China’s Miracle at Home, Catastrophe in Africa

I recently travelled to China as a sceptical African observer, shaped by years of watching what I once described as exploitative relationships between Chinese enterprises and African communities. I returned with a fundamentally altered understanding of what China represents, not just for Africa, but for the global development conversation itself.

My transformation began not in Beijing’s gleaming towers but in the pages of three books that reframed what I thought I knew about the Middle Kingdom: James Kynge’s China Shakes the World, Keyu Jin’s The New China Playbook, and Steve Tsang with Olivia Cheung’s The Political Thought of Xi Jinping. They shifted me from suspicion to curiosity, from predetermined judgment to genuine inquiry.

Kynge revealed China’s rise not as the execution of a grand master plan, but as a series of pragmatic responses to crises, beginning with a payments crunch that forced market experimentation. It resonated with Africa’s own development challenges. Jin went further, showing how China has transcended the tired socialism–capitalism binary that has constrained African policy for decades. Her “Mayor Economy,” where ambitious local officials compete for investment and growth within a nationally coordinated framework, offered a third way beyond Washington Consensus orthodoxy.

Most provocatively, Tsang and Cheung examined how Xi Jinping’s civilizational confidence fuels national development. Troubling in its authoritarian implications, Xi’s integration of technological ambition with state control nonetheless proves that modernisation need not require wholesale adoption of Western political models—a lesson with profound implications for Africa.

These intellectual preparations mattered when I confronted China’s urban transformation. Beijing, a metropolis of 21.8 million generating $700 billion in GDP, boasts the world’s most extensive subway system and hosts 54 Fortune Global 500 headquarters—more than any other city. The Zhongguancun “Silicon Valley of China” employs 1.3 million people across 25,000 high-tech enterprises: evidence that developing nations can leapfrog traditional development stages.

Wuxi, with 7.5 million residents, impressed even more. In a decade, it doubled GDP by shifting from textiles to semiconductors, now home to more than 600 chip companies generating 200 billion Yuan annually, 15 per cent of the city’s economy. This “Wuxi Model” shows how state-directed innovation can create ecosystems that private markets alone might never achieve.

Qingdao’s 10-million-strong metropolitan area revealed China’s global integration strategy. Its port, the seventh largest in the world, handles more than 630 million tons annually and connects Asia-Europe-Africa trade routes. Automated systems set records with 39.6 containers processed per hour, while the city serves as a Belt and Road gateway, illustrating China’s systematic approach to global connectivity.

The statistics I encountered were staggering. China produces more than 70 per cent of the world’s electric vehicles, about 12 million of the 17 million built globally in 2024. It controls over 80 per cent of global solar panel manufacturing and nearly 95 per cent of the solar supply chain from polysilicon to finished panels. In 2023, it filed 1.64 million patent applications, 47.2 per cent of the world total, and leads in artificial intelligence with 38,210 generative-AI inventions, six times that of the United States. With $500 billion in annual R&D investment, 2.68 per cent of GDP, China is the world’s second-largest research spender.

Most striking is that these technological feats have advanced alongside social progress. Life expectancy has climbed to 79 years; urbanisation has reached 66.2 per cent, with 941.8 million people living in modern cities. Between 1978 and 2020, China lifted 800 million people out of extreme poverty, nearly 75 per cent of global poverty reduction, through relentless adaptation and experimentation.

Yet intellectual honesty demands that we confront the darker side of this story. In February 2025, the catastrophic collapse of Sino-Metals Leach Zambia’s tailings dam near Chambishi released 1.5 million tons of toxic waste into the Kafue River, contaminating water for 12 million Zambians. It echoed a 2005 explosion that killed 46 Zambian workers and fits a troubling pattern of Chinese mining accidents in Africa.

China gets a bad press in Africa because the conduct of many Chinese entrepreneurs on the continent is abominable. I have previously written about how some Chinese businesspeople in Zimbabwe cosy up to corrupt politicians, ravage the environment and abuse workers in pursuit of quick profits. The China I saw with my own eyes—clean, well-treed, efficient—stands in sharp contrast to the one many Africans encounter.

The same nation that has achieved miraculous poverty reduction at home too often exports environmental degradation and labour exploitation abroad. Human Rights Watch has documented systematic abuses in Chinese mining operations: 18-hour shifts that violate Zambian law and wages 25 per cent below international standards. This is a troubling double standard.

China’s fundamental global engagement challenge is clear. It has achieved extraordinary domestic success but struggles to communicate its development model effectively and to ensure its citizens abroad embody those achievements. Tsang’s analysis of “Xi Jinping Thought” shows how China’s inward-looking political philosophy often translates poorly to global contexts, undermining its soft power despite hard achievements.

In Beijing’s innovation districts, Wuxi’s technology parks and Qingdao’s automated ports, I met brilliant engineers, ambitious entrepreneurs and sophisticated policymakers. Yet their achievements remain largely invisible to global audiences, overshadowed by mining disasters and labour abuses. This is a strategic failure with profound implications.

For African leaders, China offers both inspiration and caution. The inspiration lies in showing that rapid industrialisation is possible in the 21st century and that state capacity can be rebuilt and deployed effectively. China’s leap from agricultural poverty to technological leadership in a single generation proves African nations are not condemned to permanent underdevelopment.

The caution is that China’s domestic success has not automatically translated into responsible global citizenship. African nations engaging with China must demand environmental standards, labour protections and institutional quality equal to those in China itself. This means insisting that Chinese investments respect local laws, protect the environment, meet beneficiation requirements for resource extraction and follow transparent procurement processes that prevent corruption.

My journey convinced me that dismissing Chinese development as an authoritarian aberration is intellectually lazy. China’s achievements in poverty reduction, technological innovation and infrastructure development transcend old ideological pigeonholes and offer valuable lessons for Africa’s development challenges.

But China must confront the contradiction between its domestic success and its overseas conduct. Environmental disasters in Zambia and labour exploitation across Africa undermine its potential as a development partner and global leader. True partnership requires China to export its development successes, not its environmental and social failures.

China shakes the world not through military might or ideological conquest, but by demonstrating alternative pathways to prosperity. For African leaders, this is both an opportunity and a responsibility. We must engage with China’s development model intellectually, understanding what works and why, while demanding that Chinese conduct abroad match its domestic standards.

My own transformation from sceptic to thoughtful critic reflects the challenge before African leadership: to move beyond simplistic rejection or uncritical acceptance toward sophisticated engagement with complex realities. China’s rise demands that we elevate our analytical capabilities, strengthen our institutions and insist on a genuine partnership built on mutual respect and shared prosperity.

The alternative, continued exploitation disguised as cooperation, serves neither Chinese nor African interests. Both continents deserve better than the feudal relationships I once criticised. Both deserve partnerships worthy of the remarkable achievements I witnessed in Beijing, Wuxi and Qingdao. The question is whether leaders on both sides have the wisdom and courage to demand nothing less than transformative collaboration built on dignity, transparency and shared human flourishing. 

By: Trevor Ncube, the Founder and Managing Partner of Trevor & Associates, trevorandassociates.com and Chairman of Alpha Media Holdings. He is also the anchor of In Conversation With Trevor YouTube.com//InConversationWithTrevor