Like all his predecessors since 1991, Qin Gang, China’s new foreign minister, began the year with a tour of Africa. For a week, from January 9 to 16, the man who was China’s ambassador to the United States until the end of December visited five African countries: Ethiopia, Gabon, Angola, Benin and Egypt. If no spectacular announcement was made during this trip, it helped to strengthen ties, both economic and diplomatic, between China and Africa.
In Ethiopia, Qin Gang inaugurated the new headquarters of the African Union Center for Disease Control (Africa CDC), funded and built by China, as Beijing pledged at the 2018 China-Africa Summit. China had already built the headquarters of the African Union (AU) in Addis Ababa and is preparing to build in Nigeria that of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Qin Gang asserted that Beijing wants the AU to participate in the G20, “a symbolic but clever gesture”, according to researcher Jean-Pierre Cabestan, based in Hong Kong. Obtaining a seat in the G20 is a strong claim of Africans.
On the other hand, the minister remained very cautious about the situation in Ethiopia after the fragile peace agreement concluded in November between the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the insurgents of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). China had appointed a special envoy to the Horn of Africa, but he does not seem to have played a role in the negotiations. More than 400 Chinese companies are present in the country and Qin Gang recalled that Beijing wants Ethiopia “take effective measures” to ensure the safety of its nationals.
Debt trap
While Ethiopia’s debt to China would amount to more than 13 billion dollars (about 12 billion euros), according to a study by the Global Development Policy Center of Boston University, and that Ethiopia announced in 2021 that it wanted to renegotiate its foreign debt, the emissary from Beijing remained evasive on the subject. During a meeting with Moussa Faki Mahamat, chairman of the AU Commission, Qin Gang denied that there was any debt trap. “Africa’s debt problem is fundamentally a development issue”, did he declare.
A sign of the competition between the great powers in the Horn of Africa, Qin Gang had barely left Addis Ababa when the French and German foreign ministers, Catherine Colonna and Annalena Baerbock, paid an official visit there on January 12 and 13.
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