1 - Africa and the Geopolitics of the Chinese Path to Modernization

The 2024 Forum on China Africa Cooperation offered the clearest and ambitious assertion of China-sponsored modernization. President Xi Jinping proclaimed China’s ‘national rejuvenation through a Chinese path to modernization’, lauded ‘China and Africa’s joint pursuit of modernization’ and asserted that China will ‘spearhead the Global South modernization’. Beijing’s championing of Chinese-led developmental modernization has historical resonances but represents a salient current trend in Africa’s relations with China. Notably, it is assuming greater geopolitical significance, starting with but not confined to global US-China strategic competition. This paper investigates the geopolitics of African state engagement with Beijing’s modernization agenda as a new direction in studying Africa-China relations. It first historicizes modernity and modernization of China’s evolving foreign policy, as pursued by post-colonial African states amid Cold War ideological competition. Secondly, it considers the meaning and implications of “modernization” in terms of China’s current interconnected domestic and global contexts, and how this intersects with Beijing’s African relations. Third, it examines the new geopolitics of China's developmentally-premised but politically driven mobilization of modernization as not just different from but superior to historic and more recent Western engagements. Therefore, it seeks to invert the standard emphasis on Beijing’s agenda as a prominent part of external power competition by asking what modernization means – and might mean – in practice to African states in 21st century development. Finally, in view of the historic connections between modernization theory and US foreign policy in Africa, it problematizes the prominence of Chinese modernization in terms of evolving knowledge-power relations.