IMPERIALISM
China's economic hold over Africa increasingly runs through container ships rather than sovereign loans.
Chinese exports to Africa have nearly doubled since 2020, jumping about 26% in 2025 and another roughly 25% year on year in the first half of 2026, the fastest growth of any major destination, according to a Global Macro Views note published on August 20 by the Institute of International Finance (IIF). Africa now takes about 6% of China's exports, up from 2.3% in 2004 and ahead of Japan's share; it supplies only about 4.5% of China's imports.
The IIF calculates that Africa contributed 1.3 percentage points of China's 5.4% export growth last year, ahead of the European Union and second only to ASEAN. The continent has therefore become part of how Beijing redirects exports as Chinese shipments to the US contract under higher tariffs and worsening trade tensions.
What China sends has changed as much as how much. Capital goods made up 42% of Chinese exports to Africa in 2024, against 36% intermediate goods and 22% consumer goods; in 2014 the three categories were roughly balanced. That is potentially a more development-friendly import mix than one dominated by finished consumer goods, although the report's authors are careful not to oversell the implications.
"The development question is whether Chinese equipment, inputs and infrastructure help African firms move into processing, manufacturing, logistics and regional value chains, rather than simply lowering the cost of importing what China already produces efficiently," the note says.
The other side of that potentially more productive import mix is tougher competition for Africa's own manufacturers. Moody's Ratings said in July that China's trade pivot was generating limited diversification gains for the continent because much of the increase in imports was being absorbed domestically rather than assembled and re-exported. South Africa was the most exposed of eight major African economies it examined, particularly in machinery and automotive components. Africa's manufactured-goods trade deficit widened to about 11% of GDP in 2025 from 9.9% a year earlier.
That makes the development test harder than simply distinguishing capital goods from consumer imports. Cheap Chinese machinery can lower the cost of investment, but if African firms lose domestic market share or fail to move into assembly and processing, the same trade boom can work against industrialisation. Moody's found little evidence so far that the surge in Chinese imports was producing a corresponding rise in African manufactured exports.
Going the other way, the broad pattern has changed far less. Africa's exports to China remain overwhelmingly resource based, even as the mix has shifted from oil towards minerals that are increasingly important to Chinese manufacturing and clean-energy supply chains.
Petrochemical products, metal ores and scrap, and non-ferrous metals each account for roughly a quarter of Chinese imports from Africa, with South Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola and Guinea among the dominant suppliers. China's trade surplus with the continent has doubled over the past decade and now represents almost 10% of its total surplus.
The lending story is the one that has genuinely reversed. Chinese loan commitments to Africa peaked at about $28.8bn in 2016 and fell to around $2.1bn in 2024 — less than a tenth of the volume committed by the World Bank to the region that year, after Chinese commitments exceeded World Bank lending for much of the 2010s.
Direct investment has flattened too. China's outward direct investment stock in Africa has remained around the low-to-mid $40bn range since 2018 and accounts for only about 1.4% of China's total ODI stock.
Beijing has not withdrawn, though. It has changed instrument.
Completed overseas contracted project turnover in Africa came to about $40bn in 2024, many times larger than annual investment flows. Chinese companies are increasingly building, supplying and connecting African infrastructure rather than owning it, a structure that can reduce their balance-sheet and long term ownership exposure while keeping them embedded in African economies.
It also helps explain the export boom. Contracted projects generate demand for Chinese machinery, vehicles, equipment and technical services that then show up in the trade data.
Zero-tariff treatment for African exports, extended by Beijing this year, is read through the same lens.
"Tariffs are no longer the only binding constraint, and in many cases they are not the most important one," the note argues. "The harder constraint is supply capacity."
There are early signs that the tariff concession is moving the needle. Chinese imports from Africa rose 21.1% year on year in May and 40.2% in June after the zero-tariff regime took effect, with growth extending beyond critical minerals into some agricultural products and other new categories. But minerals and oil still account for much of the increase, making it too early to conclude that tariff-free access is changing the basic structure of Africa's exports to China.
The financial plumbing is also quietly being rebuilt in renminbi. More Chinese financing is being denominated in RMB, including infrastructure lending to Kenya and the conversion of existing Kenyan railway debt from dollars into renminbi.
Afreximbank has issued CNY2.2bn ($327mn) of Panda bonds and the Africa Finance Corporation is preparing to follow. The People's Bank of China has swap lines with Egypt worth CNY30bn ($4.46bn) and Nigeria worth CNY15bn ($2.23bn), alongside arrangements involving Mauritius and South Africa.
RMB clearing infrastructure has also expanded. Existing arrangements in markets including South Africa, Zambia and Mauritius were supplemented in June by a Standard Bank-ICBC Renminbi Clearing Bank of Africa, authorised to serve 19 African markets. African banks are also becoming more closely connected to China's Cross-Border Interbank Payment System, or CIPS.
None of this displaces the dollar, and the IIF does not claim that it does. It matters at the margin, in much the same way de-dollarisation elsewhere does: gradually increasing the number of transactions that can be financed, settled or refinanced outside the dollar system.
The conclusion is deliberately unsatisfying to both camps.
"The China-Africa relationship is too large to ignore, but too uneven to summarise with a single number," the authors write, arguing that resource-rich economies will continue to benefit from Chinese demand but remain exposed to commodity cycles without downstream processing, while construction-linked economies increasingly need to worry about project quality and debt sustainability rather than gross financing volumes.
That framing sits between the two positions the debate usually offers.
The debt-trap reading is increasingly anchored in a large-scale sovereign lending model that Beijing has largely stopped using, while the BRICS-delivers reading assumes an alignment of interests that the trade composition does not support.
Kenya's own experience of seeking infrastructure revival and debt relief in Beijing is closer to what the data now show: China remains deeply embedded in Africa, but increasingly through trade, contracting and financial infrastructure rather than the large sovereign loans that defined the previous phase of the relationship.
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