(TibetanReview.net, Aug09’24) – China is in an all-out soft-power conquest of Africa effort, building infrastructures, providing aid and loan, establishing party-to-party relations, cultivating political leaders, and building political schools to promote its governance and development model and ideology. The idea is to mould African leaders and citizens to think and act pro-China on the global stage, including on issues like Tibet, human rights, minority rights, and democracy.
Kenya’s ruling United Democratic Alliance (UDA) is the latest African political party to benefit from China’s soft power push to promote its development model and ideology on the continent, reported the scmp.com Aug 8.
UDA officials visiting China in May clinched a deal with the Communist Party of China (CPC) to build a leadership school for the Kenyan party in Nairobi. Chinese officials had previously held talks about setting up the school when they visited Kenya in March, the report noted.
Paul Nantulya, a China specialist at the National Defence University’s Africa Centre for Strategic Studies in Washington, has said the CPC had stepped up training of party and government officials in Africa. He has pointed to the Nyerere School in Tanzania, which trains ruling party members from the Former Liberation Movements of Southern Africa coalition – from Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania and Zimbabwe.
He has said many African political parties had approached the CPC to build their schools and help strengthen party building. He has cited Burundi, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Morocco and Uganda as some of those counties.
The CPC has already provided US$40 million to build the Mwalimu Julius Nyerere Leadership School in Kibaha, named after Tanzania’s revered founding father, which opened in 2022. Beijing also supported the refurbishment of the Herbert Chitepo School of Ideology in Zimbabwe – the political training school of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front – that was completed last year, the report noted.
China seemed to be following the model it used in Ghana, where it provided successive ruling parties with political leadership training since 2018, Nantulya has said in a report published by the Africa Centre for Strategic Studies on Jul 29.
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While China had built or supported African party schools since the 1960s, the Nyerere School was the first to be modelled on the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Party School, which trains its top cadres and leaders, he has said.
He has said China is expected to receive more than 50 African party delegations this year – double the number hosted in 2015.
According to Nantulya, the activities of China’s National Academy of Governance – the external name for the CPC Central Party School – were less noticeable. Although it does not have bricks-and-mortar schools it conducts year-round training with governance academies in countries including Algeria, Ethiopia, Kenya and South Africa.
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However, despite China’s economic growth, many Africans are not convinced by the country’s political model. “Nearly 80% reject one-party rule,” Nantulya has pointed out.
“Yet, as many African scholars argue, China’s party and governance training has the potential to entrench single, dominant party models in Africa.”
He has noted that the CPC has ongoing relations with 110 African ruling and opposition parties, 35 parliaments and 59 politically oriented organisations including party think tanks. In fact, it had conducted exchanges, party building and training with every African ruling party except for eSwatini, which recognises Taiwan.
Lina Benabdallah, an associate professor in the politics and international affairs department at Wake Forest University in the US, has said that for African nations, China’s willingness to financially endorse leadership or party schools remain a lucrative opportunity.
“It remains to be seen whether these schools actually display an ideological alignment with China in content or whether they are in fact independent and just the building and the outside structure are China-influenced.”
Yun Sun, co-director of the East Asia programme and director of the China programme at the Stimson Centre in Washington, has cited the example of Ethiopia to note that China may not necessarily get what it wants from these efforts.
“Ten years ago, the Chinese called Ethiopia the best student of the China model in Africa,” Sun has said. “But I don’t think the Chinese still refer to the case of Ethiopia anymore.”
Still, Benjamin Barton, an associate professor at the University of Nottingham’s Malaysia campus, has said building party schools was part of the CPC’s soft power efforts in Africa.
The construction of these schools also “come in handy not just in promoting a positive image of China globally but they are important for Beijing in terms when it comes to debunking certain myths (or what Beijing sees as untruths) about the CPC,” he has said.
Barton has said that under the aegis of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, Beijing had placed a lot of emphasis on African youth leadership, a calculated move aimed at positively influencing the leaders of tomorrow on the continent as well.