A ubiquitous Chinese government talking point is the principle of non-interference in other countries. This includes issues of governance where China has long claimed that it does not export its model or encourage foreign nations to emulate its practices.<\/p>\n
Yet, this is rapidly changing in China\u2019s engagements in Africa. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has escalated its training of African party and government officials as part of CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping\u2019s \u201cnew model of party-to-party relations,\u201d particularly in the Global South. An indication of this renewed emphasis is the Mwalimu Julius Nyerere Leadership School. Launched in 2022, the Nyerere School trains ruling party members from the Former Liberation Movements of Southern Africa (FLMSA) coalition\u2014Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe.<\/p>\n
China has built or supported African party schools going back to the 1960s. However, the Nyerere School is the first to be modeled after the CCP Central Party School, which trains China\u2019s top cadres and leaders. It is also the first of its kind to cater to multiple African political parties. This school parallels the China-Africa Institute, a continental CCP initiative to train African party and government leaders. The Institute, which started in 2019, is based within the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing and the African Union (AU) in Addis Ababa.<\/p>\n
CCP-supported governance and party training also occurs at the national level as illustrated by the refurbishment of the Herbert Chitepo School of Ideology, the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party school, completed in 2023.<\/p>\n
China\u2019s party and governance training has the potential to entrench single, dominant party models in Africa.<\/p>\n
Less noticeable are the non-brick-and-mortar schools of China\u2019s National Academy of Governance (CAG), the external name for the CCP\u2019s Central Party School. Algeria, Ethiopia, Kenya, and South Africa are among the African countries whose governance academies maintain year-round training partnerships with CAG. China\u2019s party exchanges have increased alongside this expanding training. China is expected to receive over 50 African party delegations this year\u2014double the number of party visits hosted in 2015.<\/p>\n
While often overlooked in discussions of party training, Chinese government institutions also run programs in Africa (and the Global South more generally) on \u201csharing governance experience in governing state affairs\u201d (fen xiang zhiguo li zheng jin yang; \u5206\u4eab\u6cbb\u56fd\u7406\u653f\u7ecf\u9a8c) that mirror the CCP initiatives. Many of these trainings place emphasis on party supremacy over the state and government, a concept that is at odds with the multiparty democratic framework required by most African constitutions and AU conventions. Notably, CCP party schools are embedded in the structure of China\u2019s government institutes.<\/p>\n
China\u2019s constitution describes the government as a \u201cpeople\u2019s democratic dictatorship.\u201d This oxymoronic framing is an anchor concept that runs through the CCP\u2019s entire suite of political trainings. It is popular with African ruling parties intent on extending their longevity. According to the head of one African government training school, \u201cThey [CCP] show us what they achieved without the messiness of democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite its economic growth, China\u2019s political model has not been something to which many African citizens aspire. Nearly 80 percent reject one-party rule. Yet, as many African scholars argue, China\u2019s party and governance training has the potential to entrench single, dominant party models in Africa. The CCP\u2019s foreign training programs are also heavily oriented towards elite capture. National elites, in turn, are keen to use their ties to China to entrench their rule. This escalation in CCP party training is happening against the backdrop of major democratic setbacks in Africa in recent years.<\/p>\n
Advancing China\u2019s Dominant Party Model in Africa<\/p>\n
The blurred line between the CCP and the Chinese state mirrors the situation in parts of Africa where the interests of the ruling party are self-interestedly conflated with those of the state. China has many venues to advance its governance philosophy and practice. Between 2000 and 2022, the CCP carried out 881 exchanges (807 bilateral and 74 multilateral) with African ruling and opposition parties, according to the CCP International Department\u2019s metadata.<\/p>\n
The CCP has ongoing relations with 110 African ruling and opposition parties, 35 parliaments, and 59 politically oriented organizations, including party think tanks. In 2017, Xi Jinping directed the CCP to conduct 15,000 exchanges globally over the next 5 years, driving it to tap into its vast network of over 3,000 political schools, some of which have subsequently established their own training programs in Africa. CCP training also occurs via state agencies like the Academy for International Business Officials (AIBO) in the Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM). AIBO is China\u2019s flagship foreign training institute, which works closely with the MOFCOM CCP Central Party School.<\/p>\n
Chen Wenqing, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, meets with a delegation of chief justices of African countries in Beijing. (Photo: AFP)<\/p>\n
Participants in the AIBO training system must be citizens of developing countries. Scholarships for graduate studies in government are given to candidates under 45 years of age, highlighting China\u2019s interest in shaping younger generations of party and government leaders. Nearly all 21,123 AIBO government and ruling party trainees between 2021 and 2022 were from developing countries, with about a third from Africa.<\/p>\n
There has been strong demand for CCP engagement from some African ruling parties. The decision to establish the Nyerere School was taken at the 2016 FLMSA Heads of State Summit. Tanzania, which was chosen as the venue, played a major role in securing the CCP\u2019s support. The Chitepo School was revived in 2016, having been disbanded at Zimbabwe\u2019s independence in 1980, with construction beginning in 2021. China\u2019s stepped-up support for the local party schools of the six FLMSA countries was also undertaken on the initiative of the parties concerned.<\/p>\n
Xi\u2019s directive to expand party training, in short, has been advanced in four ways in Africa:<\/p>\n
The resumption of party school construction<\/p>\n
\u201cBrainstorming summits\u201d for party leaders, like the CCP and World Political Parties Summit and the Beijing International Forum for Democracy<\/p>\n
CCP briefing delegations<\/p>\n
Support for African governance academies<\/p>\n
The \u201cbrainstorming summits\u201d assemble 300-500 political party leaders globally every 1-2 years\u2014a venue for China to win support for its governance concepts among foreign political parties. The CCP and World Political Parties Summit sponsors an Africa Thematic Event that Tanzania hosted when the gathering first met in 2018. The CCP briefing delegations consist of top CCP leaders sent to brief their foreign equivalents about the outcomes of major CCP meetings. These include the CCP\u2019s annual plenum, which maps out China\u2019s overall strategic direction.<\/p>\n
What Exactly is China\u2019s Governance Model?<\/p>\n
China\u2019s governance system has four dominant features: party supremacy, fragmented authoritarianism, political meritocracy, and party-led economic governance.<\/p>\n
Party supremacy is the most attractive feature for many ruling parties in Africa. A major study of 71 African political parties found that \u201cThe [African] party in power is hardly autonomous from government influence and it is difficult to draw the line between where the influence of government begins and that of political party ends.\u201d<\/p>\n
China\u2019s model of fragmented authoritarianism gives significant autonomy to lower state structures as long as they do not deviate from party control. Hence the regime can rally around a \u201cstrong leader,\u201d dispense patronage, and prevent alternative power centers from forming, a disposition many patronage-laden African systems share with China.<\/p>\n
China likes to call itself a \u201cpolitical meritocracy,\u201d that favors effective, technocratic government and claims legitimacy by equating democracy and human rights with economic development. This explains why the Chinese concept of democracy is married to China\u2019s economic achievements. African leaders make similar arguments. As Rwanda\u2019s President Paul Kagame explains, \u201cThere is nothing like human rights minus… development. These are human rights: development, schools, education, health, and food security.\u201d Left unstated in this argument is that autocratic governance has been a major source of instability in Africa. Many top African development thinkers, moreover, note that economic development without democracy is ultimately unsustainable as it exacerbates societal cleavages, institutionalizes corruption and party privilege, and ignores the social roots of conflict.<\/p>\n
China\u2019s rekindled interest in African party schools is also something of a marketing endeavor. After the Nyerere and Chitepo schools opened, many approached the CCP to build their schools and enhance their party building, including Burundi, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Morocco, and Uganda.<\/p>\n
Chinese Vice Premier Liu Guozhong, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, meets with Rukia Nakadama, Uganda\u2019s third deputy prime minister, attending the 5th Forum on China-Africa Local Government Cooperation, July 9, 2024. (Photo: AFP)<\/p>\n
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Even Kenya\u2019s United Democratic Alliance (UDA) has requested the CCP to build its new party headquarters, leadership school, and Kenya\u2019s new foreign ministry building. China seems to be following the model it used in Ghana where, since 2018, it has provided successive Ghanaian ruling parties political leadership training. The dalliance of Kenyan and Ghanaian parties with the CCP offer a glimpse into how China seeks to engage and reshape governance norms even in more pluralistic and open contexts.<\/p>\n
The CCP prizes regular contact, replication, and critical mass. Three parties, Tanzania\u2019s Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), South Africa\u2019s African National Congress (ANC), and Zimbabwe\u2019s ZANU-PF collectively trained over 900 cadres in China between 2000 and 2022. Over the same period, China conducted exchanges, party building, and training with every African ruling party apart from Eswatini\u2019s. The China-Africa Institute has trained 348 party and state officials through the Ethiopian, Kenyan, and South African governance academies alone.<\/p>\n
The China National Academy of Government (CCP Central Party School) has trained 400 Algerian ruling party and government officials since 2015 and run similar programs for Egypt, Tunisia, and South Africa. As leading China scholar, Yun Sun, explains, the CCP\u2019s party-to-party work is \u201cgeographically expansive, institutionally systematic, and psychologically and politically impactful over the choices and preferences of African political parties and, thus, over the African political landscape.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Implications for African Citizen Agency<\/p>\n
Africa\u2019s pro-democracy voices and civil society leaders consider the CCP\u2019s enhanced party engagements as directly hostile to Africa\u2019s democratic project. Many of the CCP\u2019s partners share anti-democratic features like highly personalized political institutions and little to no accountability, even though China\u2019s economic programs remain popular. China is therefore viewed as a negative actor for Africans\u2019 democratic aspirations. It should be recalled that Africa\u2019s experience with single-party rule was almost uniformly negative, explaining the popular groundswell of pro-democracy movements that spearheaded the collapse of one-party states during the 1990\u2019s transition to multiparty politics.<\/p>\n
Africa\u2019s experience with single-party rule was almost uniformly negative.<\/p>\n
Those who question African ruling parties\u2019 embrace of China\u2019s party training are often dismissed as \u201cWestern puppets.\u201d Africa\u2019s democracy proponents strongly push back on this characterization, however. \u201cIt is Africans themselves who long for democracy,\u201d says scholar Tafi Mhaka. This is supported by polling. Afrobarometer finds that nearly 70 percent of Africans surveyed prefer democracy to any other type of government. Roughly 80 percent reject one-party rule. China\u2019s dominant single-party system, therefore, runs diametrically counter to African citizen interests.<\/p>\n
A growing number of voices also take issue with Africa\u2019s assumed position as a \u201cperennial student\u201d of foreign powers. Africa possesses a wealth of noteworthy experience that it can teach others such as negotiating political disputes, reaching out to former enemies, and upholding democratic processes even if it means losing power as many African parties have done. Rather than a weakness, such features are healthy attributes of democratic self-correction and accountability\u2014guarding against corruption and abuses of power.<\/p>\n
For Africa\u2019s democracy advocates, such attributes are worth defending and vital to Africa achieving both the freedoms and prosperity that its citizens desire. This, too, is supported by experience. Africa\u2019s authoritarian governments are linked to three-fourths of the continent\u2019s conflicts, 80 percent of its forcibly displaced populations, and 85 percent of the acute food insecurity in Africa. Africa\u2019s consolidating democracies, meanwhile, typically generate two-thirds more rapid economic growth, realize higher educational attainment levels, have lower infant and child mortality rates, and longer life expectancies.<\/p>\n
Disconnect between Ruling Parties and Citizen Interests<\/p>\n
There is a disconnect between the trajectory certain African ruling parties would like to follow and the democratic path desired by citizens and enshrined in constitutions. While some African ruling parties may try to dress this up, their enthusiasm to train with the CCP is essentially about (re)normalizing dominant single-party systems. These forces are on the ascendant as the CCP sees ramped-up party training as a key lever of influence and some ruling parties see it as a means of justifying their hold on power indefinitely.<\/p>\n
For More News And Analysis About Liberia Follow Africa-Press<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Paul Nantulya Africa-Press – Liberia. China promotes its dominant party model in Africa through a suite of training programs for party and government officials even though this model is antithetical to Africans\u2019 preference for multiparty democracy. A ubiquitous Chinese government talking point is the principle of non-interference in other countries. This includes issues of governance […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":84,"featured_media":61728,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,12],"tags":[234],"class_list":["post-61729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-all-news","category-policy","tag-liberia"],"yoast_head":"\n