It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
For several years now, a phrase has been recurrent in French public debate, used to discredit discussions on discrimination: “anti-white racism.” It is mainly propagated by the far right, its supporters, and certain media outlets, often inclined to stoke social tensions to suppress any questioning of institutional racism affecting visible minorities, particularly those of immigrant backgrounds.
In reality, “anti-white racism” is neither a systemic phenomenon nor a proven sociological reality, but rather an ideological construct designed to delegitimize the fight against structural racial discrimination by creating a false equivalence. Fundamental definitions of racism and analyses of historical and contemporary power relations expose its inconsistency.
Racism is not merely about prejudice or individual hostility. It is a system of historical, economic, and political oppression founded on racial hierarchies. In France, as in most Western societies, this system was built through colonization, slavery, and white domination. Slavery and the transatlantic slave trade were organized by European powers for the benefit of a white elite. Colonization, in turn, established a supposed white racial superiority, justifying the exploitation of non-European peoples. France’s state, economic, and cultural structures remain deeply marked by this history.
Today, systemic racism in France is evident. Hiring discrimination is widely documented in numerous scientific and institutional studies. According to the International Labour Organization, for candidates with equal qualifications, a “white” applicant is 40% more likely to be invited for an interview than one perceived as “Arab” or “Black.” Racial profiling is also a reality: young men perceived as “non-white” are up to 20 times more likely to be stopped and searched. Furthermore, police violence disproportionately targets minorities.
In this context, invoking so-called “anti-white racism” is a deliberate attempt to deny these structural discriminations. Hostile remarks toward white individuals, however reprehensible, do not constitute an inverted system of racial domination. Judicial statistics clearly show that the primary victims of hate speech are overwhelmingly non-white individuals. This is no coincidence: racist acts predominantly target those in a position of social disadvantage. In France, white people constitute the dominant group and occupy a privileged social position.
The notion of “anti-white racism” largely emerges in discourse from those who refuse to acknowledge the existence of white privilege. In France, a white individual will never face discrimination in employment, housing, the justice system, or public spaces due to their skin color. This notion serves to obscure the country’s colonial past and its enduring legacy, as well as institutionalized racism within society.
The concept of “white privilege” is not stigmatizing. It simply reflects a historical reality: white individuals enjoy advantages that non-white individuals are systematically denied. Similarly, “male privilege” refers to systemic discrimination—the oldest in the world—against women. No one would seriously claim that men face widespread discrimination. In a world structured by patriarchy, such a notion would be a historical, political, and sociological absurdity.
The rhetoric of “anti-white racism” is dangerous because it serves as a distraction, perpetuating structural inequalities. It fuels division, resentment, and hatred, fostering fear—the very climate in which the far right thrives, playing on fantasies of ethnic conflict or the so-called “Great Replacement.” Ultimately, “anti-white racism” is nothing more than a baseless political and media-driven fabrication designed to discredit those who expose real discrimination.
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Salim Lamrani holds a PhD in Iberian and Latin American Studies from Sorbonne University, and is Professor of Latin American History at the Université de La Réunion, specializing in relations between Cuba and the United States. His latest book in English is Cuba, the Media and the Challenge of Impartiality.
The book under review, by Dr. Eve Ewing of the University of Chicago, is a manifesto arguing for educational abolitionism: abolishing the American system of education as it currently exists and replacing it with one based much less on coercion and conformity and centered instead on positive encouragement for students to develop a desire to learn and exercise their creativity. . Ewing makes the case that American education, as currently constructed, reinforces white supremacy and settler colonialist ideology–that it deeply harms the two most historically marginalized groups in the US: African Americans and Native Americans.
Ewing, an African American who earned a PhD in 2016 from Harvard (where she also edited the Harvard Educational Review), has based her scholarship and activism in critiquing what she views as the irredeemably racist foundations of American society. Her first scholarly work, Ghosts in the Schoolyard, was published in 2018 and covered the racism involved in public school closings in her native Chicago. She has also written books of poetry and prose, children’s books and comic books for Marvel–including iterations of Marvel’s Black Panther series–all dealing with themes of racial oppression. Her poetry collection 1919–which addresses the notorious anti-black riot which ravaged Chicago that year–was listed by NPR as being among the best books of 2019. She also serves on the editorial board of In These Times. She is highly critical of the capitalist system.
For Ewing, the American school system has carried prominently racist features up to the present whose roots go well back in time, even to the late 18th century when Thomas Jefferson asserted in Notes on the State of Virginia that persons of African ancestry were vastly and innately inferior in intelligence to white people. As American settler colonial society implanted itself more and more on the American continent–and slavery was abolished–one of the leading questions vexing the American ruling class in the last decades of the nineteenth century related to the place of blacks and Native Americans in the white dominated broader society.
Ewing profiles multiple prominent white Americans who–post Civil War–set about to devise educational tools with which to mold the two communities into docile menial laborers who accepted their subaltern fate and offered no threat of violence against the white supremacist social order. After the Civil War, the prominent anti-slavery activist Lydia Maria Child produced a textbook that was used in the freedmen’s schools and other institutions established in southern states to provide newly liberated slaves with a rudimentary education. Child’s text exhorted blacks to practice docility and christian forbearance in their dealings with white people: they were warned against violence as a response to white abuse.
Reformers of Child’s ilk were in fear that newly freed black Americans would buy a small patch of land, build rudimentary lodgings, grow just enough food on which to subsist and spend the rest of their time dancing and living slothful and anti-social lives. In order to assimilate blacks–and native Americans–into mainstream American society, it was argued that they needed to internalize the notion that they were required to participate in the accumulation of American capitalist wealth, mainly as menial wage laborers. To this end, former Union Army general Samuel Armstrong Chapman founded the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (now Hampton College) in Virginia in 1868 to train blacks in low wage agricultural labor–and to train blacks to be teachers at the Institute of the desired agricultural skills.
More prominently, another former Union Army officer, William Henry Pratt, established a school at Fort Marion in Tallahassee, Florida in 1879 for Native American prisoners of war from the upper Midwest and Great Plains. Pratt is most famous for his phrase, uttered while giving a college commencement address in the 1890’s, of “kill the Indian, save the man,” a description of his belief that Indians could be fully assimilated into mainstream white American culture by forcing them to abandon Indian culture. Pratt’s efforts to “civilize” his prisoners by combining military discipline and teaching them the elements of Christianity and the properly docile behavior expected of them led to him overseeing the founding of the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, the first of many Indian boarding schools around the country. The boarding schools, overseen by the federal government, created horrific harms on generations of Native Americans. The students at the boarding schools were forcibly seized from their parents and subjected to modes of instruction based on the harshest forms of military discipline that Ewing observes were not designed to educate them in any real sense but to force docility upon them. Extreme physical violence was regularly meted out to students for alleged disciplinary infractions. Ewing notes that Estelle Reel, the federal superintendent of Indian boarding schools from 1898 to 1910 was heavily focused on pupil comportment in the curriculum she oversaw, writing out elaborately specific instructions for how students should sit at their desks, the particular manner in which they should place their elbows while sitting and so on. Scores of pupils died from violence and disease at the boarding schools, with many unmarked mass graves being discovered in recent years at both the former sites of American Indian boarding schools and similar institutions in Canada. Students were isolated and without the protection of their parents, which made them vulnerable in all too many cases to sexual abuse by school faculty. The boarding schools intended for the pupils to be locked into a life of menial labor–they farmed out the male students as laborers for various industrial and agricultural enterprises while the females were sent to white households to learn domestic service. The boarding schools barred American Indians from practicing their various religions, speaking their own languages or displaying any other manifestation of indigenous cultural practices. Native religious practice was outlawed in general in the United States until the 1970s.
The racism of American schools made further strides during the Progressive Era as American academics latched onto intelligence testing as a way to sort the supposedly superior population (persons of northern and western European heritage) from the inferior (blacks, indigenous, other people of color as well as immigrants from eastern and southern Europe). Such testing became a way to justify racist policies ranging from racial segregation to forced sterilization of black and Indian women. The US military used intelligence tests devised by American progressive academics to allow it to identify and discard supposedly intellectually inferior prospective recruits during World War I. The intelligence testing mania took hold in American schools after World War I, continuing to afflict students today in the form of the various aptitude tests that supposedly represented a pure and flawless measure of both a student’s aptitude for learning and a teacher’s ability to teach. Ewing notes that both Alfred Binet, the French psychologist who created the IQ test and Carl Brighman, the American academic who created the SAT in the 1920’s, warned against using their respective tests as conclusive measurements of a person’s innate learning ability. Ewing quotes Binet as noting that an individual’s IQ can change significantly over time, depending on environmental influences. However American educators have ignored their warnings.
In the present day United States, Ewing writes that settler colonialism and white supremacy continue to exercise a baleful influence on black and indigenous students–who are, in many cases, not encouraged in educational settings to develop a love of learning and to exercise their creativity but are viewed as potential criminals who need to be tamed. Early in their schooling, children from these communities are all too often set on lower academic tracks than white students even if they show similar or greater levels of aptitude for learning. These students are typically subjected to harsher forms of discipline than white students, with the latter more likely to have their typical childish rowdy behavior overlooked as “just being a kid.”
Ewing recalls an incident, apparently in the late 2000s, when, as a young middle school teacher at a predominantly black school in south Chicago, students in her classes went on a required field trip to a correctional facility where inmates lectured them on the perils of a life of crime. This trip to spend time in the company of roughneck inmates terrorized and deeply traumatized some of her brightest students and she laments that they were deprived of time in her classroom for potentially useful and intellectually stimulating activities and instead subjected to highly counterproductive “scared straight” lectures. She notes with dismay that a fellow black teacher at the same school confided to her his own belief that the kids were highly vulnerable to falling into a criminal lifestyle and needed to be exposed to “scared straight” presentations.
In Ewing’s telling, the substance of education for many black and native children has not changed much since the days of Samuel Armstrong Chapman and Richard Henry Pratt. Both are viewed as potentially violent rebels against the social order who need to be “civilized”– taught to be docile and prepared for a life of low wage labor.
The Way Forward
Ewing writes that American schooling is racist because American society as a whole is suffused with white supremacy and settler colonialist ideology. The United States’ wealth was built up by black enslavement and the theft of indigenous land. During the New Deal era and World War II, massive subsidies–almost entirely given to white people to the exclusion of people of color–were dispensed by the federal government through home loan programs and the GI bill. Such policies have laid a substantial basis for the enormous wealth gap between whites and non-whites that exists in this country to the present day.
Moreover, many white Americans hold racist views, although it has become less socially acceptable in recent decades to express those views. Ewing notes that Charles Murray and Richard Herrenstein published the enormously influential The Bell Curve in 1994, arguing that racial differences in IQ tests were based on innate black inferiority in learning ability. More recently, the prominent pundit Andrew Sullivan, a writer for the prestigious intellectual journal The Atlantic, has played around with the idea of innate differences in intelligence among races, offering the “I’m just asking questions” defense for flirting with biological racism. Meanwhile, in 1986, the General Social Survey based at the University of Chicago reported that 1 in 5 white polling respondents agreed with the idea that gaps in white-black achievement existed because “most Blacks have less in-born ability to learn.” In 2018, the affirmative answer to the same questions among white respondents was 1 in 12. Ewing is doubtful that these figures represent a significant decline in white adherence to biological racism; instead she thinks they indicate that publicly expressing explicit racism (at least while talking to pollsters) became less socially acceptable among whites between 1986 and 2018.
Ewing believes that black and native communities need to directly control their own schools so they can ensure that a proper love of learning will be stimulated within their children. In fundamentally transforming American education, she wants to focus on the following question: “how do we center Black and Indigenous children themselves–center their notions of self-concept, of history and ancestry, of play and joy, of communal dreaming, of wonderment….?” She writes that “we can make schools for us–schools that are loving and nourishing, schools that celebrate our languages and cultural histories and intergenerational bonds, schools that teach stewardship and care of the land and one another.”
Quoting the scholars Mariame Kaba and Andrea J Ritchie, Ewing writes that a foundation for the elimination of white supremacy and settler colonial ideology within US education can only occur with the enactment of a general socialist vision that dismantles carceral systems and enacts a broader transformation of American society: “meeting basic needs that include housing, health care, access to care for disabled people, childcare, elder care, a basic guaranteed income, and accessible, sustainable living-wage jobs that enable people to prevent, escape, intervene in, and transform the conditions that make violence possible.”
Ewing’s book is well written; I believe she mirrors some of the thoughts of past thinkers who pondered the problem of achieving true human liberation under socialism. As Alexander Berkman once suggested, human beings are innately equipped with a desire to learn about the world around them and to create and shape that world on their own initiative and in collaboration with others. This innate capacity is what Karl Marx called “species being.” Under capitalism in general, the species being of the human race is severely warped into destructive and exploitative ends. Ewing’s book offers some food for thought about how education in the United States seriously harms human potential and what we might begin to do about it.
The vast undercount of Israeli-caused deaths in Gaza is regularly reported as 50,000. The actual toll from violent military action and the indirect deaths (stemming from infectious disease, epidemics, untreated chronic illness, untreated serious wounds, and starvation) is well over 400,000 and growing by the day.
No crowded enclave like Gaza – the geographical size of Philadelphia – with 2.3 million people under a long-term siege blocking essentials can withstand over 115 thousand tons of bombs, plus artillery, grenades, and snipers targeting civilians, with uncontrollable fires everywhere. How could 97.5% of its inhabitants survive? Tens of thousands of Palestinian children, women, and men lie under the rubble. Tens of thousands of diabetics and cancer victims have no medicine. Five thousand babies a month are born into the rubble.
As declared by the Israeli war ministries, “no food, water, medicine, electricity and fuel,” the words of genocide or mass murder of utterly defenseless civilians who had nothing to do with October 7, 2023 — hikes the ratio of “indirect deaths” to the higher range of three to fifteen-fold by the Geneva Declaration Secretariat’s review of prior conflicts.
In my lengthy article, published in the Capitol Hill Citizen, (August/September 2024 issue) I noted that the total ban by Netanyahu of foreign and Israeli reporters from entering the killing fields of Gaza allows the undercount by Hamas to be the anchor on the lethal truth. Hamas counts only names of the deceased given by hospitals and mortuaries, which were largely destroyed many months ago. Hamas, like Netanyahu, favors an undercount for obviously different reasons – the former to lessen the ire of its people for not protecting them and the latter to diminish international sanctions and condemnation.
It is not as if there are no higher estimates by credible groups. UN agencies, international aid groups, and specialists in disaster casualties at places like Brown University and the University of Edinburgh, and reports in the prestigious medical journal LANCETall point to a major undercount. They cite minimum reasonable estimates. But the mass media just keeps citing the Hamas undercount, awaiting some magical number that meets an impossible level of precision.
Interestingly, the mass media has no problem reporting estimates of deaths under the Syrian Assad dictatorship, during the Sudanese conflict, or the Russian war on Ukraine. It seems only the Palestinians are not allowed to live by the Israeli/U.S. terrorist regimes and are not told how many of them are being annihilated. Imagine, whole extended families in apartment buildings and tents.
More curious is why the so-called Left, in their denunciations, are still clinging to the Hamas figure. A famous commentator from Haaretz and a civic leader in the U.S. gave me the same answer. The Hamas figures are horrific enough!
Can you imagine Israeli governments undercounting their fatalities by nearly 90%?
More curious is what is keeping the few strong defenders of Palestinian survival in Congress from asking the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress to come up with a minimum accurate figure from the available empirical and clinical evidence?
What kept the majority of Democrats in the Senate under Biden from subpoenaing the evidence accumulated by the State Department on the death/injury count? The State Department has been resisting our Freedom of Information request since May 23, 2024. What about tapping into the work of sixteen Israeli human rights groups, including the military reservist groups like “Breaking the Silence”?
Numbers matter in wars and natural disasters. They matter in the intensity behind the civic, political, and diplomatic efforts worldwide to stop the killing, secure a permanent ceasefire, let in the thousands of trucks bearing humanitarian aid (food, water, medicine, fuel, and other essentials), and enter into serious peace negotiations.
Instead, Trump is backing the expulsion of the Palestinian survivors, supporting the annexation of the West Bank, and leaving devastated Gaza as a real estate opportunity for Israeli and American developers.
This attitude is what Jim Zogby (founder of the Arab-American Institute) exposed when years ago he delivered a lecture on “The Other Anti-Semitism” before an Israeli University audience. The other antisemitism, exhibited by Biden and Trump, is backed by F-16s and other weapons of mass destruction that have killed over 100,000 children along with their mothers, fathers, grandmothers, and grandfathers.
A deep racism backed by a genocidal delivery system day after day is funded by American tax dollars delivered by a homicidal Congress. A Congress that has refused, since 1948, testimony by leading Israeli and Palestinian peace advocates before House and Senate Committees to provide justice for the Palestinian people.
The first port is the largest in East Africa. Originally announced in 2013 during a highly publicized visit by Tanzanian president Jakya Kikwete to China, the massive new Port of Bagamoyo was designed to both outmaneuver Kenyan competition to the north (including the established port of Mombasa and a similar Chinese-invested port expansion in Lamu) and replace the overburdened port in Dar es Salaam (where, on a clear day, you can see container ships forming a long line along the horizon as they wait to dock at one of two small container terminals). To secure financing for the replacement port in Bagamoyo — a small town about an hour north of Dar es Salaam — the government agreed to clear land, compensate its owners, and award a series of tax write-offs to foreign investors and their chosen contractors. In exchange, Chinese financiers would provide some 10 billion USD, Chinese construction companies would build out the basic infrastructure, and a Chinese logistics firm would manage the port on a ninety-nine-year lease. On many of the widely publicized maps showing China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the Bagamoyo Port lies just south of where the sharp tip of the Maritime Silk Road appears to stab into the continent.1
The location is symbolic in several senses: from the Chinese perspective, it invokes China’s own central role in historic Indo-Pacific trade networks. In fact, the maritime portion of the BRI quite literally maps out the famous “treasure voyages” of Ming dynasty explorer Zheng He, who travelled across the Indian Ocean and reached East Africa in the 1410s, where he called at several of the Swahili Coast’s medieval city-states. From the East African perspective, the project evokes the region’s own rich commercial history for much the same reason. In fact, more than three hundred years before Zheng He’s voyages, a merchant named Amîr-i-amîrân (known as Zengjiani in Chinese accounts) sailed from Zanzibar — just across from Bagamoyo — to Guangzhou twice during the Song Dynasty, in 1071 and again in 1083.2 Nor was he an outlier. Traces of Chinese porcelain found in Lamu date to as early as the ninth century, indicating an already-established trade network.3And, if anything, envoys from the Swahili city-states were the more active partners in the trade: “Known travelers from the East African coast during the late Middle Ages appear frequently in Chinese accounts, especially during the Song and Ming dynasties.” In addition to Zengjiani, these include “the envoy Puluo Shen (Abu-al-Hasan) from Yuluhedi (Manda, Kenya) [in] 1073. These were later followed by many unnamed envoys from…Mogadishu (1101 CE); ‘Gudanu’ and ‘Yaji’ in Ethiopia (1283 CE, 1328 CE)…[as well as] the 14th-century Mogadishu scholar Sa’id who visited the Hejaz, India, and China….” Thus, when Zheng He set out, he was tracing a well-established trade route. Moreover, he was even met and guided by envoys “who traveled from the cities of Zhubu, Mogadishu, Barawa in Somalia, and Malindi in Kenya.”4 Similarly, Bagamoyo itself was once among the largest ports in Africa. From roughly the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the city served as one of the main interfaces between the African interior and the thriving Islamic trade networks that spanned the Indian Ocean.
The prototypical map of overland and maritime routes associated with the Belt and Road Initiative used throughout the 2010s. The blue maritime route is pictured intersecting with Kenya, just north of Bagamoyo. Source: Xinhua News Agency
As these complementary images suggest, the Bagamoyo port project symbolizes the “win-win” logic promoted by both sides. According to this theory, abundant Chinese capital seeking avenues for global investment would link the concrete experience of Chinese construction, engineering, and logistics firms with the massive potential of the African market. As argued by former Chief Economist of the World Bank, Justin Yifu Lin, alongside former World Bank Senior Economist Yan Wang:
Just as China and Vietnam have learned from the faster-growing East Asian newly industrialized economies and maintained rapid GDP growth of nearly 10% a year in the past decades, African countries can also achieve the same. In particular, they can seize the opportunities of labour-intensive industries relocating from China and other emerging markets. Through building infrastructure smartly around cluster-based industrial parks and attracting foreign investors, a win-win strategy can achieve both employment generation and capacity development for many years to come.5
Generalized across the continent, projects such as the Bagamoyo megaport are expected to trigger a new industrial boom that will help make Africa into the “next world’s factory.”6
But others have cast suspicion on such projects, viewing them as mere fronts for securing the strategic goals of the Chinese government. In a typical account from the 2010s, New York Times journalist Howard W. French even referred to Africa as “China’s Second Continent,” claiming that Beijing was “Building a New Empire” across the region.7 Similarly, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a rightwing think tank with close ties to the military-industrial complex, lists the Port of Bagamoyo on its map of African “ports with financial, construction, and or operational involvement by Chinese entities” which, it argues, also “provide China with access to achieve varying strategic objectives.”8In hearings before US Congress, CSIS experts have warned that “China’s rapid development and integration into the world economy has also provided Beijing the opportunity to weaponize its vast market to advance its geopolitical interests.”9
At a larger scale, these accounts are often accompanied by warnings of “Chinese imperialism” or even a “New Cold War.” The latter term has gained particularly strong momentum in recent years within rightwing policy circles to justify both more strict trade war policies against China and the rollout of increasingly authoritarian policies to suppress dissent within the United States. Sir Robin Nesbitt, former head of CSIS and Chatham House (a UK think tank within the same military-industrial milieu) and author of a book titled The New Cold War argues that the basis of the conflict is not so much economic competition as an “ideological” conflict over “two systems of governance.”10 Similarly, in a prominent 2023 op-ed chiding the Biden administration for not taking adequate action against the alleged Chinese threat, president of the far-right Heritage foundation Kevin D. Roberts declared: “We’re in a New Cold War.”11 Soon after, Roberts would help to formulate the Project 2025 policies currently being enacted by the Trump administration, designed to gut government regulations, mute Congressional oversight, and implement autocratic rule by corporate interests — all justified as necessary measures to bolster American power against an ascendant China.
Nor are these views limited to the West. In fact, the claim that Chinese loans constitute a “debt trap” used to force poor countries to hand over key resources or pieces of infrastructure was initially popularized not by American think tanks but instead by the former advisor to India’s National Security Council Brahma Chellaney. Pointing to the case of Sri Lanka, Chellaney alleged that, “unable to pay the onerous debt to China it has accumulated, [the Sri Lankan government] formally handed over its strategically located Hambantota port….”12 Amplified by India’s rightwing China hawks, Chellaney’s framework was then taken up by pundits and think tanks worldwide, spawning the pervasive “debt trap” narrative. In all the clamor, however, it went largely unnoticed that almost every aspect of Chellaney’s story had distorted the basic facts of the case: the port project in Sri Lanka did not actually fall into default, “Sri Lanka owed more to Japan, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank than to China” at the time, and “of the $4.45 billion in debt service Sri Lanka would pay in 2017, only 5 percent was because of Hambantota.”13 Nor did China demand that the port facilities be handed over in exchange for a bailout of this debt. In fact, China was not involved in the bailout of Sri Lankan debt at all. The Sri Lankan government instead “arranged a bailout from the International Monetary Fund, and decided to raise much-needed dollars by leasing out the underperforming Hambantota Port to an experienced company,” as earlier recommended by a Canadian consulting firm and encouraged by IMF advisors.14 China Merchants Group — the same firm involved in the Bagamoyo project — was simply one of the few to put in a bid on an unpopular contract.
In a similar register, Indian naval captain Sipabada Rath offers an extended analysis of the Bagamoyo project, in which he warns that “China lays a great deal of importance to the strategic value of ports” and quotes from a recent US government report speculating that China is using its logistics investments as a precursor to establish new military bases across the Indian Ocean, similar to the one that it currently operates in Djibouti — its sole overseas base, sited alongside similar bases operated by France, Italy, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and of course the United States. Given his military background, Rath is fairly explicit about his concerns: “Amidst growing scepticism about Chinese investment among the African nations in particular and the world in general, opportunities exist for India to partner with the African countries in multiple spheres like solar energy, road, rail, airport and port infrastructure developments, etc. Geo-politically and geo-strategically the East African region is extremely important for India.”15 In other words, much like the US case, warnings against Chinese influence are inset within larger geopolitical contests pitting the supposed national interests of the author’s own home country against a “Chinese” threat that is portrayed as an omnipresent and conspiratorial force.
But these concerns then percolate into local politics as well. In places like Zambia and Malaysia, financial ties to China wrought by incumbent administrations made for easy targets by opposition parties in local elections. Similarly, in Uganda, local media agitating against deals signed by the Museveni administration warned that in exchange for financing, the government had signed a contract allowing China to seize the Entebbe International Airport in the case of a default, a claim that was soon repeated in the Wall Street Journal.16When the loan document was examined, however, no such clause was found.17In other cases, established economic dependencies proved equally important. For example, in Mexico, Chinese competition muted industrialization efforts in the 2000s, resulting in suspicion toward incoming Chinese investment in the 2010s and 2020s. After US officials raised concerns that Chinese firms might set up shop in Mexico to avert US trade restrictions, the Mexican government agreed to join a bilateral working group with the United States designed to screen inbound investment “to guard against foreign investments that pose national security risks” to either Mexico or the United States. In 2024, the Mexican government then extended import tariffs on items such as metals, textiles, chemicals, and an array of plastic products.18In Asia, Indonesia has pursued similarly nationalistic policies, passing an export ban on unprocessed minerals in 2014 designed to force foreign mining firms to invest in local processing and manufacturing facilities.19
Popular accounts of “global China” have therefore been bifurcated, portraying Chinese investment as either securing the future of global development or signaling China’s ascendant imperial aspirations. Even left-wing appraisals have tended to fall into one of these two traps, uncritically promoting the win-win narratives of former World Bank economists like Lin and Wang or rehashing the right-wing mythos of a “New Cold War” promoted by figures like Nesbitt and Roberts. At worst, this devolves into an infantile narrative in which a noble, socialistic China serves as the last hope to defeat an evil US empire that alone upholds the entire global capitalist system. At best, the ongoing trade war and China’s BRI are portrayed as matters of “interimperialist” conflict, pitting the distinct interests of American capitalists and statesmen against those of their Chinese counterparts. In both cases, however, imperialism itself is understood to be nothing more than what it appears to be: a geopolitical conflict playing out within the global interstate system.20And, in all of these accounts, projects such as the Port of Bagamoyo have played a central role in the narrative. Whether nominally “socialist” or rabidly anticommunist, the same basic facts are invoked in each case. By 2045, the port is estimated to handle 20 million TEU, some twenty-five times that of the older port in Dar es Salaam. A special economic zone (SEZ) was also designated in the surrounding area, envisioned as one of several scattered along the Swahili Coast, all designed to emulate the coastal SEZs that had helped ignite China’s breakneck industrial boom some thirty years prior. Early on, this first SEZ had already attracted a planned 190 industries. At its peak, it is expected to host some seven hundred companies representing different product lines.21
Despite debates in academic and policy circles over the true intent of Chinese investment, then, everything seems to have aligned on the ground. Whether good or bad, the massive project is a concrete symbol of China’s ascent to a commanding position on the world stage and of Africa’s imminent industrialization. When at fully capacity, the port will be well-positioned to serve as a future trade hub for the continent and help to anchor emerging production networks centered on the Indian Ocean. Throughout, however, the project has faced one minor, but persistent obstacle, which continues to plague it to this day: the Port of Bagamoyo does not exist. Ground was never broken. Almost none of the announced financing materialized. No SEZ opened. No industries flocked to the town. On any given day, you can travel to Bagamoyo and, instead of dredging barges, looming construction cranes, and massive container ships, you will see nothing but meager wooden dhows anchored in the bay. Most of these are used as fishing vessels, while others operate as porters or informal water taxies cutting up and down the coastline, rehearsing a scene that has played out in much the same way on much the same beach for the past thousand years. Go south to Mlandizi or north to Tanga and you will still find no megaport in Tanzania. At best, you might catch a distant glimpse of ships awaiting a berth at the aging docks in Dar es Salaam or Zanzibar.22Rather than rapid industrialization and a sudden escape from centuries of underdevelopment, then, Bagamoyo remains an example of the ongoing dependency and active deindustrialization of much of the African continent.
Nor is this an incidental case featuring a minor project that no one has heard of. The narrative of the “Chinese” port project in Bagamoyo, as recounted above, was widely reported on throughout the 2010s in both regional and global media and is often still held up as evidence of growing Chinese influence on the continent. Throughout, journalists, think-tank staff, and even scholars have actively and eagerly conflated early, speculative reports on a potential investment project with an actually existing port.23They also consistently ignored the equally prominent role played by an Omani firm in the initial agreement. More importantly, the same pattern was then repeated for projects across the continent, each defined by its own degree of untruth. In some cases, the projects were not actually Chinese-financed. In others, Chinese firms were not the main contractors. Sometimes, ground was broken on a project before it stalled, leaving the skeleton of a luxury apartment complex crumbling like an ancient ruin back into the sand. As in the case of Bagamoyo, however, many simply never got off the ground. By the end of the 2010s, the entire African continent was thereby littered with these mirages: the specter of Chinese projects scattered across the savannah like the imperial outposts of an empire that exists only in the mind.
Beneath the Belt and Road
Underneath the mirage, the reality of growing Chinese investment in Africa is not nearly so clear cut. The Bagamoyo project was in fact announced in much the same form described above, albeit as a joint venture between Hong Kong-based China Merchant Holdings and the Sultanate of Oman’s sovereign wealth fund.24Soon after, however, a change in administration in Tanzania and the launch of an anticorruption campaign in China saw many major investment projects scrapped only a few years after they were originally launched. For example, in Tanzania’s south, a series of large investments in new iron mines and affiliated refineries and power plants by major Chinese minerals and chemicals conglomerate Hanlong Group (via subsidiary Sichuan Hongda) were cancelled when company head Liu Han, his brother Liu Wei, and dozens of close associates were charged with several murders and other illicit business practices. The crackdown on Hanlong was itself part of a broader assault on the interests of former senior leader (and Liu’s patron) Zhou Yongkang, who was found guilty of corruption and expelled from the party in 2014, in probably the highest-profile case of the era. On the Tanzanian side, a similar anticorruption drive led by new president John Magufuli targeted luxury real estate developments, tax write-offs given to Canadian mining firm Barrick Gold, and inequitable projects such as the Bagamoyo Port deal, which was lambasted by Magufuli personally, referring to the terms of the agreement as “exploitative and awkward.”25 The project was therefore scaled down, redesigned, abandoned, and temporarily revived (after Magufuli died in office) over the subsequent decade. Now, despite renewed interest on the Tanzanian side, the impulse from the Chinese and Omani firms seems to have evaporated.
Throughout this whole ordeal, however, business was proceeding as usual in Dar es Salaam, where Chinese companies did in fact invest in a series of projects in real estate, infrastructure, trade and manufacturing. The flow of investment was fastest in the Kikwete years and did not entirely evaporate under Magufuli despite the crackdown. However, the vast majority of these were small ventures by private businesspeople operating entirely on their own initiative, rather than the massive flows of developmental financing directed from China’s consortium of major banks and enormous industrial interests that are often held up in the media mirage of “China in Africa.” This reality is immediately clear when these media claims are contrasted with the reality on the ground. In 2020, I conducted a field survey of Chinese manufacturing firms operating in Dar es Salaam and, while I found one building materials warehouse linked to a large state-owned interest in Beijing (BNBM), almost every single factory was run by relatively small, private companies with no government oversight or even any evidence of access to preferential loans. The largest were sheet metal manufacturers such as Dragon Mabati and the most technically advanced was a facility being set up by workers from a private company based in Nanyang, Henan, which would eventually produce electrical transformers. The most representative were chimeric microenterprises specializing in whatever goods seemed likely to make any sort of profit. For example, the Ocean Kiss factory produced sofas, mattresses, and tanks for compressed oxygen. Another firm imported spare motorcycle parts from China and reassembled them into working machines.26
Economist Irene Yuan Sun summarizes her survey of Chinese manufacturers in several African countries in this way: “By and large, these manufacturing entrepreneurs have little to do with the massive tranches of Chinese government-led investment and aid in Africa that the Western press often reports on in tones of fear and incredulity. These private investors care little about geopolitics. They are instead driven by the economics of their individual businesses….”27In fact, among manufacturers, megaprojects involving large state-directed flows of financing played almost no role. Similarly, the small scale of Chinese trade and manufacturing companies operating within Africa and their propensity to rely on African labor — both facts that have been confirmed repeatedly in essentially every large-scale survey of Chinese firms in Africa — also means that the relationship runs both ways, with African vendors also traveling to China and launching their own trading companies with bases in centers like Yiwu and Guangzhou.
In another survey of Chinese industries operating on the continent, Tsinghua University’s Tang Xiaoyang refers to the pattern that emerges as one of “coevolutionary pragmatism.” Like Sun, Tang stresses that, on average, Chinese investment in most African countries does not take the form of large-scale, state-affiliated infrastructure projects but instead flows through “market-driven” sectors such as trade and manufacturing. This also means that these activities exist at some distance from any ostensibly geopolitical goals. In fact, Tang notes that, “in the purely market-driven sectors, the Chinese government often appears inept in influencing and managing projects.”28In contrast to accounts that see Chinese investment in Africa as part of a grand strategy deployed by the Chinese state or as one element in an emerging Beijing Consensus counterposed to the prevailing Washington Consensus, then, on-the-ground surveys of such projects tend to reveal precisely the opposite: most Chinese firms in Africa are operating on a purely pragmatic level and have been drawn to the continent not by any state-directed incentives but instead by conventional economic imperatives. Much of the movement of Chinese firms overseas has therefore been pushed by the recognizable balance sheet pressures stressed by Lin and Wang in their account of industrial relocation: overcapacity, rising costs, and the saturation of limited markets (for example, hydropower) at home. In response, firms have either attempted to move up the value chain through acquisitions in the wealthy countries, which give more direct access to upscale end markets and access to higher-end technical capacities, or they have moved to poorer countries where competition is minimal or nonexistent, essentially detouring around any head-to-head conflict with established powers.
Infrastructure is a case in point. As documented in detail by Zhang Hong, a scholar associated with the China Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins, China’s international construction and engineering companies (ICECs) were among the first of the country’s firms to establish overseas subsidiaries and have since ascended to become the single largest consortium of companies in the construction industry across much of the developing world. If there is a single investment market in which Chinese firms truly play a dominant or at least a leading role, this would be it. By the end of the 2010s, Chinese ICECs had secured a sixty percent market share in Africa, forty percent in Asia, and roughly twenty percent throughout Latin America and the Middle East. In addition, since many Chinese ICECs are nominally state-owned enterprises hired to do the day-to-day construction work for large-scale projects, their physical presence overseas (and particularly in African countries) is frequently upheld as evidence of the “Belt and Road” in practice. Alongside mining companies, these also tend to be the firms most frequently criticized as examples of “Chinese imperialism.”
In reality, even these exemplars of modern state ownership operate with almost complete autonomy from any geopolitical mandate, guided by the same balance sheet imperatives as any other corporation. As Zhang stresses: “SOEs’ overseas activities…generally [do] not serve any hidden geopolitical agenda” even while Chinese ICECs “are pursuing goals broadly in line with the state’s strategy regarding economic globalization.”29Treating them as simply servants of Chinese foreign policy is not only wrong, then, it also risks getting the basic cause-effect relationship backward. Companies such as China Merchants Group (involved in both the proposed Bagamoyo and Hambantota projects) were instrumental in driving marketization within China itself, literally building the first SEZs and functioning as the first de facto private corporations to operate overseas.30If anything, Chinese state policy is an after-effect of trends playing out in the private sphere: “contrary to common assumptions, it is the ICECs that drive China’s international lending in infrastructure projects, rather than the other way around.”31 In other words, the state does not direct ICECs by allotting lines of credit to strategic areas but instead tails aftersuch firms once they have already made inroads in whatever markets they deem most profitable. The same pattern is visible at basically every level China’s international relations, which simply “cannot be aggregated into a single, unified Chinese position under tight central control.”32
As political scientists Lee Jones and Shahar Hameiri argue, even core geopolitical projects such as control over the South China Sea or relations with North Korea are “largely reactive” and tend to be the outcome of multiple, autonomous agents whose actions are only treated as part of a single, unified strategy after the fact. They write that “decades of state transformation, involving the fragmentation, decentralization and internationalization of party-state apparatuses, mean that many Chinese actors, with often differing interests and agendas…now operate internationally with considerable autonomy and limited coordination and oversight.” Thus, the various initiatives, bilateral agreements, and even the odd military interventions that are today portrayed as elements of a coherent and systematic strategy pursued by China’s central government instead encompass “diverse, potentially contradictory activities by a range of actors operating at different scales….”33
Jones and Hameiri cite a series of widely-publicized military forays in the Spratly Islands often held up as evidence of Beijing’s overreach in the South China Sea. In fact, private fishing companies in coastal provinces such as Hainan had merely overfished nearshore waters and expanded into deepwater fisheries in contested territory with the backing of the provincial government. The expansion of fishing vessels in this fashion “has directly precipitated the vast majority of international clashes in the SCS [South China Sea], as Chinese fishermen tussle with trawlers or coastguards from other claimant states.” Often, the Chinese navy is forced to come to the aid of the fishing companies, since it would be a major loss of face for the militaries of other countries to detain Chinese fishermen. As a result, what is often understood as a “conflict over territorial sovereignty is better understood as an over-accumulation crisis in Hainan’s marine industry, which spills over to all surrounding maritime areas, generating clashes with Korea, Japan and Taiwan, not just SCS claimants.”34
Since central state policy is often reactive and slaps post-facto strategic justifications onto whichever of these myriad activities prove successful — or whichever threaten a loss of credibility if disavowed — this sort of firm-level economic calculus is almost always the driving factor behind the various economic relationships that are later collated into pseudo-geopolitical projects such as the BRI. Such initiatives operate less as coherent policy frameworks and more as branding campaigns that give an official stamp on activities already underway and craft certain incentive structures to refine the practices piloted by various commercial enterprises and lower-level government agencies in the relevant areas. As Jones argues in another paper with Zeng Jinghan: “Projects like the BRI are not meticulously planned by top leaders; rather they are loose ‘policy envelopes’, whose parameters and implementations are shaped by internal struggles for power and resources. They are kept deliberately vague to accommodate these diverse interests, creating wide latitude for them to influence, interpret and even ignore top leaders’ wishes.”35However, since these branding efforts often frame the practices that fall under their umbrella as intentional components of a larger central state strategy, they are eagerly adopted by the foreign press to scaremonger against the Chinese.
It should hardly be a surprise that there exists absolutely no correlation between countries having formally signed bilateral agreements to join the so-called “Belt and Road” and the amount of FDI, aid, or other development financing they receive from China. In fact, most of the immense quantities of so-called financing announced in the media prove, upon closer scrutiny, to be loosely agreed-upon amounts of potential credit that may or may not be offered by a Chinese bank at some point in the future. Two politicians shaking hands does not actually determine whether a given project will actually be carried forward. It merely indicates that the project can be used as a form of political capital for both parties. Claiming these sort of deals as investment, as so many inept journalists and think tank staff have done, is similar to pretending that the money you have been preapproved for in your junk mail has already been deposited in your account. As with these credit card ads, mind-bogglingly large sums are announced mostly to grab attention. For this same reason, announced investments are accompanied by all kinds of shiny graphics of world leaders walking over sumptuous carpets in newly built convention centers. Flanked by cameras, such spaces are meant to serve as a literal political stage. Whether investment actually moves forward will be decided, as always, in the boardroom.
The geography of value
The widely circulated map showing “new silk roads” girdling Eurasia and Africa is therefore at best aspirational. In more matter-of-fact terms, it is nothing more than a viral advertising campaign. None of this is to deny that the interests of the ruling class in China are taking on an increasingly global character, or that the activities of Chinese firms in Africa are set within the imperial structure of global production. The point is simply that the port sitting off the coast of Bagamoyo is a mirage disguising altogether different shifts in the prevailing imperial order. First and foremost, the mythos of China in Africa, and the general narrative of a New Cold War both serve to obscure that the global imperial order continues to be commanded by ruling class interests headquartered in the traditional administrative centers of capitalist society, which remain safely ensconced in a state machinery founded on US power. Similarly, that power continues to be embodied in a global mesh of US-aligned military infrastructure that includes not only opportunistic alliances with local governments and militias but also hundreds of overseas military bases directly hosting tens of thousands of US soldiers at any given time, alongside planet-scouring naval fleets capable of deploying genocidal scales of violence nearly anywhere in the world at the push of a button.
Yet the military dimension of this order is merely a reflection of its deeper economic structure, explicitly visible in the rule of the US dollar as the de facto global currency or in the United States’ control over multilateral financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank. It is implicitly present in the dominant position of US firms within global production, where they are joined by a smaller share of companies from Western Europe and Japan. Meanwhile, at an even larger scale, individual firms, large state institutions, and all other actors within this system are ultimately subordinated to the social imperatives of the system as a whole: the drive to accumulate, the need to preserve property, the necessary use of prices and profit to determine efficiency. The ultimate sovereign of capitalist society is the mute compulsion of capital itself.36 Thus, even the most egregious forms of resource extraction conducted by Chinese firms — which are identical in kind to those of any other company of any other national origin and propelled by exactly the same balance sheet calculus — are ultimately feeding into planetary value chains that more often than not link back to lead firms in the wealthy countries. Cobalt mined by hand near Kolwezi in the Democratic Republic of Congo may end up being refined in a plant in Zhejiang province by a mainland Chinese firm and, from there, sent to an original design manufacturer (also likely a mainland firm) to produce batteries for a Taiwanese contract manufacturer assembling MacBooks in Vietnam for sale at the US retail outlets of the lead firm Apple.
The same power dynamic is even more pronounced in the financial sphere. For example, control of Apple is split more or less equally between inside investors (that is, executives within the firm) and leading Wall Street asset management companies such as BlackRock and Vanguard. Rather than a parasitic and unproductive force separated from the so-called real economy on which it feeds, finance is instead thoroughly integrated with the chain of production, serving as a power technology that asserts both the specific rule of individual capitalists and imposes the logic of the “total social capital” on the system as a whole. Financial assets can be understood as“structural representations of capitalist relations, objectified perceptions which obscure the class nature of capitalist societies while, at the same time, signalling and calling forth the proper mode of behavior required for the effective reproduction of capitalist power relations.”37As a result, even though the fundamental reality of the social system as a whole is visible in the “hidden abode of production” — where it is most clearly seen to be a system of domination — the underlying logic of capital is best expressed not in the factory but in finance, where the messy realities of production dissolve into a purified (albeit “reified”) circuit of money spawning more money ad infinitum.
At the more granular level, we can also understand finance to be a complex and necessary form of value logistics. Much as container ports provide the physical infrastructure necessary for planetary production chains to take shape, financial hubs like Wall Street or the City of London provide the monetary infrastructure necessary to coordinate these complex industrial networks while also serving to enforce market discipline throughout the chain: “Finance — both within and outside the non-financial firm — disciplines the extraction of surplus value, fosters competitiveness, and facilitates the international circulation and valorization of capital. The ability of [multinational corporations] to freely move investment around the world in the blink of an eye has been a crucial condition for them to structure and restructure flexible, dynamic, and globalized networks of production.”38Value is shed into local firms throughout the process but, on average, each lead firm in the sequence is able to appropriate disproportionate shares of the total value relative to those prior to it in the chain — as is evident in the sheer difference between the sum of all money paid to subcontractors like Foxconn for the materials and labor that goes into the individual smartphone and the price it is sold for by Apple. This disproportionality then takes on its purest form in the financial sphere, where the entire production process is reduced down to return on investment.
This process propagates competitive pressure all the way down: from the halls of finance to the factory floor, and then further into the many mines and monocultures beneath. It also induces struggles within the chain over how much value each firm can appropriate from the total flow and how it performs this appropriation. As political economist Ashok Kumar argues, firms further up the chain appropriate value largely through their high “degree of monopsony power.”39 Monopsony describes a condition in which a small number of buyers (often just one or two) control the largest shares of any given market, giving those buyers disproportionate power over the terms of trade. However, the sort of monopsony Kumar is describing is not a “perfect” or textbook monopsony over the entire market but instead a selective monopsony within specific subsets of particular product lines. It is therefore a really existing monopsony within a competitive market that serves to enhance, rather than mute, market competition as a whole. Throughout economic history, monopsony and monopoly always exist in a complex symbiosis with competition. They do not supplant or crowd out market efficiencies with onerous rents but instead intensify competitive exploitation by opening and channeling value through new avenues of appropriation, thereby accelerating the cycle of accumulation.
Within the value chain itself, monopsonic forms of appropriation are visible in the vast institutional apparatus enforcing lead firms’ patent ownership, ensuring the protection of their home market from upstart competitors (for example, Huawei), and giving them privileged control over the very machinery of money via their close links to Wall Street and Washington. Often, this appears as unfair collusion, or as the “capture” of state power by finance.40 But, as Simon Clarke argues, the idea that the state is a “neutral administrative apparatus” that must then be captured and bent to the will of capitalists is itself a “fetishised form…just as the rule of capital in production appears in the fetishised form of a technical coordinating apparatus.”41 Ultimately, the state is an emanation of class power. It does not need to be “captured” by any individual group of capitalists because, at root, its function is always to reproduce and maintain class rule. In Clarke’s terms, its “historical necessity” emerges “from the development of the class struggle” across the entire social system and both “the state” in general and each individual state therefore form in response to a concrete need “for a collective instrument of class domination.” Regardless of which banker has been handed the reigns to the Treasury, these “public” institutions are ultimately designed to enforce “private” market discipline throughout the entire global productive complex, shaping the basic geographic contours of imperial power in general rather than serving the narrow interests of any single firm.
Within production, firms find themselves pitted against lateral competitors in other locations, upstart firms seeking entry into higher-end product lines, and lead firms applying downward pressure from above, each of which is linked to its own state institutions. Since each group of firms is inset into equivalent hierarchies in the international division of labor, the ensuing geographies of value thereby take on the so-called geopolitical appearance accepted at face value by conventional accounts. The actual structure of the supply chains that underlie power in the modern world is conflictual, defined by a simultaneously cooperative and competitive codependence across value chains. Those lower down in the hierarchy are continually incentivized to roll out new technologies, instigate further corporate consolidation, and expand their own operations and sourcing agreements to secure cheaper inputs. In so doing, they can grow in size and scope, and thereby appropriate more of the total value flowing through the entire chain. This initially appears as a form of cooperation, propagating productivity gains across subordinate suppliers and thereby cutting costs for both the lead firm and the contract manufacturer. Eventually, however, this then places the supplier in tension with the lead firm. Large contract manufacturer monopolies like Taiwanese firm Foxconn come to control so much of the upstream market in assembly that they can charge more for more comprehensive services at larger scales. This then gives them an increased power within the supply chain that will eventually whittle away at the power of the lead firm and, by enabling new rounds of technical upgrading, may even threaten the latter with an ascendant competitor—much as Samsung evolved from early OEM contracts in the 1970s to secure its own brand name lines across the telecommunications market, which now compete head-on with firms like Apple.
The great diffraction
The process has already induced major shifts in the overall distribution of power over production, colloquially visible in the rise of China as a global manufacturer and in the earlier series of economic booms across East Asia and the Gulf. According to Kumar, large megasupplier firms such as Foxconn are therefore ultimately “beneficiaries of the Global South’s ‘rising power’. Their growth reflects a global transformation of the economy…First, nearly half of global manufacturing is now sourced from the Global South. Second, the Global South’s internal markets accounted for 32 per cent of global consumption in 2010 and are estimated to increase that share to nearly half by 2025. Third, South-South has replaced South-North as the dominant current in global trade.”42 But Kumar is engaging in mild sleight of hand here, since these trends are not at all evenly distributed. For example, in 2020, the same year for which he attributes half of all global manufacturing to the Global South, the East Asia & Pacific region alone contributed nearly 46 percent of world manufacturing output. And, even if we remove all high-income Asian countries from the measure, the remainder still contributed nearly 33 percent of the world total — the bulk of which is accounted for by China alone.43 Though stringent tariffs and domestic deindustrialization have led to a slight dip in its share, China still contributed some 28 percent of global manufacturing value-added as of 2023. By comparison, all the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa combined (including South Africa) contributed a mere 1.4 percent in that same year.
Figure 1: Share of Total Manufacturing Output, 1991–2023, China, EAP (minus China), SSA, and LatAm
In other words, the very unevenness inherent in the general process of industrialization and in the specific form of manufacturing consolidation described by Kumar also calls into question the continued integrity of the classifiers that he uses to explain this process such as Global South or Third World. In the postwar period, these designators described countries that occupied relatively similar positions in world trade vis-à-vis the wealthy nations of the Global North. These countries also shared a number of structural similarities with one another, including large rural populations that continued to live off local subsistence production, low shares of industrial employment, and a lack of adequate physical or administrative infrastructure. For example, in the year 1962, newly independent Burundi bore at least a loose structural resemblance to countries as distant and distinct as Bolivia, Saudi Arabia, or China. Moreover, in the immediate postwar decades, there was little to indicate that low-income countries in Asia were set to outpace those elsewhere — aside from the rehabilitation of Japan, which had already been a major manufacturing power prior to the war and was simply regaining this status. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, industrialization was proceeding apace across the rest of the Third World as well. In the same years that economists praised the miraculous growth boom in South Korea, for example, they also held up the “Ivorian Miracle” in West Africa as a model for the rest of the continent. As early as the mid-1970s, these conditions began to shift when a new center of world manufacturing had undeniably begun to take shape along the Asian edge of the Pacific Rim, anchored by Japan but soon expanding to South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore as well.
After the global debt crisis broke out in 1980, industrialization then stalled or even reversed in much of Africa and Latin America. The result was what Giovanni Arrighi once referred to as a “bifurcation of Third World destinies,” of which the “African collapse was a particularly extreme manifestation….”44By contrast, most countries in East and Southeast Asia passed through the crisis unscathed — in large part because their economies were buoyed by US military aid. It is hardly a coincidence that nearly all the “newly-industrialized countries” of the 1980s were either colonies still under British rule (Hong Kong), recently independent autocracies with close ties to the colonial powers (Singapore), or military dictatorships propped up by the United States (South Korea and Taiwan). Subsequent industrial booms in Thailand and Malaysia followed much the same pattern.45The same was true on the other end of Asia, where waves of rapid growth washed through the Middle Eastern countries best positioned to profit from the massive increase in demand for the oil that came to displace coal as the energetic basis of imperial power in these same decades. While some of these countries, such as Israel, loosely followed the traditional military-industrial developmental pattern of the East Asian developmental states, countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates never developed manufacturing centers of any substantial size, instead skipping straight from primary production to tertiary industries such as finance and real estate.46
Despite repeated warnings of declining US hegemony since at least the 1970s, the US ruling class has not been so much overturned, as there emerged an agglomeration of new subsidiary powers operating within the auspices of the existing imperial order. It is also clear that more and more power over the immediate process of production has nonetheless been delegated to firms further afield, often located in countries that lie outside the direct geopolitical orbit of the United States and its closest allies. The nationalistic narrative of a “New Cold War” and the anti-Chinese policies that have accompanied it therefore derive from a real anxiety over lead firms’ high degree of dependence on planetary value chains that involve Chinese firms in key (and increasingly advanced) stages of the production process.47 And yet the “diversification” of supply chains away from reliance on China simply reproduces the same basic problem in new locales, empowering emergent fractions of the global ruling class in places like Vietnam, India, and Mexico. Even the attempts to reshore production within the United States — only feasible for highly automated product lines and, even then, often reliant on state subsidies to turn a profit at all — both rely on and empower the South Korean, Taiwanese, and Japanese firms leading these investments in US states like Texas, Arizona, and Alabama.
The mirage in Bagamoyo therefore disguises a truth with a half-truth: in ostensibly representing the strategy of a global China, the mythos of China in Africa actually obscures the much more significant rise of Asia as a whole and China’s growth as a major, but still largely regional power within these larger, pan-Asian chains of finance, trade, and production. Moreover, these chains remain entirely inset within an imperial order governed by the traditional “condominium” of the core states — the “weak, but persistent, concentration of sovereignty in international institutions” that emerged in the wake of the Cold War — all aligned under the military-financial umbrella of US power.48If this condominium is beginning to fragment in the lead-up to some new hegemonic crisis on the horizon, this has as much to do with the mercurial moods of the mad king in the United States or the divergent strategies of lead firms in Germany and Japan with regard to the new Asia-centric production complex as with the supposed threat posed by China.
Nonetheless, both the growing regional influence of Chinese corporations and their ongoing integration with wealthy countries are visible in the basic geography of their overseas capital stock. Contrary to the view of Chinese financing being largely a South-South affair (and in contrast to the prevailing trends in trade), the largest share of Chinese firms’ overseas investments continue to go to the wealthy countries, mostly in the form of pricey mergers and acquisitions designed to give Chinese-owned companies access to key patents, higher-end production facilities, and lucrative consumer markets in North American and Europe. Thus, the 2016 acquisition of General Electric Appliances by Qingdao firm Haier alone cost some 5.4 billion USD, which was more than all FDI flows to every country in Africa combined in that same year (~3 billion USD).49 These investments have also targeted wealthier Asian markets, as in Japan, where Haier’s major competitor Midea acquired Toshiba’s entire white goods line in 2014. Meanwhile, Lenovo formed a new Lenovo-controlled joint venture with Japanese tech firm NEC (in 2011) and acquired Fujitsu outright (in 2018). More recently in 2021 consumer electronics firm Hisense Group acquired Japanese company Sanden, a producer of air conditioning systems for automobiles, and a proposed Honda-Nissan merger announced in 2024 was justified almost entirely in terms of rising competition from Chinese EV producers — despite support from the Japanese government, the deal was scrapped in early 2025 since it made little financial sense.
But, despite all talk of delinking, the United States remains by far the location hosting the largest single concentration of capital stock owned by Chinese firms (Figure 2).50At its peak, in 2020, this stock was worth some 80 billion USD and has more or less plateaued in the years since.51For comparison, Chinese companies held slightly more than half that amount (43.4 billion USD) of FDI stock across the entire continent of Africa in the same year. In Tanzania, Chinese capital stock has hovered around 1.5 billion USD since 2020, far short of the 10 billion promised in the Bagamoyo project and only a fraction of the amount that flows into the US every year (averaging 6 billion USD since 2017). The only region that receives comparable amounts of Chinese investment is Asia, of which Southeast Asia is the largest recipient, though border countries like Kazakhstan and Pakistan are also significant. Moreover, while high-income countries across the continent also receive substantial amounts of Chinese investment, Asia is the only region where the total Chinese capital stock invested in lower-income countries exceeds that in high-income countries (Figure 3). Thus, while Chinese firms accrued some 6.7 billion USD of capital stock in South Korea by 2022, the figure was nonetheless outpaced by accrued investment in countries like Pakistan (6.8 billion USD.), Kazakhstan (6.9 billion USD), Laos (9.6 billion USD), Thailand (10.5 billion USD), Vietnam (11.7 billion USD), Malaysia (12 billion USD) and, above all, Indonesia (24.7 billion USD), which even ranked above (nontax-haven) high-income countries in Europe.
Figure 2. Chinese Firms’ Overseas FDI Stock, 2020 (all countries minus tax havens and HK)Figure 3. Chinese Firms’ Overseas FDI Stock, 2020 (minus high-income countries)
Meanwhile, although much is made of China’s increased foreign aid, the total flows of financing remain small relative to investment and are only a fraction of that previously mobilized by the United States. At its peak in 2015, China allotted some 3.14 billion USD in aid globally, with the figure more or less plateauing in the years since, to sit at 3 billion USD in 2023.52 By comparison, in that same year, Chinese firms invested roughly the same amount in Australia alone (3.4 billion USD), and total outbound FDI flows were 145.66 billion USD. However, from 2013 to 2018, approximately 45 percent of this foreign aid went to Africa, where it did have a larger impact relative to investment, solely due to the small quantity of the latter. In 2015, this would have been some 1.43 billion USD in aid to Africa, roughly half as much as the 2.98 billion USD in FDI flows in that same year. Chinese aid is also a fraction of that supplied by other wealthy countries. According to the OECD, Germany awarded some 36.7 billion USD in 2023, Japan 19.6 billion, and the United Kingdom 19.1 billion USD. China’s 3 billion USD in that same year was on par with the amounts offered by much smaller countries such as South Korea and Denmark — and yet few warnings are sounded about the threat of Korean or Danish aid to Africa displacing US funds. In fact, compared to the United States, the numbers are miniscule. In 2015, the United States disbursed a total of 49 billion USD in aid, roughly one third of which was military, two thirds economic.53 Of this, Egypt alone received some 1.45 billion USD, the bulk of it military. In other words, US military aid to a single African nation amounted to more than China’s total aid to the entire continent in the same year, at the very height of its international lending.54
The only dimension in which China can truly be said to be a global power with an impact on par with that of the wealthiest countries is in the sphere of trade. Rather than developmental aid, loans, or even direct investment, China’s most important economic impact in Africa has been its role as both an importer of raw materials and an exporter of manufactures. In both regards, China now ranks alongside the European Union as one of Africa’s largest trade partners. Over the same years, the US share of African trade has declined precipitously. Despite initial appearances, however, it ultimately proves impossible to treat these changing relationships in purely bilateral terms, as if they simply represent the rise of China at the expense of the United States. Again, the raw materials that dominate most African countries’ export profiles are often being fed into supply chains for products with end-markets in the United States, the European Union, and Japan, or they are being used to literally build and power the factories across Asia tasked with making these goods. Nor is this a small share of total trade. The OECD currently estimates that roughly 70 percent of all trade involves global value chains. Thus, the decline of direct trade between the United States and Africa does not represent the delinking of their markets so much as the increasing delegation of power over the immediate process of production to Asia. In other words, rising exports from China to Africa represent both the reinforcement of the existing imperial order and the restructuring of its mezzanine hierarchy through the diffraction of power over production, enabling new factions of capital take on increasingly important “subimperial” roles.
Marxist dependency theorist Ruy Mauro Marini and others associated with the Brazilian theoretical collective Política Operária (POLOP) described the basic pattern as one of “antagonistic cooperation,” in which certain subsidiary powers gain a degree of autonomy from lead firms in the wealthy countries even while they grow further integrated with them.55As formulated by the POLOP theorists, this process of antagonistic cooperation “propels the peripheries’ uneven development” which then “helps develop a certain degree of political and economic autonomy for some nations despite the persistence of dependency.”56Most of the subimperial powers that emerge from the process operate “regionally,” both in the literal sense that countries such as Russia or Brazil serve to enforce market discipline in nearby geographic areas and in the figurative sense in which each exerts a disproportionate influence over certain sectoral regions of global trade: Russia as a petrostate, and Brazil as an agroindustrial power. China can also be described as a regional power in this sense, exerting a disproportionate influence on the flows of trade in Asia and within the manufacturing sector. But, since the Indo-Pacific productive complex lies at the center of world trade, firms from China and other Asian countries take on increasingly global interests in addition to regional ones. This, in turn, has endowed their respective blocs of capital with subimperial powers of a higher order, visible not simply in traditional cases of extractivism — as in the commonly cited case of Chinese mining companies in the Democratic Republic of Congo — but in a widespread and increasing dependence on Asian manufactures.
Figure 4. Imports to Sub-Saharan Africa by region: North America, South America, Europe + Central Asia, East Asia Pacific, Middle East and North Africa
Trade deficits with a number of Asian countries have increased across Sub-Saharan Africa since the year 2000, the most sizable of which are those with China and India. Both have become increasingly important suppliers of consumer goods to the region, with China supplying some 15.1 billion USD in 2021, and India 13.2 billion USD. Meanwhile, China has become the major supplier of capital goods (26.4 billion USD), machinery and electrical equipment (23.2 billion USD), and intermediate goods (15.2 billion USD).57 But a range of other Asian countries have also become important sources of inputs for lower-order manufactures such as agroindustrial goods, refined fuels, and chemicals. For example, Saudi Arabia is a major exporter of petroleum products to the continent, while Malaysia is an important source of palm oil and stearic acid. Meanwhile, the United Arab Emirates has not only grown into one of the single largest export markets for African goods (including the illicit laundering of conflict minerals) but also remains a major supplier of oil and other petrochemicals, all while serving as an important transshipment hub for a variety of inbound products ranging from cars to cigars. The other BRICS nations have similarly seen an increase in their share of African trade, with Brazil specializing in agricultural goods, Russia in petroleum products, and South Africa in electricity, machinery, and metal products. Meanwhile, Japan’s share of exports to Sub-Saharan Africa have declined precipitously since the 1990s, as have those of the United Kingdom, while the French and German shares have either remained stagnant or declined somewhat more slowly. The US share initially grew in the 2000s only to plummet after the Great Recession in 2008.
These trade patterns are even more important when compared to overall global trends in trade growth in the same years. Following the 2008 crisis, “world trade experienced a sudden, severe, and synchronized collapse” that was both “the steepest drop in world history” and “the deepest fall since the Great Depression.”58Afterwards, world trade stopped growing entirely, leading to widespread claims about “deglobalization.” But the trend is better described as the slow fragmentation of a specific global trade regime that took US-China trade as its nucleus. When disaggregated, we can see that the actual decline in global trade has been most pronounced for these two countries. Meanwhile, by the early 2020s, trade growth had even begun a stumbling recovery driven by trends in “nearshore” manufacturing hubs such as Mexico, Poland, and Vietnam — in each of these cases, trade had grown to between 80 percent and 180 percent of GDP in the years after the pandemic. The picture that emerges is therefore not one of deglobalization but, again, of a growing regionalization of the global economy in which subimperial powers have taken on increasingly important functions anchoring their respective regions of influence.
This process is both conflictual — as evidenced by the clash between Russia’s regional interests and those of the European Union — and deeply uneven. While trade and investment with established powers in East Asia provide consistency to the emerging regional production hubs in places like Indonesia, Vietnam, and India, and the vast amounts of FDI siphoned into Brazil helps to anchor agroindustrial networks across South America, there are few preexisting blocs of capital able to serve a similar function in Africa. Given the slow-motion collapse of South Africa under the strain of its own sociopolitical and ecological crises and the rapid destruction of Libya under US airstrikes, it is not an exaggeration to say that there are now no prevailing subimperial powers around which trade and other economic relationships have been able to orient on either end of the continent. Elites in countries such as Egypt and Rwanda who have tried to fill this gap have seen only middling success. Meanwhile, as the great powers have retreated further into their distant fortresses of gold and silicon, they have also delegated more and more of the dirty work within the production chain to lesser firms and lower-order militias. As a result, the field has been opened for a new subimperial scramble, triggered by conflicts playing out in the lower layers of the global economy.
Figure 5. Trade Growth, Trade as Share of GDP, Indexed (2007 = 100), 1990–2022, United States, China, World Source: World BankFigure 6. Trade Growth, Trade Growth Trade as Share of GDP, Indexed (2007 = 100), 1990-2022, Mexico, Poland, Vietnam, World
The subimperial scramble
The second port in our story has an even older history. Referred to as Sarapion in Ptolemy’s Geographia, it served as a major harbor throughout Antiquity, operating alongside coastal trade cities such as Opone and Damo in the spice route stretching from India to Rome. By the Middle Ages, Sarapion had gained a new name and become a prominent trade hub within the Islamic commercial networks of the era, operating alongside other regional ports such as Hobyo and Merca and hosting Zheng He on his westward voyages. Today known as Mogadishu, the city’s port is relatively small but strategically important, given its proximity to offshore oil deposits and the fact that it is among the closest ports to Asia by maritime distance. And, although barely operational in the first two decades following the fall of the Barre government in the Somali Civil War, it does at least exist — in contrast to the megaport at Bagamoyo.
By the early 2010s, the Federal Government of Somalia sought foreign investors willing to rebuild, modernize, and expand the facilities in an attempt to slowly resuscitate the country’s international trade. Initially, the project was presented in much the same terms as the one in Bagamoyo, albeit at a smaller scale. In fact, after a joint delegation involving the director of the Chinese-operated Port of Djibouti and representatives from Chinese logistics firms met with Somali authorities to discuss the project in 2013, it was often presented as yet another Chinese port deal in Africa indicating the country’s growing geopolitical incursions into the region.59These talks never went forward. Instead, beginning later that same year, the Somali government signed the first in a series of no-bid deals with private Turkish firm Albayrak Group. Over the subsequent decade, these deals would give the company increasing control over operations and management in exchange for investment.
Albayrak Group poured millions of dollars into the port, reconstructing damaged facilities, installing new machinery, and expanding container capacity. And, although the project did successfully revive Somalia’s ailing trade sector, the involvement of Turkish capital also created a clear regional bias. Soon after the reconstruction, Somalia’s imports from Turkey increased sevenfold, from 37.5 million USD in 2011 to 256 million USD in 2019, while exports grew much more slowly, creating a substantial trade deficit.60In the same years, another Turkish firm, Favori LLC (a subsidiary of Kozuva Group), won a similar no-bid contract to operate Mogadishu’s airport. In both cases, the companies have regularly been accused of illicit business practices, including bribery and vastly underreporting their revenue in order to decrease the sum (about half of total revenue) contractually owed to the government. In the case of the airport, this has allegedly “reduced the government’s share of revenue from 45% to just 6%.”61 Both companies have also faced accusations of labor and human rights abuses and have been shown to have inflated operational costs, charging a number of illegal fees, and operating illegal side businesses on the premises. They also appear to be smuggling revenue out of the country entirely. In the case of the airport project, “Favori LLC has allegedly repatriated its profits to Turkey in cash without making a transfer through the Somalia Central Bank, as required by Somalia’s finance laws….”62 Nonetheless, economic ties with Turkey have only deepened. In 2020, Albayrak saw its initial twenty-year contract extended by another fourteen years.
These logistics deals in Somalia are only the tip of the iceberg. Beginning in 2005, the Erdoğan administration began to ramp up its engagement with countries across Africa, targeting Muslim-majority countries locked out of access to global capital markets and traditional sources of aid. In a reversal of the Chinese pattern, in which major industrial conglomerates expand into African markets of their own accord and, in so doing, incentivize the funneling of state-backed loans and developmental aid to particular countries, Turkish firms entered African markets at the behest of the Turkish state: Turkey’s decision to involve itself in Somalia was made at the highest levels of government and is part of a wider strategy of enhancing Turkey’s global image and soft power. Once made, this decision was coordinated closely with Turkish businesses, NGOs, and governmental ministries.63As a result, “Turkish presence is ubiquitous. According to one Somali resident, ‘Turkey has become the McDonald’s of Mogadishu. Their flags are everywhere, just like the yellow arches of McDonald’s are everywhere in America’.”64The same is quickly becoming true elsewhere, as similar deals are inked across the continent.
Though initially posed in humanitarian terms and then expanded into broader economic collaboration, Turkish involvement in Africa also quickly took on geopolitical overtones, including a military dimension. After the Chinese People’s Liberation Army constructed its first overseas support base in Djibouti, warhawk politicians and jingoist journalists began warning of China acquiring a series of naval bases across Africa. This never came to pass. In fact, the Djibouti base has mostly served as a launching pad for Chinese forces to participate in US-led antipiracy efforts in the Red Sea. However, in those same years, Turkey was doing precisely what China was accused of doing. Somalia is again a case in point. Beginning in 2009, Erdoğan’s administration signed a series of military pacts with the Somali government. These started with small commitments such as offering military training and economic support. They soon expanded to include the 50 million USD construction of a Turkish military base in Somali territory — a project which Turkey officially refers to as an “embassy,” despite its avowed military character. Turkey was even gifted the land for the base, valued at some 1.5 billion USD, by the Somali government, and currently pays no lease on the property. On site, officials from the Turkish Armed Forces conduct trainings for thousands of Somali soldiers, during which “the Somali troops are treated to a heavy dose of Turkish indoctrination that includes singing the Turkish national anthem with a background video showing Turkish army propaganda commemorating the Ottoman Empire.” Similarly, Turkey openly uses these military links to bolster Turkish business interests, supplying the Somali army “with Turkish-made weapons such as the MPT-76 and other HK G3 variants made by MKEK” alongside “Turkish-provided communications equipment.”65
In 2024, Somalia then approved a ten-year defense and economic cooperation agreement with Turkey that effectively handed over naval authority to the Turkish military, ostensibly in order to train and supply a new Somali navy. As a result, Turkish warships will regularly patrol Somali waters and, in exchange, “Turkey will receive 30% of revenue generated by Somalia’s exclusive economic zone, the Blue Water Economic Zone, to fund its own maritime defense.” In another deal a month later, the two countries signed an oil and gas cooperation agreement that will allow Turkish firms to play a large role in the country’s offshore energy sector, currently dominated by US companies.66 In October of that same year, Turkish firm Metag Holding signed a similar agreement to develop a port and trade zone in Hobyo, near a large, recently-discovered offshore oil deposit.67 The wave of Turkish aid and investment in the 2010s has also swayed Somalia’s foreign policy in favor of the strategic objectives pushed by the Turkey-Qatar regional alliance, contra the interests of the United Arab Emirates and the Saudis. As Turkish military aid to Somalia has increased, Emirati deals have been scrapped. Similarly, the Turkish alliance with Somalia’s Federal Government has increased the stakes of the ongoing conflict over separatist Somaliland, which recently signed an agreement to give Ethiopia access to the Red Sea in exchange for official recognition. Nor is Somalia a unique case. Between 2005 and 2017, Turkish investment across Africa increased more than tenfold, from 2 billion to 22 billion USD. As of 2024, Albayrak group has signed similar port deals in Guinea, the Republic of the Congo, and Gambia. Yildirim Holding, another Turkish firm, already operates Takoradi Port in Ghana.
In other words, Turkey controls far more ports and has a far larger and more direct military presence across the continent than China, and yet there is little warning of Turkish imperialism or an imminent New Cold War between the United States and a resurgent Ottoman Empire. Turkish inroads across the continent are not an isolated example, either. In fact, almost every significant “subimperial” power in Eurasia and North Africa aside from China has deployed military force in the region to secure its interests. In the Sahel, private Russian mercenary firm Wagner Group has been hired by local governments to fight Islamic radicals, Tuareg rebels, or simply opponent militias, often in exchange for in-kind payments extracted from the region’s bustling and almost entirely unregulated gold rush. In response, Ukraine has sent its own special forces to combat Wagner-backed militias in Sudan and “in Mali, Ukrainian agents are said to be training Tuareg rebels to use the Mavic 3 Pro, dubbed the ‘AK-47 of the 21st century’ – a lightweight drone used for close reconnaissance and equipped with a drop grenade.”68Similarly, in the Western Sahel, local governments have justified their reliance on Russia as a necessary countermeasure against overt neocolonial operations by France, which deployed more than ten thousand legionnaires across the region in the early 2010s.69Though approved by the UN Security Council and ostensibly operating in the name of antiterrorism, the French government also openly stated that it considered the region’s uranium to be a strategic asset, sending special forces detachments to defend mines owned by French firm Areva in Niger to ensure that the supply chain for the country’s nuclear power industry faced no disruptions.70
This geopolitical web has also influenced ongoing conflicts in countries as distant from one another as Mozambique, Ethiopia, and the Central African Republic, where various militia forces have received funding, training, or other forms of support from myriad lower-order powers. Sudan is perhaps the most obvious example: many members of the Rapid Support Forces were trained in Yemen at the behest of the Saudis and Emiratis, and, upon their return, recruited to fight a civil war in which one side is backed by Egypt and the other by the United Arab Emirates, with Russia involved to differing degrees on both sides. Meanwhile, the war itself is being fought for control over new flows of value pouring from the region’s boom in “artisanal” gold production — a gold rush that is occurring in the midst of the war and often drawing on those recently displaced by the conflict as a readymade workforce. The bulk of this gold is then siphoned out of Africa and into banks in the UAE, where it is laundered before being pumped into the global market. An estimated 70 to 80 percent of all gold produced by artisanal mining across the entire African continent currently remains undeclared and is simply smuggled overseas, amounting to a total of between 24 and 35 billion USD per year. For context, that amount is more than the GDP of any single Sahelian country other than Sudan and Nigeria, and roughly eight to ten times the average annual FDI from China to Africa on any given year. Of this, some 80 to 85 percent is estimated to pass through the United Arab Emirates, and a large portion of this gold is then reexported to Switzerland and Hong Kong, where it helps to underpin the global financial system, as well as to Turkey, India, and other Gulf States.71 It is hard to imagine a more thinly veiled form of neocolonial plunder.
Similarly, Emirati, Turkish, South Korean, Japanese, and Indian firms — alongside firms associated with local elites in other African countries such as Egypt — have been involved in exactly the same sort of investment deals and megaprojects for which Chinese companies have garnered so much criticism. In fact, many of these projects are even referred to as “Chinese” projects because they subcontract much of their on-the-ground work to Chinese construction firms, despite the main contractors originating elsewhere. Some of these cases are relatively benign, such as the New Selander Bridge in Dar es Salaam, contracted to South Korean firm GS Engineering and Construction and funded in part by the Korea Economic Development Cooperation Fund, built by subcontractor China Railway Seventh Group.72 Others are controversial simply for their size, as in the case of Julius Nyerere Hydropower Station, a large dam project criticized for its impact on the surrounding environment but also crucial to basic development goals such as mass electrification. Though again often referred to as a Chinese project because of the presence of two Chinese firms as subcontractors, the primary contract for the dam was actually awarded to Egyptian firms Arab Contractors and El Sewedy Electric in a no-bid deal arranged through diplomatic negotiations between Tanzanian president Magufuli and Egyptian president Sisi and the project was financed by a loan from the African Export-Import Bank.
Delegated hegemony
The traditional condominium of core states continues to play a role, both indirectly as a source of funding for NGOs or as the end markets for key supply chains, and directly via its traditional avenues of financial influence, such as the IMF and World Bank. Today, however, these are also accompanied by somewhat covert financial and military operations across the continent.73For example, France maintained a military presence in at least nine different African countries into the 2010s, with permanent bases in seven of them. Those numbers are only now being drawn down after widespread opposition.74Meanwhile, much of West and Central Africa still use the colonial-era currency, called the CFA Franc, which is pegged to the Euro, with French officials serving on the currency’s governing body. Monetary policy for the region is therefore effectively set via the European Central Bank and, until very recently, CFA Franc membership came with a requirement that all member states deposit half their foreign exchange reserves with the French Treasury. In total, this resulted in most countries in the region sending more money to France each year than they received from France in the form of aid. In response to widespread criticism, this currency system is now under reform. The foreign exchange requirements have been lifted, and French officials no longer govern the currency. Ultimately, though the delinking of the currencies remains incomplete.75
Similarly, after the founding of the Africa Command (AFRICOM) in 2007, US military operations across the continent have also been increasing. Troops are deployed from at least eighteen officially recognized outposts of various sizes and scales, though a Pentagon map from 2019 listed as many as twenty-nine active bases.76American interventions in Africa remain nimble and largely indirect, visible less in direct deployments than in the form of joint operations with regional partners, targeted assistance for the militaries of local elites aligned with US interests, or expensive drone bases such as Air Base 201 in Agadez, Niger — all justified in the open-ended terms of “antiterrorism.”77Thus, while funding and high-tech support for these efforts may come from the United States, and arms might be bought from Europe, South Korea, or Israel, it is Africans who do most of the day-to-day fighting and dying.78For example, Kenyan troops receive US support for participating in antiterrorism and antipiracy campaigns throughout the region, for which Kenya has been designated a “major non-NATO ally” by the Biden administration.79Former colonial powers also play an important role, as in the case of the United Kingdom, which has kept “roughly 200 military personnel permanently based in Kenya since the country gained independence,” including its British Army Training Unit Kenya (BATUK), officers of which “have been accused of murder, the sexual abuse of local women, and the use of dangerous chemicals close to their base in Nanyuki, in northern Kenya,” where BATUK troops provide “anti-terrorism training to around 1,000 Kenyan soldiers fighting al-Shabab in neighboring Somalia.”80
Similarly, despite loud warnings about loans from China, the power of global financial institutions such as the IMF and World Bank has not diminished whatsoever. If anything, the growth boom linked to the commodities bubble has instead strengthened the role played by these traditional sources of capital as countries across the continent scrambled to secure low-interest loans that could be repaid with rising resource costs. Debt has therefore increased across Africa. But new entrants such as China Exim Bank have only played a minor role in increased debt burdens. In fact, Chinese lenders have often proven more willing than others to renegotiate the terms of repayment and step in as a source of emergency funding, especially in the wake of the pandemic.81And, while interest rates for Chinese loans may be high, default has not resulted in the imposition of structural adjustment programs. For example, Zambia, which owes an unusually large amount of its debt to China, defaulted shortly after the pandemic. In response, a grace period was imposed and a new twenty-year repayment schedule was formulated. By contrast, in Kenya, violent protests were triggered when the government passed an IMF-designed austerity package necessary to make payments on the massive debt owed to these traditional, US-backed multilateral lenders after a decade of profligate borrowing by the local political dynasty. Similarly, in Sudan, the United States locked the transitional government out of international capital markets until it agreed to recognize Israel and repay the debts accrued by the very regime that had just been overthrown in a popular revolution, thereby helping to trigger the ensuing civil war and ongoing refugee crisis.
Nonetheless, major shifts in the structure of hegemonic power remain visible. This is perhaps most obvious in the ongoing attacks by the Houthis in the Red Sea in response to the genocide in Gaza, which have forced a sizable portion of global container traffic to reroute around the Horn of Africa. In response, the United States and United Kingdom formed a naval coalition to patrol the region beginning in December of 2023, which began to intercept Houthi drones and launch regular airstrikes against targets in Yemen. However, while Houthi attacks declined slightly, they did not stop. By the beginning of 2024, some ninety percent of ships that would usually pass through the Suez Canal continued to divert around Africa, impacting nearly a quarter of global trade, more than doubling shipping costs from Asia to the United States, and nearly tripling the costs of shipping to Europe.82Later that same year, US naval officials openly acknowledged that this sort of full-on military approach was a failure. The basic problem was one of asymmetry. At the economic level, since Yemen is among the world’s poorest countries and is only barely integrated into global trade networks, the Houthis themselves do not suffer at all from the disruption of global supply chains. At the military level, the asymmetry was even more obvious, given that the US-led coalition was firing multimillion-dollar missiles to destroy drones and radar stations that cost less than a hundred dollars to replace. By April, for example, the United States had spent nearly a billion dollars on munitions to intercept Houthi attacks and take down missiles fired from Iran.83
These sorts of asymmetries are precisely why US hegemony relies on the delegation of imperial power to lower-order elite institutions — local militaries, local supplier firms, local government agencies — capable of enforcing the basic rules of the market “in-house” and operating with a degree of autonomy. This is a cheaper option that offers both the veneer of “multilateralism” and plausible deniability for lead firms like, for example, Apple, which can disavow the brutal conditions of cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo as a problem caused, not by its own profit imperatives, but instead by barbaric Chinese mining companies. However, in the same way that arms-length contracting by lead firm monopsonies ultimately leads to the development of larger contract manufacturers with more market power, the delegation of authority to subaltern elites also results in their progressive empowerment, allowing subimperial interests to exert an outsize influence within particular supply chains and even negotiate independently with specific ruling class fractions at the top of the imperial order.
In other words, the ascent of Asia and the gradual decline of the wealthiest countries’ direct investments in Africa do not represent the decay of US hegemony, but instead its strengthening through the agglomeration of new, subimperial power centers operating within an increasingly variegated global market that is nonetheless integrated under the power of lead firms and the state institutions that serve them. Yet the same process of agglomeration also generates and aggravates intraelite conflict within the very hegemonic hierarchy that it serves to bolster. The rise of new geographies of capital accumulation across Asia rooted in the Pacific Rim manufacturing complex — itself drawing on new “logistical” infrastructures of extraction being implanted throughout Africa — therefore signals the slow simmering-over of a fraternal conflict within this order itself. Rather than the mere “rise of China” as an outside challenger to the United States, we find instead that hegemony is eroded in its very deployment, generating a complex confluence of chaotic competing interests as power is delegated to the peripheries.
Faced with similar conditions after the collapse of the USSR and the defeat of the Japanese in the trade war, dependency theorist Samir Amin once suggested that what we may be seeing is not so much a clear-cut hegemonic transition as the decay of hegemony in the absence of either a successor or a revolutionary socialist alternative, resulting instead in an “empire of chaos” wherein the basic mechanics of the imperial order will be lubricated with continual violence, global trade will slowly fragment into warring regional blocs, and first proxy and then increasingly direct military conflict between these blocs will again become common.84 Rather than the simple story of a Chinese megaport in Bagamoyo, we instead find a beach littered with dhows, container ships lined up at the very edge of sight like a mirage on the horizon. Some of those ships likely unloaded a portion of their cargo into Albayrak coffers at the Port of Mogadishu before departing south through waters patrolled by Turkish frigates. Perhaps some will carry gold smuggled out of the Sudanese killing fields to banks in Dubai. When the tide is low, people scavenge in the muck unveiled by the retreating waves, plucking shellfish from the mud and perhaps, on a lucky day, stumbling across some commodity spilled from a container ship bombed by the Houthis in the Red Sea and washed south by currents coursing blind and deep beneath the bellies of the great ships in the distance.
Phil A. Neel is a communist geographer based in the Pacific Northwest. He is the author of Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict (2018) and Hellworld: The Human Species and the Planetary Factory (forthcoming, 2025).
A term popularized in the 2010s and used in a book of the same name by Irene Sun Yuan. Irene Sun Yuan, The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment Is Reshaping Africa (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2017).
This is the title and subtitle of French’s 2014 book. Howard W. French, China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building an Empire in Africa ( New York: Knopf).
James M. Linsay and Robin Niblett, “A U.S.-China Cold War, with Robin Niblett,” July 23 2024, in The President’s Inbox, produced by Council on Foreign Relations, Podcast, MP3 Audio, 36:18, https://www.cfr.org/podcasts/us-china-cold-war-robin-niblett.
Rather than outright opposition to Chinese investment, however, the policy has been designed to court any foreign firms willing to enter into joint ventures and build local industrial parks. Though China has featured prominently in these efforts, firms from Australia, Japan, South Korea, and the United Arab Emirates have also played important roles. See Tritto, “How Indonesia Used Chinese Industrial Investments to Turn Nickel into the New Gold.” Angela Tritto, “How Indonesia Used Chinese Industrial Investments to Turn Nickel into the New Gold,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, April 11, 2023, https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2023/04/how-indonesia-used-chinese-industrial-investments-to-turn-nickel-into-the-new-gold?lang=en
The geopolitical understanding of imperialism is not entirely wrong, only superficial. In more technical terms, it is what Marxian theorists call an “alienated appearance,” wherein the operation of the actual social relationships at play tends to disguise those very relationships. Beneath this alienated appearance, we find that imperialism is not reducible to geopolitical maneuvers by certain states seeking to dominate others but is instead an inherent outcome of capitalist accumulation’s uneven geographical development. As described by Martín Arboleda: imperialism is “one of the phenomenal forms in which global value relations assert themselves. This means that capitalist imperialism — as opposed to dominant readings — is not autonomously determined by the political relations of the nation-state but by the directionally purposed drive to increase the organic composition of capital at the system-wide level.” Guido Starosta elaborates the same idea in more technical detail: “The territorial or spatial dimension of the accumulation process…needs to be grasped as an expression of the underlying formal and material unity of the essentially global contradictory dynamics [of the] accumulation of the total social capital, which are economically mediated by relations of competition among individual capitals like TNCS…on the one hand, and politically mediated by the policies of the nation-state on the other.” Martín Arboleda, Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2020), 26; Guido Starosta, “Revisiting the New International Division of Labour Thesis,” in The New International Division of Labour: Global Transformation and Uneven Development, ed. Guido Starosta and Greig Charnock (London: Macmillan, 2016), 86.
There is, however, a deepwater port project underway in Lamu, along the Northern coast of Kenya. The Lamu project is much smaller in scale, with only three berths currently under construction, capable of handling 1.2 million TEU per day. At its full scale, it is expected to consist of twenty-three berths and cost some 3.5 billion USD — roughly a third the amount projected for the Bagamoyo project, though estimates of TEU are similar, around 20m a day. However, geopolitical shifts in the region have seen its two major transit markets, Ethiopia and South Sudan, reoriented toward new routes in Djibouti, Somaliland, and even Eritrea. As a result, many fear that the project will now stall without ever reaching the predicted scale. For an overview of the issue, see Githua Kihara, “The Fading Fortunes of Lamu Port.”Githua Kihara, “The Fading Fortunes of Lamu Port,” The Elephant, October, 30 2020,https://www.theelephant.info/analysis/2020/10/30/the-fading-fortunes-of-lamu-port. For a longer history of the Lamu project’s political-economic context, see Zhu and Aalders, “Vanishing Line.” April Zhu and Theo Aalders, “Vanishing Line,” Guernica, December 11, 2023, https://www.guernicamag.com/vanishing-line/.
In addition to the sources already cited above, we can find the story repeated by the BBC and the Guardian, not to mention scholars writing on the topic, as in the contributions of Paul Nugent and Jana Hönke to an essay collection in the Routledge Studies in African Development series. “Bagamoyo port: Tanzania begins construction on mega project,” BBC, October 16, 2015, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-34554524; Nick Van Mead, “China in Africa: win-win development, or a new colonialism,” Guardian, July 31, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/jul/31/china-in-africa-win-win-development-or-a-new-colonialism; Paul Nugent, “Africa’s Re-Enchantment with Big Infrastructure: White Elephants Dancing in Virtuous Circles,” in Extractive Industries and Changing State Dynamics in Africa: Beyond the Resource Curse, ed. John Schubert, Ulf Engel, and Elísio Macamo (New York: Routledge, 2018), 22–56; Jana Hönke, “Port Geographies: Africa’s Infrastructure Boom and the Reconfiguration of Power and Authority,” in Extractive Industries and Changing State Dynamics.
Hong Zhang. “Chinese International Contractors in Africa: Structure and Agency,” Working Paper 47, China Africa Research Initiative, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Washington, DC, 2021, http://www.sais-cari.org/publications.
The company that is today China Merchants Group traces its lineage back to the China Merchant Steam Navigation Company founded in 1872 in Shanghai. This original firm was brought under state ownership in the 1930s by the Nationalist government. After the revolution, it was then effectively split in two with its mainland assets transferred to the ownership of the People’s Republic government and operated via the firm’s Hong Kong headquarters. Meanwhile, to prevent the seizure of further assets by the new mainland headquarters, the military dictatorship in Taiwan forced the firm’s Taiwan branch to transfer its remaining assets to the Yang Ming Marine Transport Corporation, now among the top ten container shipping companies in the world. The modern version of China Merchants Group took shape on the mainland in 1978 when Yuan Geng, Deputy Director of the Ministry of Transport and founder of the Shekou SEZ in Shenzhen, needed a vehicle for building up logistics capacity in Shekou to make it easier for private businesses in Hong Kong to invest in the mainland. A year later, Shekou was then taken as the template for the rollout of SEZs across Southern China by Deng Xiaoping and Guangdong Party Secretary Xi Zhongxun, father of Xi Jinping. In developing the Shekou SEZ, China Merchants Group was able to rebuild its capacity as a shipping company and expand into a range of other ventures that helped drive early marketization, founding the first joint-stock bank in the country, the China Merchants Bank, and piloting some of the earliest private real estate projects through its property wing.
Lee Jones and Zeng Jinghan, “Understanding China’s ‘Belt and Road Initiative’: Beyond ‘Grand Strategy’ to a State Transformation Analysis,” Third World Quarterly 40, no. 8 (2019): 1414–39, https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2018.1559046.
Dimitris P. Sotiropoulos, John Milios, and Spyros Lapatsioras, A Political Economy of Contemporary Capitalism and its Crisis: Demystifying Finance (New York: Routledge, 2013), 2.
Perhaps the most familiar case is that of the “revolving door” that shuttles economists from the private sector into government institutions and back again. Both the Obama and Biden administrations made regular use of BlackRock advisors, and the Federal Reserve worked closely with the firm in its allocation of funding during the pandemic: the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Department under Biden, Adewale Adeyemo, was former senior advisor and chief of staff to BlackRock’s CEO. Brian Deese, a former investment executive at BlackRock, was a senior advisor to President Obama and currently directs the National Economic Council. Michael Pyle, former global chief investment strategist at the company, served on the National Economic Council under Obama, became chief economic advisor to Vice President Harris after the 2020 election, and was then promoted to deputy national security advisor for international economics by President Biden in 2022. Similarly, Steven Mnuchin, Secretary of the Treasury during Trump’s first term (and also his campaign’s national finance chair) was a hedge fund manager and former partner at Goldman Sachs. Current Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, was also a hedge fund manager.
Here I use the World Bank indicator for manufacturing value-added (NV.IND.MANF.CD), the standard World Bank definition of “high-income,” and the World Bank subset of countries. For 2020, this removes the following high-income countries from the measure: Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Oman, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Israel (excluding West Bank and Gaza). Hong Kong, a Special Administrative Region of China, is also removed. Taiwan is already excluded from the dataset. Russia is not removed, since (with the exception of 2012, at the height of the commodities boom) it was officially an upper-middle-income country until 2023.
For a detailed history of the structural forces driving this process, see Glassman, Drums of War, Drums of Development. Jim Glassman, Drums of War, Drums of Development: The Formation of a Pacific Ruling Class and Industrial Transformation in East and Southeast Asia, 1945–1980 (Chicago: Haymarket, 2018).
This was only possible under the unique historical conditions that allowed these countries’ core firms to serve as effective appendages of US power. Their lopsided developmental arc has also required them to become massive labor importers, implementing some of the most brutal systems of division between a minority native population and a majority population of migrants via the kafala system—with foreign-born workers composing some 88 percent of the total workforce in the United Arab Emirates in 2019, for example (according to UN data on the migrant stock).
At the same time, such policies have not quite constituted a “trade war” in the traditional sense of a lateral conflict between firms in the same leading product lines, as when an ascendant Toyota grew throughout the 1970s and ‘80s to threaten companies like Ford and General Motors, which were at the time among the largest and most influential corporations in the world. Instead, the so-called “trade war” policies have mostly been efforts to enforce the existing imperial order by “punching down” at the small handful of Chinese companies that seem poised to become the greatest threats to US hegemony at some point in the next few decades.
The idea of a ‘condominium among core states’ comes from the work of second-generation world-systems theorists, particularly those associated with the Journal of World-Systems Research. The quotation above comes from Chase-Dunn, Kawano, and Nitkin, and a more systematic summary can be found in Goldfrank.Christopher Chase-Dunn, Yukio Kawano, and Denis Nikitin, “Globalization: A World-Systems Perspective” (presentation, the Ad Hoc Session of the Future of Globalization, International Sociological Association, XIV World Congress of Sociology, Montreal, July 26–August 1, 1998, https://wsarch.ucr.edu/archive/papers/c-d&hall/wc98.htm; W. L. Goldfrank, “Beyond Cycles of Hegemony: Economic, Social, and Military Factors,” Journal of World-Systems Research 1, no. 8 (1995): https://doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.1995.37.
Note that all the absolute figures cited here are underestimates, given the role played by tax havens and the limits of the MOFCOM data, which exclude firms below a certain size. But this does not impact their relative shares.
In part, China’s lower official aid is accounted for by its preference for concessional loans, which can muster larger sums than traditional aid. But the Chinese lending boom in Africa was also a short-lived affair, keeping pace with the commodities bubble and peaking in the space of a few years. Throughout, traditional lending from multilateral agencies, other bilateral partners, and in the form of bonds has been larger than total Chinese lending. Nonetheless, lending did lead to the construction of a number of actually-existing projects in these years, such as the Dar es Salaam–Mtwara Natural Gas Pipeline in Tanzania, funded by a 1.2 billion USD loan from the China Exim Bank. But it is only in Angola that Chinese lending has reached anything even approximating the hyperbolic proportions it has taken on in the media. As China’s major oil supplier, Angola received a total of 270 loans from China between 2000 and 2023 worth a total of 46 billion USD, more than half of which were in oil infrastructure and related energy projects. Loan data comes from the Chinese Loans to Africa Database, formerly run by the China Africa Research Institute. “Chinese Loans to Africa Database,” BU Global Development Policy Center, accessed December 18, 2024, https://www.bu.edu/gdp/chinese-loans-to-africa-database/.
Jaime Osorio, “Prologue: The Relevance of the Marxist Theory of Dependency” in Ruy Mauro Marini, The Dialectics of Dependency (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2022), 44–46.
Data from the WITS database. For comparison, imports from leading EU nations such as Germany have either stagnated or declined since 2010. As of 2021, Sub-Saharan Africa imported some 4.2 billion USD of capital goods from Germany, which was less than 20 percent the value of similar imports from China.
Sun Degang and Yahia Zoubir, “Sentry Box in the Backyard: Analysis of French Military Bases in Africa,” Journal of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies (in Asia) 5, no. 3 (2011):82–104, https://doi.org/10.1080/19370679.2011.12023186.
Marceleau Biankola-Biankola and Aubin Nzaou-Kongo, “International Law and Monetary Sovereignty: The Current Problems of the International Trusteeship of the Cfa Franc and the Crisis of Sovereign Equality,” African Review of Law and Critical Thinking 1, no.1 (2020): 25–61, https://ssrn.com/abstract=3674201.
