China is throwing open its market to Africa, pairing trade with charm to win allies on the continent.
Starting on May 1st, Beijing will scrap tariffs on imports from 53 of 54 African countries, a sweeping gesture Chinese officials say will unlock “enormous opportunities” for the continent’s exporters.
The move is the latest in a yearslong campaign by Beijing to position itself as Africa’s partner of choice — combining trade concessions with massive construction projects and high-level diplomacy aimed at recasting China as a champion of development over Western aid models.
But the tariff rollback also underscores the limits of that strategy. Despite preferential access already in place for many of Africa’s poorest countries, exports to China have struggled to diversify or scale up. In practice, the new policy may do more to burnish China’s standing in African capitals than to rebalance a trade relationship still defined by the flow of raw materials out and manufactured goods in.
“In the short term, the new policies provide a boost to China’s image in the Global South,” said Deborah Brautigam of the China Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins University. “But they are unlikely to increase exports from any African country right away.”
The duty-free policy will apply to 53 countries. Only Eswatini — which maintains diplomatic relations with Taiwan, an island nation China considers as part of its territory — is excluded.
The large imbalance signifies Africa’s limited capacity to make use of the zero-tariff policy.
— Yun Sun, Director of the China Program at the Stimson Center
To gauge the likely impact, MBN’s China Tracker — a data-driven service examining Beijing’s influence in the Middle East and North Africa — looked at how existing zero-tariff arrangements have shaped trade flows.
Thirty-three African countries already export to China duty-free under least-developed country provisions. Just 10 of the countries export more to China than they import.
In North Africa, Mauritania’s trade surplus has narrowed rather than expanded since tariffs were eliminated, and imports from Sudan have declined.
It’s not a clean apples-to-apples comparison: Conflict has weighed on Sudan, for example. But the broader pattern suggests tariff-free access alone is not enough to drive trade.
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Across the continent, Africa’s trade deficit with China nearly doubled last year to $101 billion, up from $61 billion. The widening gap reflects two trends: strong African demand for Chinese electric vehicles, machinery and finished goods, and stagnant exports of African raw materials.
“The large imbalance signifies Africa’s limited capacity to make use of the zero-tariff policy,” said Yun Sun, who directs the China Program at the Stimson Center in Washington. “To change Africa’s position, African countries have to produce and export more products with higher value added. That means structural changes to Africa’s current economic model.”
Sun noted that China runs trade surpluses with most of its partners, a pattern critics often attribute to subsidies and other state support for manufacturers that help keep export prices low.
Some smaller exporters in Africa have seen gains under zero or near-zero tariffs. Shipments of copper, coffee, tea and spices from Burundi have increased, as have fish and shellfish exports from the island nation of Comoros.
But these flows largely reinforce existing patterns: China continues to import raw materials rather than higher-value goods. As a result, the policy has yet to deliver the kind of structural shift in Africa’s export mix that Beijing says it wants to support.
Non-tariff barriers also remain a constraint. Beijing’s strict pest and disease controls make it hard for countries that lack sufficient administrative infrastructure to meet certification requirements to get their farm products to the Chinese market.
More than tariffs
On paper, North African economies could benefit most from the new policy. Tariffs on their fish and agricultural exports have averaged about 14 percent, compared with roughly 6.5 percent for non-agricultural goods. Morocco’s and Tunisia’s exports to China have been industrial intermediates: copper foil and wire, electrical machinery, aircraft and aluminum components. Each of these traces back to Chinese-anchored industrial investment in industrial free zones in the region, particularly battery-supply-chain facilities. Zero tariffs are functioning less as a market-opening tool for African farmers and businesses and more as a lubricant for intra-firm flows within Chinese production networks that happen to be sited abroad.
Brautigam noted that countries such as Egypt, Algeria and Morocco have succeeded in attracting Chinese manufacturers. But much of the output from these countries goes to nearby European markets rather than to China.
To take full advantage of tariff-free access, African governments will need to act more strategically, Brautigam said, through incentives like low taxes, low-interest loans and targeted training programs.
Sun of the Stimson Center said China’s push to support African industrialization through infrastructure projects and industrial parks was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic and a subsequent return to commodity-driven trade. Zero tariffs alone are unlikely to change the trade calculus.
From Beijing’s perspective, however, the policy carries little downside. “It doesn’t hurt to offer,” Sun said.
Jim Snyder
Jim Snyder is a journalist and former investigative editor at Radio Free Asia.
Zhou Yu
Zhou Yu is a senior journalist and researcher focuses China-Middle East relations.
