China's African Empire

This is the long and turbulent history of China’s attempts to influence African states – and how China succeeded in buying access to the rich natural resources, and the millions of consumers, on Africa’s continent. In the fifteenth century, Zheng He’s Treasure Ships arrived in East Africa, and marvelled at the ostriches, rhinoceroses and giraffes they found there. In the 1950s, Mao and his comrades cultivated new African leaders – Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Julius Nyerere in Tanzania and a young Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe – vying for control with the USA and the Soviet Union. They seduced this new generation of statesmen with cheap supplies of arms and machinery, training in guerilla warfare and promises of economic cooperation. Today, a now mighty economic power under Xi Jinping offers huge infrastructure projects, joint exploitation of mineral wealth and apparently easy credit to states still struggling to develop. In 2000, trade between China and Africa amounted to $10 billion and by 2014, it had grown to $220 billion. In countless smaller manoeuvres and alliances, China has become a major force in Africa – a successor to the old European empires. This is the story of how they did it.