Geo-Economics of Russia and China in Africa

Introduction

When it comes to Western views on Africa, China and Russia are often treated similarly—as rivals and revisionist powers—but the political economies of their roles on the continent could not be more different.

China plays three principal economic roles in Africa—creditor, export offtaker (a long-term contracted buyer), and provider of infrastructure and resource extraction expertise.  Russia performs none of these roles. Its conventional economic footprint in Africa is minuscule in comparison, but its leverage—derived from the bundling of military support with commodity dependency—far exceeds what the raw investment figures suggest.^[1]

Russia has long been a supplier of grains and fertilizers to Africa. This predates the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, though the war has enabled Russia to instrumentalize supplies by offering subsidized shipments and preferential terms.^[2] Russia has become consequential as a reactive power across a belt of unstable states from Libya to the Sahel. It has filled the vacuum left by coups, civil wars, and the withdrawal of American and French influence. Russia offers mercenaries, vetoes at the UN Security Council, and arms without human rights conditionality. Since February 2022, Russia has also needed to provide diplomatic and financial cover for its sanctions-afflicted economy. Together, bulk grain provision, expeditionary capability, and diplomatic cover constitute a regime security package that Russia can offer imperiled dictators.      

Russia engages mostly with states that are economically peripheral. China maintains relations with all African states regardless of the leader or regime type. Unlike Russia, it engages with the fastest growing economies and largest resource exporters. Its military and surveillance goods are typically provided on commercial terms, and—as the DRC-Rwanda conflict illustrates—to all sides. China’s few direct security engagements are tied to the protection of commercial interests.

At US$180 billion in cumulative lending since 2000, China ranks alongside the World Bank as a first-tier source of development finance.^[3] Russia is a minuscule development financier in comparison.^[4] Chinese firms operate some of the largest mines and infrastructure projects on the continent, in which they increasingly take equity stakes.

Finally, the two countries differ in their internal policymaking. Russian policy is made by a tight-knit group of figures orbiting Putin. Chinese policymaking is less unitary, emerging from a constellation of political, commercial, and financial institutions. China’s approach is evolutionary and subject to vigorous, if opaque, internal debate. Western states typically extend loans to Africa through dedicated bilateral agencies with clear mandates. In fact, there is no unitary development authority in China. It just established a dedicated foreign aid agency in 2018. Coordination between policy banks and state-owned enterprises (SOEs) remains limited to this day.^[5] Chinese firms, even those which feature prominently in state policy, operate on commercial criteria and answer to their own balance sheets.

Russia’s Position

The Military Business Model

Over the last decade, Russia has operated on a reactive engagement model in the region, building on the template developed in Libya and Sudan. Although its involvement in Libya has attracted more international attention, Sudan serves as a clearer illustration of how Russia has developed this model.

Following a series of deals struck between Moscow and President Omar al-Bashir in 2017, entities affiliated with the Kremlin embedded themselves within Sudan’s gold economy, often through the then-growing Wagner Group. Wagner began operating mines in collaboration with the local security forces. It established training relationships that have given Russia a durable influence, regardless of which faction held the presidency. Russia asked for no upfront cash, no equity stake in infrastructure, and no formal defense treaty. Instead, it extracted gold and established a mutually reinforcing relationship between military access and mineral access.^[6]

The scale of gold extraction became clearer when data from the Sudanese Central Bank, leaked to CNN, suggested as much as 32.7 tons of gold went unaccounted for in 2021 alone. At contemporary prices, that amount represented a haul for Wagner approaching US$2 billion.^[7] In Mali, where Wagner arrived following the coups of 2020 and 2021, similar dynamics unfolded. Between 2021 and 2024, the Malian junta reportedly paid Wagner more than US$200 million—much of it sourced from gold revenues—in exchange for combat support that enabled the recapture of Kidal, the separatist stronghold in the country’s gold-rich north, by late 2023.^[8]

The death of Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin in August 2023 and the group’s subsequent disbandment did not interrupt these arrangements. The rebranded Africa Corps, subordinated to Russian military intelligence (the GRU), assumed operational responsibility for Russia’s growing engagements in the Central African Republic (CAR), Mali, Libya, Burkina Faso, and Niger. The first units arrived in Burkina Faso in late 2023 and in Niger in April 2024, just as junta pressure compelled the United States to withdraw its 1,000-strong contingent.^[9] The Prigozhin era had made it seem as though Wagner Group was a freelance enterprise; the transition to Africa Corps proved it had always been a Kremlin instrument. Nevertheless, the substantial setback to its position in the country resulting from a late-April 2026 offensive by Tuareg and Islamist forces in Mali that forced Russian withdrawal from Kidal in northern Mali highlights Africa Corps’ ineffectiveness as a long-term security guarantor.^[10] 

Burkina Faso provides a further example. The country underwent a coup in January 2022 that brought a military junta to power. Moscow’s engagement has centered on commodities, particularly gold, and expanded rapidly in recent years.

Russian firm Nordgold, majority-owned by sanctioned oligarch Alexey Mordashov, has invested more than US$1 billion and produces nearly half of its global gold output in Burkina Faso, routing its exports through Dubai to circumvent Western sanctions. In February 2023, Burkina Faso’s junta leader Ibrahim Traoré went further, demanding the handover of nearly US$30 million in gold from domestic mines to the state for “public necessity.”^[11] For domestic consumption, the Burkinable government cast the measure as anti-colonial and anti-French. Other Western gold mining investors faced demands for new deals. In contrast, Nordgold has since received a new concession in the country, while the Kremlin’s Africa Corps works to revise mining laws across the Alliance of Sahel States’ members in ways that systematically disadvantage Western operators.^[12]

The Kremlin has sought to expand this model to other Sahel states aligned with Burkina Faso, including Mali, Niger, and even the CAR. It is seeking to secure mining and other key economic concessions, which would transform its military deployments into lasting economic influence. This has been true even when the underlying assets are macroeconomically insignificant for Russia. For example, the CAR has less mining wealth than Sudan, Mali, Burkina Faso, or Niger, but the Kremlin has still sought to ensure it controls as many economic assets as possible, including even drink bottling factories. ^[13]

Across the continent, Russia’s formal foreign direct investment (FDI) stock in Africa represents less than 1% of total FDI—a figure that places Moscow far below the top ten investors and behind the United Kingdom, France, and the Netherlands, each of which holds FDI stocks in Africa in the range of US$54–60 billion.^[14] Russia’s small FDI numbers are inflated by a single project: the El Dabaa nuclear power plant in Egypt. This project aside, Russia’s engagement will remain insignificant on a regional and global macroeconomic level. Headline figures alone fail to account for the leverage that even modest investment can make, especially when deployed strategically in support of nascent regimes, as in the case of Sudan or Libya. 

The Agricultural Supply Base  

Beyond the military business model, Russia’s management of fertilizer supply chains has proved a durable instrument of influence. This form of economic control operates on the level of food security rather than regime security, and so it implicates a broader range of African governments, many of which are uninterested in hosting Russian paramilitaries. Russia accounts for roughly 16% of global fertilizer exports by volume, covering nitrogen, phosphate, and potash streams. Its importance to African agriculture became acutely visible when the 2022 invasion of Ukraine disrupted supply chains and caused prices to spike across sub-Saharan Africa.

Moscow responded to the political opportunity with characteristic bombast. Russia’s Uralchem-Uralkali, one of the world’s largest fertilizer producers, pledged to deliver approximately 300,000 tons of fertilizer to African states for free when consignments became stranded in EU ports due to secondary sanctions compliance in 2022–2023.^[15] 

This move was deliberately framed as humanitarian. At the 2023 Russia-Africa Summit in St. Petersburg, Putin announced that free wheat for six African countries—Somalia, Mali, Burkina Faso, the CAR, Eritrea, and Zimbabwe—and free fertilizer for countries in southern Africa.^[16]  The announcements were designed to reinforce a narrative Russia had been cultivating since the collapse of the Black Sea Grain Initiative in July 2023: Western sanctions, rather than Russian aggression, have been responsible for Africa’s food insecurity. This rhetoric gained genuine traction in African countries where sanctions had caused substantial complications for importers paying their Russian suppliers. Many African governments have, therefore, been receptive to arguments that the international economic order is penalizing them for a distant conflict.

As Financial Times reported, Russia leveraged its position as a key agricultural supplier to pressure African governments to facilitate sanctions circumvention. Russia demanded its clients use alternative payment corridors and support parallel financial mechanisms.^[17] During the May 2023 Russia-Africa Summit, African leaders engaged in negotiations to continue to pay Russia for fertilizers.^[18] From Moscow’s perspective, the food security conversation and the sanctions evasion conversation were the same.

The continent’s dependency on Russian fertilizer is unevenly distributed. In West Africa, Togo and Nigeria have been courted by Russian officials and fertilizer firms seeking to expand commercial relationships. Russia is considering the construction of local fertilizer production facilities in Nigeria and Kenya. If realized, these proposals would convert episodic trade dependence into embedded industrial relationships.

Russian presence in Africa, then, is more consequential than its raw economic weight suggests. Moscow’s formal FDI position is thin, with its trade relationships dwarfed by those of China, the European Union, and the United States. But its model generates influence with fewer costs and scruples.

China’s Position

Where Russia’s Africa policy is reactive, China’s is structural. It is the product of two decades of surplus capital, industrial overcapacity, and institutional momentum, rather than any single strategic design. China is Africa’s largest trade partner, largest bilateral creditor, and an increasingly significant equity investor in the continent’s mines and infrastructure. The financial returns have often been lacking though. Chinese banks are transitioning from rapid balance sheet expansion to long-term debt collection, while their firms are shifting from opaque state-to-state lending to joint ventures with Western majors.

China is by far Africa’s largest trade partner. Bilateral trade reached a record US$348 billion in 2025, roughly seven times US-Africa trade. The continent-wide trade deficit with China was US$102 billion in 2025.^[19]

The Offtaker

The composition of this trade has, in qualitative terms, remained stable over two decades: Africa exports raw commodities—oil from Angola, copper and cobalt from the DRC and Zambia, iron ore from Guinea and South Africa, and manganese from Gabon—and in turn imports Chinese finished goods. Outright ownership by Chinese firms is rare and is highly concentrated in certain countries, such as the DRC and Guinea-Conakry. However, joint ventures are increasingly common. Refining and processing take place overwhelmingly in China; African states have not successfully demanded local production.^[20] Moving refining onto the continent would require enormous subsidies or Indonesia-style export bans to succeed, and few countries have enough market power to achieve the latter.^[21]

The trade imbalance holds even in the continent’s largest and most diversified economies. In South Africa, China is the dominant trade partner, but it limits its imports to gold, base ores, diamonds, and platinum. Nigeria exports relatively little to China, but only because China lifts crude oil from other sources. In both cases, China is the largest exporter of a huge variety of sophisticated goods.

The case of Guinea-Conakry illustrates the evolution of China’s position as offtaker. In December 2025, the first shipment of iron ore from the Simandou complex left for China. This was the culmination of nearly two decades of development and US$20 billion of investment. Bringing Simandou’s enormous, high-quality reserves to production required 600 kilometers of new railway and a deep-water port built from scratch. Chinese firms found themselves negotiating with a new government after a military coup in 2021. At full capacity, it will deliver roughly 10% of China’s imports, directly displacing existing Australian supply.

In terms of corporate organization, the Simandou industrial complex consists of joint ventures between Chinese firms, Western firms, and the Guinean government. The mine’s southern blocks are held by Simfer (British-Australian Rio Tinto 45%, Chinalco 40%, Guinean government 15%), while the northern blocks are operated by the Winning Consortium (Singaporean Winning International Group 45%, China Hongqiao Group 35%, Guinean firm United Mining Supply 20%, with the Guinean government holding an additional 15% profit share). The shared rail and port infrastructure is owned by the Compagnie du TransGuinéen, split between Simfer (42.5% ownership), Winning Consortium (42.5%), and the government (15%).

Chinese firms are the largest stakeholders overall, but they are operating inside a conventional, if complex, commercial structure alongside a major Anglo-Australian mining house. There has been considerable evolution since the 2010s; Simandou is not an opaque minerals-for-infrastructure deal. Rio Tinto’s presence provides cover from geopolitical headwinds, while the Guinean government stake gives the regime an incentive to make the project work. The early Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) model was sovereign lending bundled with engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) contractors. The Simandou model demonstrates equity participation alongside Western majors.^[22]

In the space of a decade, Chinese engagement with African commodities can be divided into three phases. The first consisted of bulk sovereign lending under opaque terms. Infrastructure was exchanged for mineral access under opaque state-to-state deals. The second phase has seen Chinese firms take direct equity in assets.

The third phase began in 2022. Beijing established the China Mineral Resources Group (CMRG) to coordinate Chinese iron ore purchases as an attempt to exert pricing power over a difficult market. CMRG has already secured favorable terms from some Western suppliers. Simandou complements this policy on the supply side.^[23]

The Creditor

The scale of Chinese lending to Africa has been enormous. Between 2000 and 2024, Chinese state institutions committed approximately US$180 billion to 49 African governments, comparable to US$210 billion committed by the World Bank over the same period.^[24] The two main vehicles are the Export-Import (Exim) Bank of China and the China Development Bank (CDB). These are policy banks which combine state control with commercial balance sheets. Exim provides roughly 60% of commitments through concessional loans and preferential buyer’s credits denominated in US dollars. CDB operates at slightly higher rates on nominally commercial terms. Unlike Western states and multilateral institutions, China has never clearly distinguished development, aid, and commercial behavior.^[25]

President Xi Jinping announced the now famous BRI in 2013. For the subsequent decade, the BRI dominated discourse on Beijing’s growing influence in the region. During the peak BRI years of 2013–2018, annual commitments regularly exceeded US$10 billion, reaching US$28.8 billion in 2016. Some observers considered the policy grand strategic thinking, while others theorized it was an attempt to snare African states in “debt trap diplomacy.”^[26]

The fundamental causes are more innocuous. China’s internal drive to export necessitates a current account surplus and managed exchange rate. These policies generate massive foreign exchange reserves, which peaked at roughly US$4 trillion in 2014 and need to be recycled.^[27] Simultaneously, there was, from the Chinese perspective, a long-term market niche. Since the 1990s, multilateral institutions had shifted away from financing dams, railways, and power plants, which left a gap of US$100 billion per year.^[28] This created an incentive to deploy capital in USD-denominated lending. Chinese policy banks and SOEs responded with a model that bundled sovereign lending, Chinese EPC contracting, and the export of Chinese capital goods.

Aside from a few notable successes, China’s financial return has been modest, estimated at 1.7% across all BRI projects.^[29] In Africa, the policy banks have often taken losses, while exuberant lending has given way to the more prosaic task of extracting debt service.

The policy banks began to decrease their lending in 2018. By 2020, new Chinese financing commitments to Africa had fallen to US$1.9 billion. By 2022, new loans totaled less than US$1 billion. CDB issued zero loans to Africa in 2021. More than half of the modest US$4.6 billion committed in 2023 went to African multilateral banks and Egyptian state banks rather than sovereign borrowers.^[30]

The case of Zambia illustrates this entire arc. From 2011 onward, the country contracted US$6.6 billion in Chinese debt to fund infrastructure projects like the Kafue Gorge hydropower station and Lusaka’s international airport.^[31] Zambia defaulted on its debt in November 2020, the first of a wave of African sovereign defaults.^[32] It sought treatment under the G20’s then-untested debt-restructuring principles, known as the Common Framework, in February 2021.^[33] China, having effectively undermined previous debt treatments, agreed to participate in good faith with the “traditional” creditors.

Nevertheless, Zambia’s restructuring took more than three years. Chinese claims were spread across 18 distinct Chinese creditors: Exim, CDB, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, other state-owned commercial banks, and at least one SOE that had lent directly.^[34] Each held different terms, collateral, and incentives. Unlike with Western creditors, there was no single Chinese negotiating counterpart. CIDCA, the foreign aid agency established only in 2018, had no authority over any of them.^[35]

Belt and Road loans have bound together Chinese creditors, their debtors, and even other creditors in long-term mutual dependence. In many cases, creditor status exposed China to the unenviable position of coercion by other creditors and even by the debtor itself. In Zambia, China at first vetoed debt suspension and then pushed for the IMF and World Bank to share in its losses. The latter would have upended decades of precedent. Western governments refused, and eventually China was forced to participate under their terms. The final deal, finalized in late 2023, saw China extend the repayment period of its loans through 2043.^[36]

In a few cases, debt trap diplomacy has trapped the lender. In the DRC, President Tshisekedi renegotiated an infamous minerals-for-infrastructure deal between state firm Sicomines and Exim Bank, extracting billions in additional commitments from Chinese partners whose assets were in the ground.^[37] Many African sovereigns have ambitious plans to force Chinese miners to begin refining domestically—a concession Indonesia negotiated successfully. None have succeeded yet.

More recently, some observers have speculated that China is attempting to institutionalize the renminbi (RMB) as a reserve currency, competing with the US dollar. There are more than a few supporting episodes: Kenya’s conversion of its Standard Gauge Railway loan from USD to RMB, Gabon’s reserve diversification, and Zambia’s acceptance of RMB for certain tax payments.^[38] There is no sign of an alternative architecture, even with these trivial instances. In these cases, China’s banks have sought to maximize their debt recovery and minimize the costs of their own borrowing on the Chinese market.

For the RMB to function as a clearing or reserve currency in Africa, commodity exports would need to be invoiced in RMB, central banks would need liquid RMB assets, and the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) would need to extend swap lines at scale. None of these conditions hold. There is no evidence that BRICS or other grand narratives play a role in these decisions. For now, China’s goals are political, industrial, and financial—not monetary.

Conclusion

China is likely to remain the dominant political and economic actor on the African continent for the foreseeable future. Its trade position alone ensures this: Even if the financial role of the RMB and Chinese policy banks were to contract materially, the sheer volume of commodity offtake, infrastructure financing, and manufacturing export that China directs toward the continent would preserve its structural primacy. The Zambia case captures this dynamic in full. From its early Belt and Road lending through the agonizing debt restructuring that concluded only in late 2023, China demonstrated both the reach of its financial entanglement and its capacity, however reluctantly deployed, to anchor that entanglement in durable long-term arrangements. Chinese creditors now hold claims on Zambia’s external debt extending to 2043, while Chinese mining and construction firms remain embedded in the country’s most critical infrastructure. That entrenchment is not incidental; it is the point.

Growing American interest in both Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo reflects Washington’s belated recognition of what Beijing grasped a generation earlier: The continent’s critical mineral endowments are a defining variable in the long-term competition between great powers. In the DRC, that recognition runs hard against an uncomfortable reality. As Kinshasa itself has noted in its debut Eurobond prospectus, “China is the DRC’s largest bilateral creditor and an important trade partner, and an adverse impact on the Chinese economy may directly impact the Congolese economy, its balance of payments, and its fiscal position” [emphasis added].^[39] Competing with a partner so deeply embedded in the state’s financial architecture is not a simple substitution problem. It requires a sustained commitment of alternative finance, technical assistance, and diplomatic capital that the United States has, to date, struggled to provide at the necessary scale. Finding a credible and durable way to offer African states a genuine alternative to Chinese capital and Chinese terms remains the primary strategic challenge for Washington in its engagement with the continent.

While China is the preeminent player, Russia is the most disruptive actor and the one most directly motivated to target Western economic and security interests. Libya illustrates this with clarity. Russia’s intervention there was not driven by any meaningful commercial interest in the country’s economy; it was driven by the opportunity to establish a forward military and political position in a state whose collapse had created a vacuum that Western powers had helped produce and then declined to fill. The deployment of Wagner forces in support of Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army placed Russian assets within reach of the central Mediterranean, complicated NATO’s southern flank, and gave Moscow leverage over the migration flows that European governments regard as an existential domestic political pressure. The return on investment, measured in geopolitical disruption relative to financial outlay, was exceptional.

This model has proven adaptable. Russia has demonstrated a consistent pattern of moving quickly when political turbulence creates an opening, whether in the Sahel states examined in this report or further afield. Madagascar has been a recent example: As domestic political tensions have risen, Russian actors have sought to establish footholds through a combination of political financing, disinformation operations, and offers of security assistance to factions positioned to benefit from instability. The pattern is recognizable because it is deliberate. Russia does not need to win everywhere. It only needs to be present when states are vulnerable, to extract what it can while conditions permit, and to leave behind a web of dependency and distrust that complicates Western reengagement long after the immediate crisis has passed. Turbulence, in the Russian calculus, is not a problem to be solved but a resource to be harvested.

Appropriately, recent events have proven the Russian model fragile. A jihadist offensive in Mali, which began on April 25 and is ongoing as of writing, has forced the Africa Corps to withdraw from several bases.^[40] It has likely lost its gold mining concession at Intahaka to the insurgents. Rather than acting as a stabilizing security partner, Russia raided Mali for private enrichment and diplomatic alignment.

In Africa, China and Russia are neither strategically equivalent nor a single unified threat to be managed by a single policy framework. Beijing and Moscow are not the same actor, do not pursue the same objectives on the continent, and are not operating as a coordinated bloc in Africa today any more than they do elsewhere. The absence of meaningful Russian-Chinese coordination in supporting their respective partners—most notably in Venezuela and Iran, where both Moscow and Beijing maintain significant stakes but have conspicuously failed to act in concert—has given the United States genuine structural advantages in navigating these relationships. Washington has been able to apply differentiated pressure, engage selectively, and exploit the divergent interests of the two powers in ways that a more coordinated adversary would foreclose.

Forcing that coordination to deepen by treating China and Russia as a single combined adversary—thereby giving Beijing an incentive to provide Moscow with diplomatic cover, financial backing, and operational alignment in Africa that it does not currently offer—would squander that advantage. A policy that drove China and Russia into closer alignment on the continent would not merely make the African challenge harder; it would risk accelerating the consolidation of a genuinely coordinated Sino-Russian bloc with consequences that extend far beyond Africa itself.

^[1] On Russia’s reactive posture in Africa, see Samuel Ramani, Russia in Africa: Resurgent Great Power or Bellicose Pretender? (Hurst, 2023); and Maximilian Hess, “Russia’s Mercenary Diplomacy in Africa,” Foreign Policy Research Institute, 2022.

^[2] Russia’s grain and fertilizer exports to Africa have grown significantly since 2022. Africa’s share of Russian exports doubled from 2.5% to nearly 5% in 2023, with the value of this trade rising 43% to US$21.2 billion.

^[3] Boston University Global Development Policy Center, Chinese Loans to Africa Database.

^[4] If completed, the El Dabaa nuclear power plant in Egypt will prove to be its largest development finance project.

^[5] On the fragmented nature of Chinese overseas finance, see Shahar Hameiri, “China, International Competition and the Stalemate in Sovereign Debt Restructuring,” International Affairs, March 2024; and Wu and Chen, “China’s Creditor Diversification in Africa,” ODI Global, October 2024.

^[6] U.S. Congressional Research Service, “Russia’s Security Operations in Africa,” IF12389, updated April 2025.

^[7]Nima Elbagir, Barbara Arvanitidis, Tamara Qiblawi, and Gianluca Mezzofiore, “Russia is plundering gold in Sudan to boost Putin’s war effort in Ukraine,” CNN, July 29, 2022.

^[8]Antonio Giustozzi, “A Mixed Picture: How Mali Views the Wagner Group,” RUSI, March 27, 2024.

^[9] Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed mutiny in June 2023 and his subsequent death in August 2023 triggered a formal reorganization. Wagner’s African operations were assumed by the Africa Corps, a paramilitary structure subordinate to Russian military intelligence (GRU). See U.S. Congressional Research Service, “Russia's Security Operations in Africa,” updated April 2025.

^[10] Saikou Jamme, “Mali Rebels Deal Major Blow to Junta and Russian Mercenaries,” The New York Times, April 27, 2026.

^[11] Anthony Milewski, “Russia’s Military Scramble for African Critical Minerals,” The Oregon Group, August 2024.

^[12] Ibid.

^[13] RFE/RL, “Wagner Fanta: Russia’s Defunct Mercenary Group Hopes to Make a Killing on Bottled Water,” March 28, 2025.

^[14] United Nations Conference on Trade & Development, World Investment Report (2025), June 2025.

^[15] Uralchem, “Uralchem-Uralkali’s humanitarian consignment for Kenya begins its sea journey from the EU,” April 22, 2023.

^[16] Pjotr Sauer, “Putin promises free grain to six African nations after collapse of Black Sea deal,” The Guardian, July 27, 2023

^[17] Polina Ivanova and Jacob Judah, “Russian crypto payment system expands into Africa,” Financial Times, April 6, 2026.

^[18] Associated Press, “Peace, Food and Fertilizer: African Leaders’ Challenge Heading to Talks with Moscow, Kyiv,” May 21, 2023

^[19] Ngundu and Ciliers, “AFI: African Futures,” Institute for Security Studies, October 2025.

^[20]  Paul Nantulya, “China’s Critical Minerals Strategy in Africa,” Africa Center for Strategic Studies, December 2025.

^[21] In January 2020, Indonesia banned the export of unprocessed nickel ore, compelling Chinese firms to invest in domestic smelting. This succeeded due to Indonesia’s scale. For a discussion, see Guberman et al., “Export Restrictions on Minerals and Metals: Indonesia’s Export Bank of Nickel,” USITC, February 2024.

^[22] For a systematic treatment of the “levelling up” of Chinese overseas finance, see Muyang Chen, The Latecomer’s Rise: Policy Banks and the Globalization of China’s Development Finance, Cornell University Press, June 2024.

^[23] Pascale Massot, “China Moves to Regain Iron Ore Market Power,” East Asia Forum, December 2025; and Melanie Burton, “Inside Beijing’s Bid to Tame the Global Iron Ore Market,” Reuters, December 2025.

^[24] Boston University Global Development Policy Center, Chinese Loans to Africa Database.

^[25] For a short summary of the multiple aims of policy banks, see Parks et al., “Banking on the Belt and Road,” AidData, 2021.

^[26] “Debt trap diplomacy” was coined in 2017 to describe allegedly predatory behavior where excessive extension of credit would allow China to extract concessions, such as the seizure of major assets. It was popularized in 2018 by incorrect New York Times reporting on Sri Lanka’s Hambantota port concession. Some observers analogized China to the early 20th century US, which intervened militarily to protect its citizens’ overseas property. See Deborah Brautigam, “A Critical Look at Chinese ‘Debt-Trap Diplomacy,’” Area Development and Policy, May 2020; and Noel Maurer, The Empire Trap (Princeton University Press), August 2013.

^[27] Brad Setser, “China’s New Currency Playbook,” Council on Foreign Relations, February 2024.

^[28] African Development Bank, “African Economic Outlook,” various years.

^[29] Christoph Trebesch, “The Financial Returns on China’s Belt and Road,” World Bank, July 2024.

^[30] Boston University GDP Center, “A New State of Lending: Chinese Loans to Africa,” September 2023.

^[31] Deborah Brautigam, “How Zambia and China Co-Created a Debt ‘Tragedy of the Commons,’” SAIS-CARI, October 2021.

^[32] Ghana defaulted in December 2022, Ethiopia in December 2023.

^[33] The G20 Common Framework was adopted in November 2020 to provide a structure for relief to low-income countries with unsustainable debt. For a fuller account of Zambia’s default, see Martin Kessler, “The Road to Zambia’s Default,” Finance for Development Lab, June 2023.

^[34] Deborah Brautigam, “How Zambia and China Co-Created a Debt ‘Tragedy of the Commons,’” SAIS-CARI, October 2021.

^[35] Brad Setser, “The Common Framework and its Discontents,” Council on Foreign Relations, March 2023.

^[36] Charles Ho Wang Mak, “Sovereign Debt Restructuring in Zambia: A Chinese Approach,” Oxford Business Law Blog, October 2025.

^[37] Jevans Nyabiage, “Chinese Firms Agree to Raise Investment in Democratic Republic of Congo Copper-Cobalt Mining Deal,” South China Morning Post, February 2024.

^[38] Umesh Moramudali, “How Is China’s Overseas Lending Changing in a Post-Default Era?,” The Diplomat, January 2026.

^[39] Democratic Republic of Congo, “Global Medium Term Note Program – Prospectus,” London Stock Exchange, April 2026. pp. 18. https://www.rns-pdf.londonstockexchange.com/rns/6796Z_1-2026-4-8.pdf

^[40] Liam Karr, “Fall of Kidal—What JNIM’s Latest Offensive Means for Mali’s Future,” AEI Critical Threats Project, April 28, 2026.

This publication was funded in 2025 by the Russia Strategic Initiative, U.S. European Command. The views expressed in this publication do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of War or the United States Government