way investment between Chinese and African companies. Photo: AP

China pledges deeper DRC ties as African leaders gather in Beijing for FOCAC summit

President Xi Jinping with counterpart Félix Tshisekedi from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the source of more than 60 per cent of China’s cobalt, in Beijing on Monday. Photo: Xinhua

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa arrives in Beijing early on Monday. Photo: EPA-EFE 

China-Africa summit a fitting showcase of Global South’s rise

African leaders applaud Chinese President Xi Jinping after his speech at the opening ceremony of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on September 5. Photo: AP

Protesters waving Russian flags and chanting slogans during a rally in Niamey, Niger, in 2023. Protesters demanded the departure of the French military from the country and expressed their support for the junta, after a coup against a democratically elected president. Photo: EPA

Avocados and honey imports a sign of China’s growing agricultural engagement with Africa

The list of China’s food imports from Africa now includes avocados, soybeans, pineapples, chillies, cashew nuts, sesame seeds and spices. Photo: Xinhua

What China’s Belt and Road Initiative has in store for coming decade as priorities evolve

A family rides past a decoration in the shape of the national flags of China and Pakistan ahead of a visit to the capital city of Lahore by Chinese Vice-Premier He Lifeng in July last year to mark the 10th anniversary of a mega economic plan that is the cornerstone of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative. Photo: AFP

In Uganda’s mountainous eastern region, the Namagumba-Budadiri-Nalugugu Road (pictured) will be paved with asphalt by a Chinese construction firm. Photo: Handout

News

China

Diplomacy

Proposed network connecting to Africa and Beijing’s language around it are straight from ‘Hunan model’ playbook, observer says


Proposed network connecting to Africa and Beijing’s language around it are straight from ‘Hunan model’ playbook, observer says.


Belt and Road Initiative

Africa