FOCAC illustrates China’s vision and aspirations for Global South

Leaders from over 50 African countries are descending on Beijing for the upcoming 2024 Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), the largest diplomatic gathering hosted by China in years, as the “Global South,” a catchall term for a diverse array of developing countries located mostly south of the Brandt Line, has been making a comeback.

Prior to the opening of the FOCAC summit, a narrative crafted by the West about China “winning” the Global South began to gain traction, alleging that China had embarked on a “charm offensive” to coax the bloc into its orbit. The claim was met with a firm response by Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Lin Jian, who said, “As a natural member of the Global South, China never seeks to ‘win the Global South,’ but is committed to helping Global South partners, including African countries, truly realize development and prosperity.”

FOCAC is a microcosm of China’s time-tested friendship with its Global South partners. In the wake of the Cold War in the early 1990s, the Western powers started to pull out their aid and investment in Africa, and the continent began to feel the pinch as the economy began to shrink and the accumulated debt amounted to over 80 percent of its entire GDP in 1994. The dire situation prompted the Economist magazine to publish an infamous article titled “Hopeless Africa” in 2000. But it was exactly in this year that China and Africa jointly initiated the first FOCAC in the form of a ministerial conference.

“Right at that time, China did not forget its identity as a developing country,” said Liu Hongwu, a professor and the director of the Institute of African Studies at Zhejiang Normal University. “In the early 2000s, China took part in the globalization led by the West through joining the WTO, but it also forged an even tighter bond with the nations of the South in Asia, Africa and Latin America.”

China’s Africa policy has been guided by the principle of sincerity, real results, amity and good faith, proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping during his first foreign visit as China’s top leader in 2013, which included three African countries as destinations. The principle is emblematic of China’s relationship with the rest of the Global South based on equality and mutual respect.

Since the initiation of FOCAC, China has insisted on having the forum hosted alternately between China and African countries. In the past quarter of a century, FOCAC was held in African countries including Ethiopia, Egypt, South Africa and Senegal. In contrast, the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summits, with only two ad-hoc sessions convened so far, were only held in America.

The Global South has been dismissed by some American academics as a “loaded term” or merely a “geopolitical fact,” but China sees it differently. “The Global South is not some label invented by the Northern powers to rationalize their power games,” said Liu Haifang, an associate professor and the director of the Center for African Studies at Peking University. “It is a self-identity commonly recognized among the nations of the South.”

China’s identification with the Global South was reaffirmed by Xi’s remarks that “China and African countries are destined to be good friends, good brothers and good partners, and China-Africa cooperation stands as a fine example of South-South cooperation.”

The FOCAC summit taking place this week carries the theme “Joining Hands to Advance Modernization and Build a High-Level China-Africa Community with a Shared Future.” It exemplifies China’s engagement approach with the Global South partners built on sincerity and tangible results.

For the past three FOCAC meetings, Beijing launched “Ten Major Cooperation Plans” in 2015, “Eight Major Initiatives” in 2018, and “Nine Projects” in 2021, which outgrew the original model of mainly promoting trade and investment and started to foster Africa’s nearly all segments of social-economic development. The effort to modernize the continent mapped out in a succession of FOCAC meetings boils down to China’s initiatives that support Africa’s development on three fronts: industrialization, agricultural modernization, and talent development.

In a bid to help Africa reduce its reliance on food imports, over the past decade, more than 300 cutting-edge technologies promoted by China have helped drive up local crop yields by 30 to 60 percent on average, benefiting over one million small-scale farmers. In the meantime, China has devoted itself to promoting “Made in Africa” by building multiple industrial parks while enriching the continent’s talent pool by training about 10,000 specialists per year through a vast network of vocational schools.

Since the initiation of FOCAC, Chinese enterprises have assisted Africa in building or upgrading over 10,000 km of railways, 100,000 km of highways, 1,000 bridges, and nearly 100 ports, laying the foundation for an era of fast modernization on the continent.

“We have gone willingly into a relationship that we think is a win-win,” said Sierra Leonean President Julius Maada Bio in a recent interview, praising the China-Africa cooperation.

South-South cooperation is a high priority in China’s cooperation with other countries. And it is China’s strategic choice, not a stopgap measure. The establishment and continuity of FOCAC is testimony to China’s aspiration to work with other developing countries to build a “Global South community with a shared future.” Xu Zeyu & Tian Zijun, Xinhua, Xinhua