Sino-African relations

Based on Wikipedia: Sino-African relations

The Giraffe That Changed History

In October 1415, a Chinese admiral named Zheng He stood on the eastern coast of Africa and made a decision that would echo across six centuries. He selected a giraffe—an animal the Chinese had never seen—and sent it as a gift to the Yongle Emperor back in Beijing. The emperor was so enchanted that he declared the creature a qilin, a mythical beast that appears only during the reign of a truly virtuous ruler.

That giraffe was not the beginning of the relationship between China and Africa. Nor was it the end.

Today, China is Africa's largest trading partner. Trade between the two increased by seven hundred percent during the 1990s alone. Roughly a million Chinese citizens live across the African continent, while an estimated two million Africans work in China. This is not some recent development born of twenty-first century globalization. It is the latest chapter in a story that stretches back more than two thousand years.

Ancient Threads of Silk and Spice

The Greek geographer Ptolemy, writing in Roman Egypt during the second century, already knew of China by two separate routes. There was the famous Silk Road cutting across Central Asia, and there was the Indian Ocean trade that connected East Africa to the ports of southern China. Ptolemy even distinguished between two different Chinese peoples: the Seres, which means "silk people," and the Sinai of the southern maritime trade, whose name likely derives from the Qin dynasty.

The first African mention in Chinese records appears in an eighth-century compendium called the Yu-yang-tsa-tsu, compiled by a scholar named Tuan Ch'eng-shih before his death in 863. He wrote about a land called Po-pa-li—almost certainly Berbera, the ancient port city in what is now Somalia.

Then, in 1071, something remarkable happened. An embassy arrived at the Chinese court from an East African kingdom. The Chinese recorded it as a formal tribute mission in their official History of the Song Dynasty. They called the kingdom Ts'eng t'an, a name probably derived from the Persian word Zangistan. The ruler's title was recorded as a-mei-lo a-mei-lan—a rendering of the Persian phrase amir-i-amiran, meaning "emir of emirs."

This was not some isolated contact.

Archaeologists excavating the medieval trading cities of Mogadishu and Kilwa in Tanzania have found numerous Chinese coins. Most date to the Song dynasty, though Ming and Qing dynasty coins have also turned up. In 1226, a Chinese trade commissioner named Chao Jukua compiled a remarkable document describing foreign peoples and their lands. He wrote about Zanzibar and Somalia, demonstrating that Chinese merchants and officials maintained detailed knowledge of the African coast.

The Admiral's Lost Sailors

Zheng He was one of history's greatest admirals. Between 1405 and 1433, he led seven massive voyages of exploration and diplomacy across the Indian Ocean. His fleet dwarfed anything Europe would produce for another century—hundreds of ships, including treasure junks that measured over four hundred feet long. By comparison, Columbus's Santa Maria was perhaps eighty-five feet from bow to stern.

Zheng He's armada rounded the Horn of Africa, followed the Somali coast southward, and sailed as far as the Mozambique Channel. He brought gifts and imperial titles to distribute among local rulers, spreading Chinese influence and collecting exotic treasures to bring home. Giraffes, zebras, and incense flowed back to the Ming court.

But the most intriguing part of Zheng He's African voyages may be what went wrong.

Local traditions on Lamu Island, off the Kenyan coast, tell of a Chinese ship that sank near there in 1415. Survivors supposedly washed ashore, received permission to settle from local tribes after killing a dangerous python, converted to Islam, and married local women. For centuries, this remained oral history—the kind of story that scholars treated with polite skepticism.

Then came the DNA tests.

In 2002, researchers tested a local woman who claimed descent from those shipwrecked sailors. The results confirmed she was of Chinese ancestry. Her daughter, Mwamaka Sharifu, later received a scholarship from the Chinese government to study traditional Chinese medicine in China—a strange echo across six hundred years.

When journalist Frank Viviano visited nearby Pate Island for National Geographic in 2005, he found more tantalizing evidence. Local people had eyes that resembled Chinese features. Some bore names like Famao and Wei. Ceramic fragments recovered from the area appeared to match Chinese origins from Zheng He's era. A local guide showed Viviano a graveyard made of coral, with tombs featuring half-moon domes and terraced entries that looked virtually identical to Ming dynasty burial sites.

Two places on Pate are still called Old Shanga and New Shanga—names that may have been given by those stranded Chinese sailors all those centuries ago.

The Curious Case of the Abandoned People

Even stranger tales persist further south.

In their book "Colour, Confusions, and Concessions: the History of Chinese in South Africa," historians Melanie Yap and Daniel Leong Man document that a Chinese mapmaker named Chu Ssu-pen included southern Africa on maps he drew in 1320. Chinese ceramics from the Song dynasty have been found in Zimbabwe and South Africa.

And then there are the Awatwa.

Several tribes living north of Cape Town have long claimed descent from Chinese sailors who arrived during the thirteenth century. Their physical appearance differs from neighboring groups—paler skin and features that some observers describe as East Asian. Their language is tonal, like Mandarin. Most intriguingly, the name they use for themselves, Awatwa, translates to "abandoned people."

Did Chinese sailors reach southern Africa in the 1200s, two centuries before Zheng He? Did they settle among local populations after being somehow stranded? The evidence remains fragmentary. But the oral traditions persist, and the genetic and archaeological investigations continue.

The Medieval Travelers Who Connected Two Worlds

The relationship between Africa and China was not merely a matter of trade goods and shipwrecks. It was also carried by remarkable individuals who crossed vast distances in an age before steam engines or GPS.

Ibn Battuta, the legendary Moroccan scholar, spent nearly thirty years traveling across the medieval world. In April 1345, after an extended stay in India serving as an envoy, he reached China. His observations paint a picture of a sophisticated civilization:

China is the safest, best regulated of countries for a traveler. A man may go by himself on a nine-month journey, carrying with him a large sum of money, without any fear. Silk is used for clothing even by poor monks and beggars. Its porcelains are the finest of all makes of pottery and its hens are bigger than geese in our country.

Ibn Battuta's journey represented one direction of medieval travel. But Africans also traveled to China. In the fourteenth century, a Somali scholar and explorer named Sa'id of Mogadishu made his own journey eastward, another thread connecting these two great civilizations.

Why the Ming Treasure Fleets Stopped

And then, abruptly, it ended.

After Zheng He's death in 1433, the Ming court turned inward. The treasure fleet voyages stopped. Records were destroyed. China's brief age of maritime exploration gave way to centuries of isolation. The connections with Africa faded into legend and archaeological fragments.

When Europeans rounded the Cape of Good Hope and entered the Indian Ocean in 1498, they encountered African ports that still bore traces of Chinese contact—the porcelain shards, the coins, the oral traditions—but no more Chinese ships arrived. The great admiral's giraffe was long dead, and no new mythical beasts crossed the ocean.

A New Beginning After Revolution

Modern Sino-African relations began not with trade or exploration, but with ideology.

When Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party won the Chinese Civil War in 1949, they inherited a country that had suffered a century of humiliation at the hands of Western imperial powers and Japan. China sought allies among the newly independent nations of Asia and Africa—countries that had experienced similar colonial exploitation.

Mao viewed Africa and Latin America as what he called the "First Intermediate Zone." As a non-white power, China might compete with and supersede both American and Soviet influence among the world's former colonies. This was not mere cynicism. Chinese leaders genuinely saw themselves as allies of the colonized against their colonizers.

The late 1950s saw China sign bilateral trade agreements with Algeria, Egypt, Guinea, South Africa, and Sudan. Between December 1963 and January 1964, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai embarked on an ambitious ten-country tour of Africa. He visited Ghana and established close relations with Kwame Nkrumah, who dreamed of a united African continent.

China offered economic aid, technical assistance, and military support to African countries and liberation movements. The goal was to encourage "wars of national liberation" as part of an international front against both superpowers—the United States and the Soviet Union.

The Vote That Changed Everything

In 1971, the People's Republic of China achieved one of its greatest diplomatic victories, and Africa made it possible.

Since 1949, the Republic of China on Taiwan had held China's seat at the United Nations. The People's Republic in Beijing was shut out. But that year, twenty-six African nations voted to expel Taiwan and seat the mainland government instead. The resolution passed, and the People's Republic of China took its place as a permanent member of the Security Council.

Mao Zedong was characteristically blunt in his gratitude. "It is our African brothers who have carried us into the UN," he declared.

That vote established a pattern that continues today. Almost every African nation now officially recognizes the People's Republic of China rather than Taiwan. As of 2025, only Eswatini—formerly known as Swaziland—and the self-declared Republic of Somaliland maintain official relations with Taiwan. Eswatini is the only African member of the United Nations that formally recognizes the Republic of China.

The reasoning is straightforward. China offers trade, aid, and investment. Taiwan cannot match those resources. For African governments making pragmatic calculations about their countries' interests, the choice is clear.

Cold War Complications

But China's African relationships during the Cold War were never simple.

Take South Africa. China initially cultivated close ties with the African National Congress, known as the ANC, which was fighting against apartheid. But as relations between China and the Soviet Union deteriorated during the 1960s, and the ANC moved closer to Moscow, China shifted its support to the rival Pan-Africanist Congress.

A similar dynamic played out in Rhodesia, which is now Zimbabwe. The Soviets backed Joshua Nkomo's Zimbabwe African People's Union, supplying them with weapons. Robert Mugabe led a rival group, the Zimbabwe African National Union, and when Moscow rebuffed his requests for support, he turned to Beijing. China became Mugabe's patron, a relationship that would have long and complicated consequences.

In Egypt and Sudan, China welcomed the expulsion of Soviet military advisers during the 1970s and stepped in to supply arms. In Angola, China and the United States found themselves on the same side—both supporting factions fighting against the Soviet and Cuban-backed MPLA government. China funneled aid to the National Front for the Liberation of Angola and later to UNITA, working alongside Mobutu's Zaire and the shadowy Safari Club, an alliance of intelligence agencies from France, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Morocco.

When Somalia's Siad Barre went to war with Ethiopia over the Ogaden region in 1977, the Soviets initially supported Somalia. But when Moscow switched sides to back Ethiopia—which had recently undergone a Marxist revolution—Barre expelled all Soviet advisers and citizens from Somalia. China and its allies provided diplomatic support and token military aid to the isolated Somali regime.

The Forum That Formalized Everything

The end of the Cold War transformed China's approach to Africa.

With Soviet competition eliminated, ideology mattered less. What mattered now was economics and political reliability. China sought relationships with African governments based on mutual benefit and predictability, regardless of whether those governments claimed to be socialist, capitalist, or anything in between.

In 2000, this new approach was institutionalized with the creation of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, known by its acronym FOCAC. The first major summit was held in Beijing in 2006, following ministerial conferences in Beijing and Addis Ababa. FOCAC now meets every three years and has become the primary mechanism for coordinating relations between China and African nations.

At the 2018 FOCAC summit, Chinese leader Xi Jinping articulated what he called the "Five Nos"—principles guiding China's foreign policy toward Africa and other developing countries:

• No interference in other countries' pursuit of development paths suitable to their national conditions
• No interference in domestic affairs
• Not imposing China's will on others
• Not attaching political conditions to foreign aid
• Not seeking political self-interest in investment and financing

These principles represent a deliberate contrast with Western approaches. The United States and European nations often tie aid and investment to conditions about human rights, democratic governance, or economic reforms. China presents itself as offering an alternative—money without lectures.

Whether China actually adheres to these principles is debated. Critics point to cases where Chinese investments have come with significant strings attached, or where China has involved itself in local politics to protect its interests. But the messaging has proven effective. Many African leaders appreciate not being told how to run their countries.

The Numbers That Define the Relationship

The scale of Chinese engagement in Africa is staggering.

China is now Africa's largest trading partner. One million Chinese citizens were estimated to be residing across the continent as of 2013. The China Africa Research Initiative tracked over 263,000 Chinese workers in Africa at the peak in 2015, though that number had dropped to about 88,000 by 2022.

Meanwhile, an estimated two million Africans were working in China as of 2017.

China's approach includes not just trade and investment but significant diplomatic attention. Since 1991, every Chinese foreign minister has made their first overseas visit of the year to an African country. This tradition continues through at least 2023. Even delegations from the smallest African nations receive audiences at the highest levels—a courtesy that Africa-watchers note is not always matched by Western powers.

As of 2024, China spends approximately one billion dollars annually on what might be called public diplomacy in Africa, covering media, education, and cultural programs. This includes funding for Confucius Institutes, scholarships for African students to study in China, and support for Chinese-language media outlets across the continent.

The UN Connection

China's cultivation of African support has paid particular dividends at the United Nations.

African countries that rotate through the Security Council and sit on the Human Rights Council generally vote more frequently with China than with the United States, France, or the United Kingdom. General Assembly voting patterns show similar alignment.

This matters enormously. When Western nations attempt to criticize China's human rights record or its actions in places like Xinjiang, Tibet, or Hong Kong, they often face opposition from African states that argue such criticism constitutes interference in internal affairs—the same principle China espouses.

In 2016, ten African countries signed a declaration during a meeting of the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum expressing appreciation for China's approach to maritime and territorial disputes. The declaration endorsed China's preference for bilateral dialogue over international arbitration—a significant statement given ongoing disputes in the South China Sea.

In 2022, the African Union announced it would establish a delegation with a resident ambassador in Beijing, formalizing the continental body's relationship with China.

The Principles Behind the Policy

Understanding China's approach to Africa requires understanding its stated principles.

Upon founding the People's Republic, Chinese leaders articulated the "Five Principles of Peaceful Co-existence": national sovereignty, win-win cooperation, mutual non-aggression and non-alignment, neutrality and non-interference in internal affairs, and equality. Throughout the 1960s, China deployed both formal instruments like friendship treaties, cultural pacts, and financial assistance, and informal diplomatic engagement.

When Deng Xiaoping replaced Mao as paramount leader in the late 1970s, his reforms focused on opening China to the West and pursuing economic development. Africa temporarily lost some of its significance to Beijing as China prioritized relationships with wealthy Western nations that could provide capital and technology.

But this changed dramatically after 1989. The Tiananmen Square massacre led Western governments to impose sanctions and distance themselves from Beijing. African nations, by contrast, largely declined to condemn China. This loyalty was remembered.

China also finds African regional organizations attractive precisely because they operate largely independent of Western influence. The African Union, the Economic Community of West African States, the East African Community, and the Southern African Development Community all maintain relationships with Beijing. China provides the Southern African Development Community with an annual hundred-thousand-dollar grant to help fund its secretariat—modest money, but consistent engagement.

A Relationship Still Unfolding

The story of China and Africa stretches from Song dynasty coins buried in Tanzanian soil to twenty-first century infrastructure projects financed by Chinese banks. It encompasses medieval scholars crossing oceans, shipwrecked sailors starting new lives, Cold War proxy conflicts, and the patient accumulation of diplomatic goodwill at the United Nations.

This is not a relationship of equals. China is vastly wealthier and more powerful than any single African nation, and indeed than all of them combined. Critics argue that China is engaged in a new form of colonialism, extracting African resources while loading African governments with unsustainable debt. Supporters counter that China offers an alternative to Western paternalism—investment and trade on terms that African governments freely accept.

The descendants of those Ming dynasty sailors on Pate Island might have something to say about cultural exchange and its unexpected consequences. Six hundred years ago, their ancestors set out to spread Chinese influence and display Chinese power. They ended up stranded, adapting to new lives in a land utterly unlike home, their descendants now indistinguishable from their neighbors except for traces in their DNA and coral tombs by the sea.

History rarely proceeds as intended. The giraffe sent to enchant an emperor became a symbol of virtuous rule. The trading relationships of medieval merchants evolved into geopolitical competition between great powers. The votes that African nations cast in 1971 to admit China to the United Nations continue to shape international politics half a century later.

What the next chapter holds, no one can say. But the story of China and Africa—two civilizations connected across two millennia, interrupted and renewed, trading and competing and occasionally fighting—is far from over.