Economics – Trade & AfCFTA · Editorial
By Moakanyi Magazine · China-in-Africa · June 2026
The aid frame no longer fits the China-Africa economic relationship, and the figures show why. Two-way trade reached a record US$295.6 billion in 2024 and ran at US$72.6 billion in the first quarter of 2025, up 2.7 percent year on year, according to China's June 2025 ministerial readout. This is commerce at scale, not charity, and it has been so for years.
The contradiction is that an expansion story for both sides depends on the trade running both ways – and the composition of that record number, not its size, is where the question lives. A larger total can mask an unchanged structure underneath: more volume moving through the same one-way channels is growth for the figure but not necessarily for the African producer.
The expansion is measurable, and broad
Beyond the headline trade figure, Beijing reports RMB 130.32 billion (about US$18 billion) in financial support provided since the 2024 summit, RMB 13.38 billion in new Chinese enterprise investment between September 2024 and March 2025, and RMB 2.08 billion lent to roughly 350 small and medium enterprises across 19 industries.
A Hunan-Guangdong-Africa sea-rail service ran 1,915 trips, exceeding 1,000 annual trips for the first time in 2024. The relationship is widening from megaprojects towards enterprise-level commerce – the kind of routine, repeatable trade in goods and services that looks less like a state programme and more like a market taking shape. SME lending in particular reaches a layer the big-ticket loans never touched, spreading activity across 19 industries rather than concentrating it in a handful of flagship contracts. Breadth, not just the headline total, is what marks this as expansion.
The growth is no longer just state-to-state – it is reaching firms and SMEs, which is what expansion looks like.
Zero tariffs: opening the door to African goods
From 1 December 2024, China extended zero-tariff treatment to 100 percent of tariff lines for least-developed countries with diplomatic ties, and signed 22 agricultural protocols with 18 African nations, with more than 2,400 food enterprises from 53 countries registered to export to China.
The stated aim is to rebalance trade by pulling in more African goods – a direct response to long-standing complaints about a one-way flow that sends commodities out and finished goods back. The instruments are well chosen: tariff access lowers the price barrier, and the protocols clear the sanitary and registration hurdles that often keep African produce out in practice, regardless of tariffs. The measure is a genuine opening, treated here as Beijing's own stated intent rather than a guaranteed outcome, and its effect will show in the export data, not the announcement.
Tariff access is the right lever for balance – its effect shows up only in what Africa actually ships.
The balance question the headline hides
A record trade figure says nothing, on its own, about who exports what. The persistent African concern is structural: raw commodities out, manufactured goods in, with the deficit and the value-addition both landing on the wrong side of the ledger and the jobs that go with processing staying offshore.
The zero-tariff measure and the US$20 billion agricultural-export target for 2030 are aimed squarely at this. But agricultural exports, even at US$20 billion, are still largely primary goods; the harder shift is into processed and manufactured exports that capture more value at home and build industrial capability. Whether the new instruments change the composition – or simply raise the volume of an unbalanced flow – is the metric that will decide whether this is shared expansion or a bigger version of the old imbalance. The total is the easy number to grow; the mix is the hard one to change.
Bigger trade is not the same as fairer trade – the composition, not the total, settles the expansion story.
The instruments are new; the test is old
What distinguishes the 2024-2025 package from earlier trade rhetoric is that the instruments are concrete and aimed at the right target. Zero tariffs on 100 percent of tariff lines, 22 agricultural protocols, 2,400-plus registered food enterprises, RMB 17.12 billion (about US$2.4 billion) in export financing – these are mechanisms for pulling African goods into China, not just statements of intent to balance trade. On the supplier's own account, the door has been widened in measurable ways.
The old test remains, though. Access is necessary but not sufficient: African exporters still need the produce to certify, the volumes to ship and the processing to climb the value ladder. A zero-tariff line on a finished good is worth little to a country that exports the raw input. The instruments lower the barrier at China's border; whether African economies can meet that opening with diversified, higher-value supply is a question that turns on industrial policy at home as much as on tariff schedules abroad.
Beijing can widen the door, but only African supply decides what walks through it.
Read as business rather than aid, the China-Africa trade relationship is genuinely expanding, with new instruments reaching firms and farmers and a record headline to show for it. The honest caveat is that expansion only benefits both partners if the balance improves alongside the volume. African policymakers have the openings – zero tariffs, agricultural protocols, SME financing – to push for value-added exports rather than more of the same raw flow. The record number is the start of the argument, not the end of it.
Sources: China MFA – June 2025 readout, China MFA – FOCAC 2024
