Author: Adams Oloo.

China- Africa Relations can be traced from the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia. From the 19050s until the late 1970s, China offered African countries politically motivated aid. Much of it included infrastructure projects as well as sectoral economic development projects. China’s subsequent rapid economic growth in the early to mid-1980s prompted it to gradually redefine its international relations policy goals. Increasingly, it began to pursue bilateral ties defined by pragmatic economic and trade-related ends, rather than political or ideological ones. Renewed Chinese interest in and ties with Africa were sparked in the late 1980s and 1990s by China’s rapidly expanding domestic economy and export-focused manufacturing sectors, which spurred trade ties with other countries, including many in commodity rich Africa. In Africa, as elsewhere, China also advocated international norms of political neutrality and state sovereignty, particularly with respect to non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries. This was notably the case following a rise in international criticism of China prompted by the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown on democracy activists. As in earlier decades, Africa played an important role in China’s strategy for achieving its policy goals within and through the UN system and in other international forums, where Africa’s many member governments represented an important potential block of allied votes. Many of China’s goals during this period were amenable to African governments, which wanted to boost their own trade and tap often under exploited natural resource reserves. Many also firmly espoused principles of non-interference in the affairs of sovereign states, in some cases, because like China, they were targets of foreign criticism regarding undemocratic governance and poor human rights records.