How China used loans and infrastructure to transform Africa’s development

Illustration showing China’s infrastructure projects across Africa, including railways, ports, and trade routes.

Major European powers turned their close attention to the Black Continent only in the second half of the 19th century. However, they coped with the colonial division of Africa very quickly. 

By 1900, only two states remained south of the Sahara, which could be considered to some extent independent. Liberia, founded by Black American slave settlers who had returned from the US, and Ethiopia, ruled by the Abyssinian emperors. 

By the beginning of World War I, the seizure of part of the African continent by Europeans of the northern, Arab part had virtually ended. For most territories, this colonial period in their history was not too long. 

Already in the 1950s, an avalanche-like process of gaining independence by new countries began, the culmination of which began in 1960, the Year of Africa, when 17 former colonies became independent at once.

However, the majority of new states experienced unrest and unstable governments.

Coup after coup in the African continent turned into another arena of confrontation between two political and socio-economic systems: the capitalist, led by the United States government, and the socialist, under the Soviet Union.

One of the minor, but at the same time, independent players in Africa has become the People’s Republic of China. China built communism, but Chairman Mao, especially after an epic row with Nikita Khrushchev, had his own vision. 

Beijing first supported the movement of African states for independence, and after they gained it, began to provide the newly independent countries with all possible economic assistance.

The first major Chinese project in Africa was the railway linking the port of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania with the Zambian city of Kapiri-Mposhi. 

In just five years, 1970-1975, 50,000 engineers and builders from the People's Republic of China, mainly military, built a highway 1860 kilometers long, which gave Zambia and its resources, primarily copper ore, access to the sea. 

This super-project, which cost China and its African partners the equivalent of the current $2.5 billion, has remained Beijing’s main investment in the continent for three decades. 

In China, there was a cultural revolution, then Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms began, and again, this state turned to Africa in the 21st century, when this heavy political influence and practically unlimited economic resources allowed it to do so.

The Chinese returned to the Black Continent in triumph, deploying vigorous activity in dozens of countries at once. In 1980, the Sino-African trade was estimated at $1 billion; in 1999, it reached $6.5 billion, and in the year 2000, it exceeded $10 billion. 

Then it grew at an enormous pace every year: 2006, $55 billion; 2010, $114 billion; and to date, this figure has taken a mark of $200 billion. Now, the People's Republic of China is, by a large margin, the most important trade and economic partner of the whole of Africa, a source of credits and economic and engineering assistance.

For many countries, such attention from Beijing has become real salvation. With the end of the Cold War, the financial flows to the African continent continued, resulting in the opposing superpowers losing Africa.

The Soviet Union collapsed, and the interest of the United States and its European partners also declined proportionally. In the absence of an alternative socio-economic model, it was no longer necessary to support regimes, the odiousness of some of which reached a critical point. This vacant niche was occupied by China in the 21st century.

For 15 years, 2000–2015, the People's Republic of China has invested almost $100 billion in various African countries. The scope of even current projects is amazing. 

On January 1, 2018, the Addis Ababa-Ethiopia and the Djibouti railways were officially commissioned. 760 kilometers of the main line were built from 2011. The project was built on Chinese loans, with the budget exceeding $3 billion.

As usual, the loans were associated with certain conditions. The contractors were the largest Chinese construction corporations; the rolling stock purchased for the road was also made in China.

 

Even the final point of the road through which Ethiopia will continue to export its products through the new port of Doraleh in Djibouti was built on the same Chinese money.

China’s return to Africa in the 21st century was not accidental but strategic. As Western interest declined after the Cold War, Beijing stepped into a vacuum with a model built on loans, infrastructure, and long‑term economic partnerships. 

These projects, from railways to ports, have undeniably accelerated development in many African states, giving landlocked nations access to global trade and modernizing critical sectors. Yet this partnership also raises important questions about debt, sovereignty, and dependency. 

What is clear, however, is that China has become the most influential external actor on the continent, reshaping Africa’s economic landscape in ways that neither Europe nor the United States attempted after independence. 

Whether this influence ultimately empowers Africa or binds it to new forms of reliance will depend on how African governments negotiate, manage, and leverage these relationships in the decades ahead.

The untold history that shaped Africa: Power, resistance, and survival

 

Bushmen of Mozambique and Botswana demonstrating traditional survival skills in a hot, arid landscape.

It is passed but remains an era that can’t be forgotten, as well as wounds that can't heal. In different historical periods, under different regimes, Libya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Algeria, Congo, Mozambique, and Angola are some of the African countries that flowed with a long trail of blood.

 

In an inconvenient truth, which can’t be erased, European colonialists—Belgium, Spain, Holland, and Portugal, as well as Great Britain and Germany, currently fighting against the coronavirus to protect their citizens—once were terrorists that pillaged countries, subjected Africans to subhuman conditions, and plundered the continent’s natural wealth.

 

This ruthless colonialism force, with an iron fist, erased, buried in oblivion, and massacred civilians and set the cities and villages on fire. Without sympathy, they displaced the populations and promoted ethnic cleansing, sending thousands, including women and children, into their untimely graves.

 

If the African continent had a voice, with effective and competent leaders, or if foreign governments really cared about Africa, they would have carried out research and documented all the crimes and atrocities, including the opening of pregnant women’s bellies, impaled fetuses, the rape and torture of indigenous young people, and the carrying around of victims' heads as trophies.

 

King Leopold II killed over ten million Africans and was later glorified with statues and streets named after him throughout Belgium. The Belgian government and the royal family think he deserves it because his looting and crimes have made Belgium rich today.

 

These inhuman acts against humanity have all passed unnoticed and unpunished because those who made the law are the breakers of the law themselves, and at the same time, why should any foreign country get punished if crimes are committed against Black people?

 

That’s the nature of a world where elites never go to jail for the crimes they commit against the underprivileged and poor people. That's the nature of a world without the truth and a world where you'll lose all your friends because of the truth. That's the nature of a world where you will be oppressed and cast out from society because of the truth.

 

The colonial masters and the US government destroyed everything in Africa, without achieving anything significant for the continent. Even after giving Africa financial assistance, they devised plans to take resources that are worth more than the financial assistance they give, since they control the world trade and tell Africans what they want to pay.

Medical tragedies

The medical world is dangerous and corrupt. Politicians and health professionals collaborate to commit medical crimes against others because their goal is to generate profit and conquer, subdue, and control the weak and the vulnerable, who appear mostly to be people in Third World countries.

But do we have to call victims of suppression weak?" Not at all; they are strong people. Because they are strong, the so-called 'superpower' fears their presence and does everything physically and medically to subdue them.

There are reasons it has been the task of America and Western Europe to subdue Africa and keep it under their control. To have power over Africa's rich mineral resources, a suitable way to achieve this goal is to use slavery, apartheid, colonization, and medical crimes.

This fact is confirmed after the independence of the Congo. The desperate and disappointed Belgian government and the greedy royal family, not knowing how the future of Belgium could be, collaborated with the CIA, and the newly elected Prime Minister of Congo, Patrice Lumumba, was murdered in cold blood.


HIV, the virus causing AIDS, is said to be transmitted in semen and blood and originated in Africa. If this claim is true, why had HIV not depopulated Africa at an earlier stage? Why had it not spread earlier to the colonizer countries of Great Britain, France, Belgium, and Portugal? 


All biological weapons and the deliberate spread of diseases in Africa are acts of revenge against Africa because Western Europe lost Africa after independence swept through the continent. Zimbabwe was the last country to gain its independence in 1980, and after it was discovered that thousands of the population had HIV/AIDS.


It's a shame for a particular continent to suffer at the hands of people who have no regrets, conscience, or integrity, and actually feel proud of the crimes they have committed on the continent of Africa. 

How do Africans live, and how do they survive every kind of tragedy? That should be the ultimate question for Europe and America to give Africans the respect they deserve. 


What Africans have experienced and survived has made them the toughest creatures on earth. National Geographic shows documentary films showing how to survive without water or when lost in the desert. 


Africans don't need lessons for survival. The bushmen in Mozambique and Botswana will teach Bear Grylls how to survive in hot temperatures without food and water for several days. 

The Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, who could survive hard life in rough environments, are the pride of Africa when it comes to real survival, not the fake ones shown on national television.


Hurting Africa, one must say that they tried to create an impression that everything is normal because everyone was doing it, but that's not true. Apart from America, the European countries that committed both physical and medical crimes in Africa are Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium; it is not the whole of Europe.

The expert scientists maintain that enslavement was a common inner-African practice. But enslavement was enhanced by European guns to kill, and the use of bioweapons from Europe to weaken and change the minds of victims.

 

The widely claimed inner-African slave trade is a racist myth. Accurate data are claimed to be hardly obtainable. There are none. 

Ninety percent of the captives perished on transports in Africa. Dr. Livingston guessed that at least nine out of ten people died before being taken from the coast of Africa as slaves. 

 

This is supposed to have been the result of tribal feuds and headship practices customary in Africa. Africans, allegedly, sold Africans or other Africans who had enslaved themselves. 

 

Certainly, neither indigenous rulers nor traders were able to or had the power to hold such murders and abductions at that brutal rate. If this had been the case, Africa would have been depopulated before the European-North American attacks.

 

Supposedly, the 30 million survivors let themselves be voluntarily sold by their African rulers into slavery. Slave traders and slavery allegedly had been a gang and gift in Africa. 

 

A supply of enslaved persons would be transported from the interior of Africa to the coast of Africa through African slave traders. And this surplus offer had allegedly sought to be taken over through European handlers. But every sixth slave ship was destroyed by people living on the coast. 

 

For the men hunting from East Africa, in children's books and scientific articles, the Black evildoers were replaced by Arabs or Arab-Muslim slave hunters.

 

Allegedly, they had taken, since 652 AD, 17 million slaves for slavery in Islamic countries. The men from non-Muslim specialists in Abyssinia and Upper Egypt were allegedly castrated. 

 

Children of enslaved African women and Arabian slaveholders would have been killed. That should be the reason that rather few dark-skinned people are living in the former Arab slave states.

 

The chief editor of "Charlie Hebdo," Stephane Charbonnier, accused the Muslim Arabs of being the creators of slavery. He denied “that the Jews had started the slave trade; everyone knows that it was the Muslim Arabs.” The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung paid tribute to this assertion.