Economic Diplomacy as a Key Element of China's Foreign Policy Strategy in Africa

China's engagement with Africa over the past two decades has been shaped by a deliberate and evolving economic diplomacy that links trade, infrastructure financing, foreign direct investment, and institutional multilateralism to broader foreign policy objectives. Drawing on the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) framework, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and bilateral state-to-state arrangements, Beijing has positioned itself as Africa's largest trading partner and most prolific bilateral infrastructure financier. This article examines the instruments and logic of China's economic diplomacy in Africa, incorporating comparative assessments of Angola, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, and Zambia to illuminate variations in debt sustainability outcomes, employment generation, infrastructure quality, trade performance, and technology transfer. The article argues that outcomes from Chinese economic engagement differ substantially across country contexts and are shaped by factors including the structure of the bilateral financing arrangement, African governmental institutional capacity, the sectoral focus of investment, and the degree of policy conditionality that host governments are willing and able to impose. China's economic diplomacy is neither uniformly predatory nor straightforwardly developmental; it is a state-led strategy that serves China's commercial, resource, and political interests while simultaneously producing real, if unevenly distributed, development benefits for African partners. Variations in these outcomes underscore the analytical inadequacy of continent-wide generalisations about Chinese economic engagement.

China-Africa relations, economic diplomacy, Belt and Road Initiative, FOCAC, debt sustainability, comparative political economy

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