China's Africa Strategy

China is one of the 21st century's most consequential nations. It has never been more important to understand how the country is governed, and what its leaders and its people actually want and believe. Welcome to peckingology, the podcast that unpacks China's evolving political system, and the trajectory of China's domestic and foreign policy. I'm your host, Henrietta Levin, senior fellow with the Freeman Chair in China Studies at CSIS. This is peckingology. I am very pleased to be joined today by Dr. Cobis Ben Staden. Cobis is a managing editor with the China Global South Project, host of the China in Africa podcast, and a leading scholar of China Africa relations. As we look ahead to President Xi Jinping's probable travel to South Africa for the G20 summit later this month, I thought it would be a great time to unpack China's Africa strategy, and I am thrilled that Cobis has agreed to help us do that. So Cobis, it is wonderful to see you. It's fantastic to be here. Thanks for having me. We like to start all of our episodes with a personal question. So how did you originally become interested in studying China Africa relations, and how did you get to this point in your career? I started off in Japan studies, actually, and I did my grad school work in Japan, focusing on Japanese-driven media globalization and a link to that, the use of media and pop culture in Japanese public diplomacy. So I looked at flows of Japanese media to Africa and the ways that pop culture was used in promoting Japan in Africa. But when I came back to South Africa after being in grad school, it was the heyday of the emerging China-Africa relationship. So China was everywhere. Skylines were looking different due to China, different African cities. So it was as fascinating, clearly historical moment, and I started doing comparative work between Chinese media diplomacy and Japanese media diplomacy, which was quite different. China was very quite conservative, focusing on state media, Japan was all otaku kind of anime cosplay, etc. You know, that kind of pop culture promotion. And so as part of that comparison, I became very interested in Chinese relations with Africa, and so I started focusing on that more and more. And year I am years later, I'm still doing that. Well to dive into it, how would you characterize China's strategy in Africa today? I think to see it as part of a wide strategy of China building a kind of a community of influence or a network of allies throughout the global South. Africa, I think, constitutes the heart of the global South in lots of ways. And China has had a long history of anti-colonial solidarity with Africa. And so, you know, continuing Chinese influence in a continent with 54 UN votes. You know, as the global South becomes more and more central, I think, as you know, kind of to global communities, global voices, the global economy, as you know, as the century progresses. I think China is making this kind of bet on the future, that the rising powers around the world are going to have more and more influence than that China's earlier solidarities positions, it very fruitfully, to be at the center of this kind of global emerging network of developing countries. So I think I think to see it from that perspective rather than as an example of extractivism, while, you know, kind of aspects of extraction economies are clearly obviously present in the relationship. It's a great perspective, and I think we can sometimes get stuck, at least in Washington on that extractive element of the strategy when there are much broader political ambitions at play as well. So the marquee moment in China-Africa relations is Bokak, or the forum on China-Africa cooperation, which meets at the leader level every three years, most recently in 2024. What came out of that last Bokak summit, and were the African leaders happy with what they got? It was an interesting Bokak, because in the past, Bokak used to commit very public to very large single funding goals. In this case, the funding goal was somewhat more diffuse, but overall, I think African leaders were quite happy with the outcome. So Chinese project lending to Africa had declined a lot from roughly 2017 till the end of the COVID pandemic. And so this summit marked a kind of return of some of that funding, a return of engagement after the zero COVID shutdown in China. It also positioned a set of new kind of dynamics and new narratives in China's cooperation more broadly in the global south, but particularly with Africa. So there was a strong focus now on green industrialization, on electrification, and on technological and modernization cooperation. And that has, of course, been a long term kind of theme in China, but that particularly green energy as a theme really came out very strongly after the COVID shutdown. So in that sense, I think it demonstrated a recommitment to African industrialization. I think that African countries were satisfied or happy with. And I think it also showed an ongoing trajectory where the African side has more and more kind of say in setting agendas. That has been a long term kind of evolution of the FOCAC process. The last iteration, I think, showed that some of these kind of like talking points were also taken into the decision making. And can you unpack that tug of war between China and its African partners about who is setting the terms of the agenda for the relationship? That is a very interesting kind of process. Really is a kind of a back and forth between them. I think the kind of African agency in the FOCAC process is frequently kind of under explored. China is frequently kind of characterised as being in the driver's seat, you know, of the FOCAC process. And I think in reality it is a much more dialectical kind of back and forth process between African embassies and Beijing, the African Union, individual member states and China. So an example, the first FOCAC gathering was in 2000. For that first decade, China was very business focused. Like it was mostly focused on commercial engagement, infrastructure engagement. And then from the 2012 summit, there was this turn towards a broader form of engagement, including for example, a lot more engagement with security provision, and beekeeping, you know, that kind of work. That turn has largely been framed in my research as having been pushed by the African side. You know, China wasn't necessarily that interested in being, you know, in working security spaces in Africa, but they ended up doing that anyway, mostly under the auspices of the UN. So, you know, that push, I think, is an example of FOCAC agenda being widened by, you know, kind of African engagement. And we've seen that particularly in pushes towards more commitment to industrialisation work and other forms of developmental work, you know, particularly economic development to work. There's been a strong push, you know, in Africa for that kind of cooperation. How does China think and how do the African countries think about the relationship between their regional multilateral engagement, this like China plus region construct? And how does that correspond to China's bilateral engagement with these many individual countries with their diverse national circumstances? There is a kind of a tension between those two. There's been a little bit of a, I think, growing resistance in Africa against the Africa plus one model of engagement, simply because, you know, Africa is a very big place and it's very, very complex. So, it necessarily has to break down into regions, you know, there's a limit to the commonality between the different parts of the continent, even though pan-Africanism is, of course, so it has a strong history in Africa. So, in some ways, you know, the African union, with the natural kind of forum for this kind of engagement, but in a lot of ways, that complexity kind of outstrips the capacity of what the African union can negotiate. And so, it ends up kind of defaulting back to bilateral engagement anyway. And this has been kind of a central weakness, I think, in the folcare process, is that there are these kind of shared goals being put out, but in the end, the actual negotiation comes down to the bilateral. And that is frequently because China also frequently prefers bilateral negotiations because, you know, it's easier to handle in lots of ways. But also, in Africa, particularly in the context of the African union, there is sometimes a weakening of African union solidarities by individual member states, because they are also, you know, they're pushing these kind of national agendas as well. So, that is kind of an ongoing tension that lies at the heart of Africa's external engagement more broadly, particularly in the context of the African continental free trade area, that is essentially the world's largest free trade kind of area now. And this strong push for integration, like different forms of economic integration and formal integration. So, there's attention there between that and the ongoing constraints of particularly key member states, you know, that end up just kind of like outstripping their neighbors in strength and influence, you know, and end up kind of pushing the agenda. So, that is an ongoing issue within African external politics as a whole. So, in many of China's engagements with regional communities around the world, we see that it often wants to kind of appear to support regional coherence, especially when it's most convenient, but then also tries to sometimes exploit those bilateral fissures among the community to gain better leverage or better negotiating position when it comes to really concrete projects. So, do you see China trying to play that game in Africa and with Focac as well, or is that an unfair characterization of their approach? It ends up kind of defaulting to that anyway, you know, because on the African side, there tends to be a kind of a national bilateral default kind of assumption anyway. So, there, I think that kind of power play may definitely be, you know, kind of part of the mix, but it ends up being backed up, I think, from the African side too, because of these pre-existing, kind of like state biases. You know, that does change occasionally when we're talking about cross-border projects, and I think it will increasingly change as a continent itself is starting to focus more on integration. The thing to keep in mind about Africa is African infrastructure was originally bought by colonial kind of powers, and it was bought fully for extraction. And so, the infrastructure also demonstrated or, you know, kind of visualized the incoherence between different colonial regimes, but, you know, kind of within Africa. So, you would have things like like real lines running to the border and then just ending, for example. You know, so there's a lot of this kind of long-term fracturing of African systems that need to be fixed, and they need to be integrated and woven together. So, I think more and more of that will happen, but overall, I think still, this kind of bias towards a kind of a bilateral approach, and each country kind of pushing its own developmental agendas tends to play into whatever kind of like leverage Shine also wants to try and kind of gain from working on a country basis. It is kind of mutually reinforcing, I think. And so, let's dive into Chinese impassament and infrastructure development on the continent. I'd be interested in how you're seeing the latest trends in the RI development in Africa, especially now that many of those early BRI loans are coming, too. You know, obviously, you'd like the BRIs engaged with Africa, but it's really big and very complex. And also, it was very early days in the BRI. In some ways, you know, Africa was a kind of a laboratory for the BRI almost before the BRI was coined, because of the going out policies that preceded the BRI. Some of that could have early kind of trying out this kind of external engagement, but Chinese companies ended up having an app becoming Africa. And so, you know, by the time the BRI was launched, that was already running. So, in a lot of ways, I think one could kind of point to certain kind of failed projects or problematic projects under the BRI banner, and they were certainly many of those. But overall, you know, research that I've seen has also pointed out that in many cases, BRI infrastructure investments had a direct correlation with development or economic growth. So, it's very much a kind of a mixed bag. Some of these projects, I think, were really transformative in making things easier for African countries to then kind of build development on. As we were saying, some of these loans are coming due, but it's also interesting to see how they're ongoing kind of engaged. And despite the loans coming due, and the large kind of like debt repayments happening right now, particularly because some of those loans are now like in that kind of like 10-year, both 10-year kind of moment, a lot of the very large loans, like for example, to Angola and also to Ethiopia, large chunks of that have now actually been repaid. These countries are now actually looking at new kind of like phases of possible additional lending, driven by the increasing possibility of having that lending be R&B denominated. A lot of the kind of classic BRI loans were dollar denominated. Now there is Kenya as two weeks or so ago announced that they managed to have some of their remaining large loans to China changed into R&B, which saves them hundreds of millions of dollars in money. And Ethiopia has announced that they're in talks to also do that in several other African countries. Apparently it talks to do that as well. So, in that sense, we're heading into a new phase, I think, of more financial cooperation between Africa and China. At a moment where China is also for a lot of its own reasons moved away from large sovereign loans as the kind of basis for this infrastructure engagement towards other financial models. So China is acutely aware of the debt impact, I think of this and you know, it's wary for its own reasons of that debt issue. But at the same time, I think they're now moving roughly into their third decade of this kind of cooperation. Despite the BRI only starting in 2013, the kind of pre-BRI phase was already very robust. So I think both sides have also learned a lot, I think from some of these kind of unhappy projects, you know, in the past. And I think we, we've seen a lot of changes, I think, in the model as they're trying to keep it going. And of course China's own economy has evolved quite a bit over this period of time, entering into this third phase where we no longer see break-knack domestic growth. If anything, the economy seems to be stagnating even as it also generates incredibly powerful outcomes when it comes to technology and invasion. And so how does the changing shape of China's economy at home affect its approach to the continent if at all? You know, one of the big kind of discussions that we've had at the Chinese Global South Project over the last few weeks have been now with the newest plenum and the newest kind of five-year plan being announced. One of the points made from, you know, just reading through the kind of coded language has been that China is interested in obviously in developing new fields of growth and economic advancement, but also improving and maintaining basic manufacturing. Oh, that's how I understood it when I saw it. They want to own the whole value chain. Exactly. Exactly. And so China's essentially, you know, moving away from an entire kind of like development orthodoxy, a global development orthodoxy with the idea that, you know, as countries move up kind of industrial value chains, low end manufacturing is going to be off-short at some stage. That seems to not be the case in China at this particular moment. And so with that then, we're in a kind of a larger moment. I think we're a lot of orthodoxies presented to developing countries, but how they should develop or what kind of benchmarks and this kind of path towards developing that they should move towards is really been thrown up in the air, right? So, and so if you think about a country like Vietnam, for example, Vietnam, like there's this amazing graph where you can really see Vietnam's imports from China correlating in the directly with its exports to the US. You know, so it imports a lot of different kind of industrial inputs from China, it assembles stuff in Vietnam and then exports those products to the US. That exporting to the US, exporting to Europe logic from, you know, that drove essentially 25 years of development kind of thinking, you know, it's now not really feasible anymore because of the tariff regime, because of, changes economic changes in the global north of those traditional markets. And so in the process, we're seeing, I think, a large rethink of what this is going to look like. If Africa assume that at some stage Chinese makers of flip flops say are going to move those factories to Africa, that may not happen now, right? And at the same time, China may well be holding on to the flip flop sector of its manufacturing. And those flip flops will still be going to African markets. In fact, they're now more of them going to African markets, you know, now more than ever before, because Chinese you know, exports have ramped up so much. And so I think you've seen a lot of kind of open questions throughout the global south about how they should respond. Like how they should be thinking about exporting to China in the first place, what China would be willing to buy in this particular scenario where this kind of off-slaoring is not happening. And then also how they should be thinking about their domestic markets and how they should be dealing with the traditional markets in Europe and, you know, can the US and so on. So I think we really at a moment, we have a lot of these questions are really kind of hanging in midair, you know, all of these countries are crumbling around to try and see how they're going to make it work. And China seems to be at least to some degree aware of the anxiety that doubling down on this growth model may produce in Africa in that they announced, I think, quite recently, we were going to drop all import duties on goods from Africa. Is that going to meaningfully help with these trade imbalances? How is that viewed as a step in the right direction? I think it was viewed very enthusiastically, particularly because it came on the back of also the announcement of tariffs on the US side. Only a few African countries were really significantly exporting to the US and those countries are now all again scrambling to try and see how they're going to make that work. So the announcement of zero-tariff measures from China I think was was really welcomed. But everyone was also pointing out that just simply scrapping the tariffs is not enough because a lot of these, you know, non-tariff barriers that also make it hard to get into the Chinese market. And so like, for example, different kinds of fighter sanitary barriers, for example, to guard against agricultural pests, for example, it's like to enter the Chinese market as a really honest process. And so Chinese actors have started to do a lot of training for African counterparts to try and get them through this process. It's also sitting on top of an entire architecture of trade facilitation that has been driven by Chinese provinces. So Hunan province particularly, that has been putting up really robust kind of trade facilitation facilities, including like currency trading centers and beneficiation centers, big huge kind of agricultural trade fairs and, you know, and so on. All of this kind of like work, particularly to activate agricultural exports to China. And that has been really also significantly driven by African demand. And African kind of diplomacy behind the scenes to try and kind of push agricultural trade as an engine of jobs growth and development over the mining sector because Africa is overmined. Even though, you know, critical minerals is a key part of that relationship. Africa is very interested in moving beyond mining as, you know, as a way of making money. And so agriculture is a key example of that. And so I think that's a still early days, but I think overall, I think China is really a lot more proactive than I think any other Africa's other major kind of external partners in trying to kind of do work on its own side to try and kind of cover that could cross some of these barriers in order to facilitate, you know, more engagement. You know, the subnational piece of that is this very interesting. Very interesting. So turning back to China's diplomacy in Africa, foreign minister and CFAC Director Wang Yi has continued China's long tradition of ensuring his first international trip of the year every year is a trip to Africa. And of course, within the Chinese system, Wang Yi himself is acquired probably quite a bit more influence than a foreign minister traditionally would. So I'm wondering what role his leadership has played in China's approach to Africa over his increasingly long tenure. You know, it's always tricky to differentiate the person from the larger mechanism, you know, kind of in the party state mechanism in, you know, kind of in Chinese politics, but I think he has been really very successful. I think in building relationships in Africa, in demonstrating this kind of constancy. And I think he's been very nuanced in understanding, I think where African countries are coming from. You know, so like African countries don't get a lot of respect on the international state. Right. Kind of like they're very kind of marginalized. You know, it's, you know, notoriously hard for African stakeholders to, for example, to get any kind of real meetings in DC, for example, right. It's very hard to get FaceTime with the Secretary of State, for example. But when the President of Saberundi goes to China, it's full red carpet, full roll out. So that seems I think just simply into the optics of equality in the world and the optics of kind of valuing African inputs. I think he's been very good. Obviously, he was, you know, Chinggung stepped in for a while and then, you know, kind of like lost that position and one returned into that position. And I think the kind of larger logic of him returning there was kind of re-inscribing, I think, of these relationships. I think there's a default assumption, I think, particularly among African publics that almost all African external relationships are extractive. That is the only reason why external actors engage with Africa is for extraction. And of course, one could kind of like frame the China Africa relationship as extractive. I tend to not see it as that way exclusively, but they certainly are an extractive part of that relationship. But I think Wang has been very successful in heightening the other parts of that relationship, you know, of framing it as a part of larger kind of like global south connections and to then also put development and modernization, I think, at the heart of that. Yeah. And that symbolism can clearly go a long way in strengthening some of these partnerships. So I'm hoping we can also talk about China's relationship with South Africa specifically. Xi Jinping will probably visit Johannesburg for the upcoming G20 summit. So what is China looking to achieve through its partnership with South Africa? And what bilateral announcements might you expect to see in Johannesburg? Yeah, the bilateral announcements will be very interesting. You know, South Africa is obviously a key country. In Africa and in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly. So South Africa is a highly diversified economy. It's very sophisticated banking sector, for example. And so on. So in that sense, South Africa remains a kind of a key partner just on a logistical level. If one is interested in working with both a larger continent, then South Africa is frequently a very logical place to start. At the same time, I think China also sees South Africa as a key middle power. Post-Saharan Africa is really valued having its own funk policy vision. And I think as a middle power, South Africa is frequently punched above its weight in lots of ways, you know, where it's role as an opinion leader in the rest of the world as outspirited. Actually, it's economic power, you know. And so in that sense, like I think South Africa as an opinion set, as a trend set, particularly in Africa and particularly as an emblematic global South country, made that China saw it as a useful partner beyond Africa. So China famously champions South Africa's entry into the BRICS block, for example. And South Africa has jointly worked in COP negotiations, for example, or you know, around a whole bunch of different issues. So that seems I think in lots of ways China is very interested in South Africa as an example of larger global South multiplicity, you know, as an early leader in that kind of multipolar emergence. And as a kind of trend set, I think in a global South more broadly. That said, I think in some cases, the two don't necessarily always understand each other. You know, while South Africa, I think it's a significant competence in dealing with China, I think, you know, China's still quite a far away entity for South Africans. And I think a lot of South Africans feel quite distant from China. Maybe the government less than the people. There's not a lot of kind of organic knowledge of China, for example, among ordinary South Africans. I think sometimes Chinese stakeholders also find South African systems difficult or baffling to deal with. I've heard many complaints from Chinese diplomats, for example, about negotiating like South African, you know, employment equity law, which is very complex and was designed to overcome that baked in engineered kind of discrepancies between different racial groups that came from a party. And so it's a kind of a supercharged form of affirmative action, basically, that brings up a big kind of bureaucratic kind of weight with it. And many Chinese kind of investors have said this is a lot to deal with. So for example, they're not necessarily always on the same page. But I think in some key ways, they really kind of find each other as in a moment of larger kind of global self-solidarities as Western power, it's self-changes, and also as multiplearity becomes more the kind of rule of the road in international relations. And to return to some of those broader economic trends, you were describing earlier in which China is increasingly trying to retain kind of entire value chains within its own economy while doubling down on massive exports of low priced and often quite equality goods that can do real damage to manufacturing sectors around the world. What does all that look like in South Africa? And how is the government trying to deal with it, including in their relationship with China? So electrification, I think, provides kind of an interesting kind of like micro case study of this, right? Kind of so on the one hand. South Africa has its own solo panel industry. Like a small little solo panel industry has a few companies that make their own solo panels. So the South African government has been toying with the idea of putting tariffs on Chinese solo panel imports, trying to kind of grow their own industry. But at the same time, we now also know that a lot of these panel makers or assemblers in South Africa also import some of their raw materials from China. At the same time, South Africa has been going through an ongoing electricity crisis for the last 10 years with a lot of blackouts and brown else. And South African individual citizens, just just private citizens, have imported the equivalent of almost the entire South African installed capacity, bit by bit from China. So Chinese solo panels have been really instrumental in helping individuals, small businesses and individual households to overcome some of these electricity gaps. And that is happening on top of this kind of government wondering what to do in relation to its solo industry. So this is an example. I think it's a very kind of chaotic situation in that sort of way. You kind of a very complex one. And while I think China holding on to these longer supply chains or like the whole of the supply chain, within their own economy, one of the kind of contradictions that we're looking at is how that reality and the kind of China price that comes with that kind of based on the economies of scale that happens within China. In some cases, that is really kind of like hitting sectors in South Africa quite badly. On the other hand, we also seeing that other sectors are really racing ahead on the back of Chinese inputs. You know, there's a lot of kind of like businesses, for example, again, running on just the stability of Chinese electricity, like electricity provision. So it's really this kind of very interesting kind of mixed bag. You know, you can't really see how it's an end. You know, I think a certain sectors are going to be badly affected. But other sectors, I think there are ways in which the country is using Chinese inputs to try to then kind of grow its own businesses in relation to the rest of the continent, for example, in these kind of complicated ways. And at the same time, this is all happening on the back of the collapse of US South Africa diplomacy. So with the falling away of the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which facilitated a lot of auto assembly by companies like Ford in South Africa, and those cars were then exported to the US. Now that that is, you know, on the back of tariffs and the falling apart of a goa, South Africa is in dense negotiations, all of these different like automakers from China to try and kind of fool these gaps and to take over some of these assembly plans, you know, kind of amid expectations that Western car makers are going to be retreating from the scene. It's happening very quickly and it's happening in very kind of complicated ways where certain sectors are suffering and other sectors are being boosted at the same time in these kind of complex interactions with China. South Africa and China have also built a significant military to military relationship. I was reading that the South Africans were talking to Beijing about trying to push back a naval exercise so that it wouldn't coincide precisely with the G20 summit. So how does the PLA view South Africa? The PLA, I think, sees South Africa as a potential partner in its kind of larger kind of military to military diplomacy. I think one reason why South Africa was favored in this way is because it's one of the few countries in the region with, you know, with enough of a navy to be able to do this kind of engagement. We see now that this week, for example, there was also shared military exercises Kenya, for example. So so overall, you know, China, I think, is interested in having as many relationships as it can and PLA diplomacy has dovetailed a lot with training, like training based diplomacy of African militaries right across the continent. So South Africa received some of that training, but it's not the only one. It's like many African officials from all over the continent have received training in China and have had these kind of like relationship building, you know, kind of experiences has gone on. I think overall from the South African side, they see it as an exercise in non-alignment and attempt to try and kind of build relationships, you know, outside of traditional partners in the West. From the Chinese side, it's part of a much larger kind of global drive towards diversifying relationships and building as many of these kind of relationships around the world. But the thing to keep in mind is that South Africa is a small player in this space and the South African navy particularly is quite under-resourced and quite overstretched. So there's very much a limit to how much of this kind of engagement South Africa can do, you know, there's a natural kind of like ceiling there. And the country doesn't really have the capacity to go beyond that, I think. Well, we've gotten through this whole conversation without talking about Taiwan. So I'd be interested in your sense of what is going on with China pressuring South Africa to expel a Taiwan representative office from the capital, Taiwan very unusually struck back at South Africa with export controls that are then withdrew at what do you make of this? So there's been pressuring to this a few years ago in the late 2010s, they were similar pressure in Nigeria to expel the Taipeilias on office from the capital Abuja towards Lagos. And the Nigerian government was kind of put in a similar kind of awkward position and I think they did end up kind of as far as I understand they're moving that office or putting the pressure on the office to move. It's not the first time that this has happened and it's not the first time it's happened in Africa. In South Africa, the issue is slightly more complex because of the history between between Taiwan and South Africa and China. So, you know, South Africa maintained diplomatic relations with Taiwan right throughout the apartheid era. And Taiwan was an interesting kind of actor in that sense that there was a wave of migration and both migration of people and business migration like capital flows from Taiwan to South Africa during the 1970s and 80s. And they still have a significant Taiwanese community in South Africa. And at the same time, Taiwan was also one of these kind of outposts of empire in some ways, you know, in the sense that the apartheid government was propped up by Western power. And that South Africa-Taiwan relationship functioned within the Cold War, you know, as a kind of a binding in a larger global order built around US power. So, when South Africa in 1998 kind of switched to China, there was this multi-decade kind of like relationship with Taiwan that was then abandoned to I think some kind of shagrin within Taiwan. So, I think that that kind of history I think lies behind it and brings a little bit more kind of emotion into it, you know, it fits into the wide, kind of long-term history of South Africa in a partate on the global stage. That partly, I think also is one of the reasons why South Africa-Taiwan relations have carried a kind of a symbolic weight beyond the size of the actual relationship, you know, which remains relatively small. You know, South Africa is a notably kind of a dissueless small economy compared to other countries. But I think, you know, for that reason, I think this, you know, tensions and eruptions with Taiwan and hitting back, you know, kind of with export controls that were then suspended and all of that kind of like crabbyness and the kind of, you know, anger and an emotional kind of valence of all of that kind of lies at the heart of this kind of bigger global impact of what that changed from South Africa to China away from Taiwan actually implied for the entire global order. We will unfortunately have to wrap there, but Kovas, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you so much. This is great to speak with you. To learn more about China's Africa strategy, you can read Kovas' work on the China Global South Project website and tune in to the China in Africa podcast. 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