Why China's sea-rail transport link plan for Africa is an echo of the 'Hunan model'

China is on a mission to recreate the ancient Silk Road to East Africa - through air, railroad and sea links under its Belt and Road Initiative.

Beijing is also increasingly promoting the interconnected development of transport links and industrial parks built and operated by Chinese companies in Africa.

Its latest pledge involves a multimodal sea-rail transport network connecting Africa to China's central and western regions, under the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) action plan issued earlier this month.

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The September 4-6 FOCAC summit in Beijing saw Chinese President Xi Jinping hold separate meetings on the sidelines with his counterparts William Ruto of Kenya and Tanzania's Samia Suluhu Hassan, as well as Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. The talks focused on prioritising ports and rail connectivity projects for the coming network.

China and Kenya should "build an East African connectivity hub and industrial belt", Xi told Ruto.

To Abiy, Xi said China supported Ethiopia in leveraging its edge as a regional transport hub, promoting the interconnected development of infrastructure and industry, and building a sea-rail combined transport network in East Africa.

China funded the more than 750km (466-mile) Addis Ababa-Djibouti railway, linking the capital of landlocked Ethiopia with the Horn of Africa nation where Beijing built its first overseas military base back in 2017.

Strategically positioned on the Bab el-Mandeb Strait - which connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and is one of the world's busiest shipping lanes - Djibouti is home to major Chinese-funded projects such as the Doraleh multipurpose port and the Djibouti free-trade zone.

Lauren Johnston, a China-Africa specialist and an associate professor at the University of Sydney's China Studies Centre, said Xi's language on the China-Africa land-sea links and coordinated development was straight from the belt and road and the "Hunan model" playbook, named after the central Chinese province.

Landlocked Hunan is among the emerging drivers of China- Africa cooperation. The province has already built a land-sea corridor for better trade and port connections, the Hunan-Guangdong-Africa rail-sea intermodal logistics route. Launched in 2021, the route transports goods by rail from Hunan to ports in the southern coastal province of Guangzhou, where the cargo is then loaded on to ocean freighters bound for destinations including Africa.

Streamlined customs and transport procedures have reduced shipping time between China and Africa by 15 days. In Africa, the logistics route covers nearly a dozen seaports and 20 roads and railways to landlocked inland destinations.

"There's a push to connect landlocked provinces up to international trade in China [through] more dynamic provinces along the coast like Zhejiang and Jiangsu," Johnston said.

The plan was to replicate this in Africa, she said, but where the provinces were countries.

A 2022 study co-authored by Johnston said East Africa was important for China's belt and road ambitions. Kenya is important as an African frontier with a strategic coast and ports, and also because it shares important borders with landlocked countries including Ethiopia, Sudan and Uganda, the study said.

African projects completed under Beijing's multibillion-dollar belt and road strategy include the Addis Ababa-Djibouti Railway and the Mombasa-Nairobi-Naivasha Standard Gauge Railway (SGR).

Following his meeting with Xi on September 3, Ruto said the proposed SGR extension from the Kenyan town of Naivasha westwards to Uganda, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Congo Brazzaville would connect the Indian and Atlantic oceans.

According to Deborah Brautigam, a professor emerita in international political economy at Johns Hopkins University's school of advanced international studies, African leaders see the East African rail network as an important long-term programme.

She said Chinese planners incorporated the railway in 2013 into what was then the newly announced Belt and Road Initiative.

"Chinese leaders visiting East Africa in recent years have called for the continuation of the 'two axes plus two coasts' plans," she noted.

Visiting East Africa in January 2022, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi called for the faster development of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean to develop a framework of "two axes plus two coasts ... [to] accelerate the building of industrial belts and economic belts to create more jobs."

He said the two axes, the Mombasa-Nairobi-Naivasha and Addis Ababa-Djibouti railways, should be enlarged and enhanced with the aim of expanding to neighbouring countries at an opportune moment.

In both projects, Beijing has tried hard to better integrate the belt and road with national development plans and African ambitions to industrialise, according to Tim Zajontz, a research fellow in the Centre for International and Comparative Politics at South Africa's Stellenbosch University.

He said this appeared to be the key ingredient of Beijing's new concept of a "high-quality" belt and road cooperation.

"Kenya and Ethiopia are prime candidates for Chinese investments in light manufacturing which China pledges to pair with continuous efforts to improve the necessary economic infrastructure," Zajontz, who is also a lecturer in Global Political Economy at the University of Freiburg, said.

Zajontz said Xi's bilateral meetings with Ruto and Abiy showed there was a much stronger emphasis on the regional dimension of cooperation projects.

"Beijing has learned from previous mistakes when [belt and road] flagships such as Kenya's SGR suffered from a lack of regional planning and coordination," Zajontz said.

"We can also clearly see China's efforts to establish intermodal transport and logistics networks across East Africa to smoothen trade flows from and to China."

Kai Xue, a Beijing-based corporate lawyer who advises on foreign direct investment and cross-border financing, said the proposed East African railway-sea transport network was another intercontinental initiative comparable to the Middle Corridor.

The trans-Caspian multimodal transit network, also replicating the ancient Silk Road, connects China to Europe via rail and port operations across Central Asia, the Caspian and Black seas and Turkey.

Addressing more than 50 African leaders at the FOCAC summit in Beijing, Xi pledged 360 billion yuan (US$50.6 billion) in new financing over the next three years to "help turn China's big market into Africa's big opportunity".

However, Mark Bohlund, a senior credit research analyst at REDD Intelligence, said China's commitment to the "FOCAC big lending figure" was considerably weaker than it was during summits in the mid-2010s.

He said with many African countries close to, or in some cases beyond, the level of debt they can sustain, a considerable share of Chinese lending to Africa was likely to go through regional organisations such as Afreximbank.

"While Beijing will seek to maintain good relations with Ethiopia and Kenya given their regional importance, I expect the majority of the new lending for the East African interconnection hub to go to Tanzania, which currently has very low borrowing from China," Bohlund said.

This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2024 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

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