Locating Africa in China's community of shared future for mankind: A relational approach

This study applies a Chinese theoretical framework—relationality, as articulated by Qin Yaqing—to explain how Beijing creates and manipulates its relations with African partners to advance its “core interests” and leadership of the Global South. Relationality elucidates the “Community of Shared Future for Mankind”—an interlocking, multitiered network of Sinocentric relationships based on traditional Confucian conceptions of reciprocity. The pervasiveness of China's influence in Africa can be explained by its overlapping latticework of relationships involving thousands of African elites traversing all four levels—bilateral, subregional, regional and global. At each level, Chinese interlocutors use material support, inclusive rhetoric and host diplomacy to create and perpetuate so‐called “win–win” relationships with African partners. Because the “relational power” these dyads generate disproportionately strengthens the weaker side, China can elicit African compliance by reducing—or threatening to reduce—its shared economic and political resources.