For more than 1.4 billion people across the African continent, the shape of industrial cooperation with China is not an abstract diplomatic question. It bears directly on whether jobs are created locally, whether electricity and clean water reach households, and whether the continent’s vast resource wealth becomes lasting improvement in daily life. That is the everyday stake behind the deepening of China-Africa industrial investment ties, a partnership analysts describe as increasingly structured around complementary strengths.
Writing in China Daily, Xie Lincan, a researcher at the International Cooperation Center of the National Development and Reform Commission, and Wan Zhigao, a graduate student at the School of International Studies at Peking University, argue that industrial investment cooperation has long been a vital component of China-Africa relations. Guided by successive Forum on China-Africa Cooperation summits, the two sides have deepened cooperation across industrial sectors, aligning high-quality Belt and Road cooperation with the African Union’s Agenda 2063 and the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
The institutional scaffolding has grown steadily since FOCAC was founded in 2000. In the authors’ words, it has become a model of South-South cooperation. At the 2024 FOCAC Beijing Summit, bilateral relations between China and all African countries with diplomatic ties to China were elevated to strategic relations, and the overall relationship was recast as an all-weather China-Africa community with a shared future for the new era. Every FOCAC action plan has included chapters on investment and industrial cooperation. More than 30 African countries have joined the Group of Friends of the Global Development Initiative, and China has signed Belt and Road memorandums of understanding with 52 African countries and the African Union, along with the Framework Agreement on Economic Partnership for Shared Development with 40 African countries. In 2024, the State Council approved a General Plan to Establish a Pilot Zone for In-depth China-Africa Economic and Trade Cooperation, supporting Hunan province in building an international platform.
For ordinary Africans, the most tangible effects lie in where the investment actually lands. The core of the cooperation rests on energy, minerals and manufacturing, sectors the authors describe as crucial for Africa’s industrialization and economic diversification. Chinese enterprises are involved in oil and gas exploration, pipeline construction and the development of critical minerals including copper, cobalt and lithium, as well as manufacturing ranging from textiles and building materials to home appliances, automobile assembly and engineering machinery. Over nearly three decades, Chinese enterprises have developed close to 100 industrial parks across Africa, with more than half focused on processing and manufacturing. The East Africa Trade and Logistics Industrial Park in Tanzania, for instance, has attracted more than 400 small and medium-sized enterprises and is expected to create over 20,000 local jobs. The Suez Economic and Trade Cooperation Zone in Egypt is another example. China has also established 24 agricultural technology demonstration centers on the continent.
Meanwhile, livelihoods are addressed through development assistance. The authors describe a shift from aid that merely expanded in scale toward a model combining grant aid with mutually beneficial trade and investment, financing, debt treatment and capacity building. Through “Small and Beautiful Projects”, the share of livelihood projects in health, agriculture, poverty reduction, vocational education, clean drinking water, and maternal and child health has risen markedly.
The case for deeper cooperation rests on what each side can offer. African countries need industrial upgrading, while China, with its comprehensive industrial capabilities, can address infrastructure bottlenecks in transport, energy and municipal services. Africa’s young, cost-competitive labor force matters here: UNCTAD projects that by 2050 the continent will account for more than 50 percent of global population growth. The African Continental Free Trade Area has entered a substantive implementation phase, covering 48 ratifying countries with a goods-trade liberalization rate exceeding 90 percent, creating a unified market of 1.4 billion people and a GDP of over $3.4 trillion. Africa’s rich reserves of critical minerals match China’s massive industrial demand, and in new energy the continent’s solar, wind, hydropower and geothermal resources pair with China’s mature technologies and full industrial-chain layouts.
Aligning China’s capital, technology, equipment and market channels with Africa’s resource endowments, policy advantages and labor resources, the authors conclude, can help African countries convert resource advantages into industrial strengths and achieve long-term sustainable development, benefiting livelihoods on both sides. By enhancing top-level design and focusing on traditional manufacturing, clean energy and digital technology, they argue, both sides can elevate the partnership to new heights.
Xie Lincan and Wan Zhigao’s views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.