Intellectual – Frameworks & Theory · Editorial

By Moakanyi Magazine · China-in-Africa · June 2026

China is fond of describing its special economic zones as a development model it can hand over. The more honest version, set out in a World Bank paper by Douglas Zhihua Zeng, is that the playbook is exportable while the outcomes are not. China started in 1980 with four zones – Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Shantou in Guangdong, then Xiamen in Fujian – as deliberate experiments in market-oriented reform of land, labour, tax and customs, then rolled the reforms out nationally once they worked. Africa has often tried to skip straight to scale, and the gap between the two approaches explains much of what has followed.

Four zones, not forty

The Bank's first lesson is restraint. China piloted with a handful of zones at strategic coastal sites, proved them, then expanded into more diversified forms including high-tech parks. Many African countries, Zeng writes, "start with 10 or even 20 zones all at once, which is a recipe for failure." The discipline was institutional too: the Shenzhen SEZ Act was passed by the national congress the same month the zone launched in August 1980, giving local reforms top-level legal cover, and a land-leasing system from 1981 created a modern land market where none had existed. The point was never the fence around the land; it was the sequence – experiment, verify, then scale.

The transferable part of China's model is its patience, which is the hardest part to copy.

The record in Africa is thin, with exceptions

Zeng is blunt about results. Drawing on a Bank study of six African zone programmes – Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Nigeria, Senegal and Tanzania, benchmarked against the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Vietnam and Bangladesh – he finds that, on investment, exports and jobs, the African zones "are in general falling behind their peers in other continents," with only Mauritius (and to a degree Kenya, Madagascar and Ghana) clearly using zones for structural change. Power downtime inside African zones fell about 54 per cent against the world outside, versus 92 per cent in comparable non-African zones; customs clearance was barely faster inside the fence, and sometimes slower. The hardware was built; the business environment did not always follow.

A zone cannot outrun the economy around it; weak logistics and customs leak straight through the gate.

Smart incentives over tax holidays

The paper's forward-looking advice is to stop competing on tax. China, Zeng argues, used generous fiscal terms because its early environment was so constraining; today's African zones are destinations for industrial transfer from East Asia and should instead spend on infrastructure, efficient one-stop services and "smart incentives" that reward skills training, technology transfer and local linkages. Crucially, China plugged its zones into existing clusters and pushed foreign investors into joint ventures so the two reinforced each other – the backward linkage African zones most often lack. The Bank also urges a sound legal framework before construction and a public-private model to stretch limited public resources.

Incentives that buy skills and suppliers outlast incentives that only buy a few years of tax relief.

China's own zones in Africa are early days

Even the Chinese-built zones in Africa, endorsed under a 2006 policy to establish up to fifty cooperation zones abroad, were at an early stage when Zeng wrote. He cites Zambia's Chambishi zone with US$322 million invested and 7,973 Zambian jobs by 2013, Nigeria's Lekki and Ogun-Guangdong zones with a few firms operational, and Ethiopia's Eastern zone fully leased. MOFCOM itself flagged delays over land access, resettlement and coordination. The honest reading is that the overseas record was still being written – useful as knowledge transfer, premature as proof.

China sells the model with confidence its own African zones had not yet earned.

A method worth importing, carefully

The Chinese SEZ story is genuinely useful to Africa, but as a method rather than a template. Start small and prove it; legislate before you build; fix the business environment outside the fence, not just inside it; and reward the linkages that turn a tenant into an industry. Zeng's closing line is the right caution: the lessons "should not be taken as given and need to be carefully tailored into the local context of African countries, just as China did" in the 1980s. The model is for sale; the homework is not.

Sources: World Bank – Global Experiences with Special Economic Zones (Zeng, 2015)