Economics – Trade & AfCFTA · Editorial
By Moakanyi Magazine · China-in-Africa · June 2026
For most of the China-Africa relationship the unit of account has been the project: a railway here, a port there, each negotiated state to state. The African Continental Free Trade Area changes the question. It asks whether all that bilateral hardware can be made to serve one continental market of 1.3 billion people. At the FOCAC Beijing Summit of September 2024, China signalled it had heard the shift – pledging logistical and technical support to AfCFTA and co-operation on a continental digital trade agreement.
The contradiction is structural. A partner that built its presence one bilateral deal at a time is now asked to help dissolve the borders those deals were drawn around. Bilateral trade and continental integration are not the same project, and at points they pull against each other – a corridor that serves a single country's export to China is not, by default, a corridor that serves trade between that country and its neighbours.
The bilateral inheritance: deep, but country-shaped
China is Africa's largest trading partner for the 15th consecutive year, with two-way trade reaching a record US$295.6 billion in 2024, according to Beijing's June 2025 ministerial readout. First-quarter 2025 trade ran at US$72.6 billion, up 2.7 percent year on year – momentum, not a one-off peak.
But that trade has historically run on bilateral rails – Chinese-built corridors linking individual African countries to global shipping lanes, often to export raw commodities and import finished goods. The pattern delivered volume. It did not, by design, knit African economies to each other. Each corridor optimises one country's link to the world market; none was drawn to optimise the link between neighbours. The inheritance is therefore real and deep, but shaped country by country, which is precisely the shape AfCFTA exists to outgrow.
Record bilateral trade is a sum of country deals, not yet a continental market.
The 2024 turn: market-building language enters the script
FOCAC 2024's ten partnership initiatives include connectivity built around a multimodal sea-rail network, 30 infrastructure projects across five sub-regions, ten industrial-park projects and explicit AfCFTA support. Beijing also pointed to the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System and a China-Africa digital trade track.
The vocabulary has moved from discrete assets towards the plumbing of a single market – payments, logistics corridors, harmonised digital trade. PAPSS in particular matters, because clearing African trade in African currencies cuts the dollar dependence that has long taxed intra-continental commerce and drained scarce foreign reserves on transactions between neighbours. Whether the plumbing connects African markets to each other, rather than each separately to China, is the live question the language alone cannot settle.
Market infrastructure is welcome – its direction of flow decides whose market it builds.
Zero tariffs: an open door that runs one way
From 1 December 2024, China extended zero-tariff treatment to 100 percent of tariff lines for least-developed countries with diplomatic ties, and reported RMB 17.12 billion (about US$2.4 billion) in trade financing for African exports. It also signed 22 agricultural protocols with 18 African nations, with more than 2,400 food enterprises from 53 countries registered to export to China.
The measure widens access to the Chinese market and is aimed at long-standing complaints about a one-way flow. But it does not, on its own, build the intra-African trade that AfCFTA exists to create – and cheap finished-goods access can undercut the very cross-border manufacturing AfCFTA hopes to nurture. An open door to one large external market can pull African producers towards exporting raw to China, rather than towards processing and selling to each other. The instrument helps the bilateral balance and may, at the margin, work against the continental one.
A tariff door swung open to one market can crowd the market it was meant to grow.
Industrial parks and the value-addition test
FOCAC 2024 named ten industrial-park projects and 100 industrialisation training sessions, alongside a target of US$20 billion in African agricultural exports to China by 2030. Parks and processing are where bilateral investment could begin to serve continental value chains rather than single-country exports.
The condition is orientation. If park output is traded across African borders under AfCFTA, the investment builds the integrated market and keeps value-addition on the continent. If it is shipped straight out as a finished export to China, the park is another bilateral node and the value chain still terminates offshore. The instruments exist – finance, training, tariff access, payment rails. Their direction is a policy choice African governments must press for through local-content rules and procurement, not a property of the pledge itself.
Whether parks feed AfCFTA or feed export depends on what Africa demands, not what is pledged.
Payments and the dollar problem
One piece of the 2024 turn deserves to be read on its own: the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System. Most trade between African countries has historically been cleared in dollars through banks outside the continent, which adds cost, delay and a foreign-reserve drain to every cross-border transaction – a tax on integration that AfCFTA cannot remove by lowering tariffs alone. PAPSS attacks that plumbing directly by letting African banks settle in local currencies.
China's endorsement of PAPSS at FOCAC 2024 is therefore more consequential than it first appears. A payment rail that reduces dollar dependence is structurally a tool for intra-African trade rather than for Africa-China trade, which is the clearest signal in the package that Beijing's market-building language is not purely self-directed. The caveat holds: an endorsement is not the same as the volume of African trade actually clearing through the system, which remains modest against the US$295.6 billion that flows on the bilateral channel.
Cutting the dollar out of intra-African trade does more for integration than any single corridor.
From counting projects to building a market
The honest reading of FOCAC 2024 is transitional. The language has caught up with AfCFTA; the architecture – bilateral corridors, country-by-country financing, export-oriented logistics – has not fully turned. China's continued financing, RMB 130.32 billion (about US$18 billion) provided since the summit by June 2025, gives it weight in how that turn happens, and weight cuts both ways depending on how it is used.
For African states, the prize is to bend that weight towards continental integration: corridors that link neighbours, payment systems that clear in African currencies through PAPSS, parks whose output crosses African borders. The shift from a project story to a market story is the real measure of this decade – and it will be written by African policy, with Chinese finance as one input among several, not the author of the plan. The pivot is genuine in language; whether it becomes genuine in geography is the test that remains open.
The market story will be written by African policy – Chinese finance is an input to it, not its author.
There is a final reason the distinction between projects and a market matters beyond economics. A continent that trades mostly with one external partner, on rails built by that partner, is exposed to that partner's cycles and choices. A continent that trades heavily with itself, on infrastructure it has sequenced through PIDA and AfCFTA, holds more of its own future. The 2024 instruments – parks, payment rails, tariff access, US$18 billion in fresh financing since the summit – can serve either outcome. The work of this decade is to make sure they serve the second, and that is work the continent has to lead even where the finance comes from abroad.
Sources: China MFA – FOCAC 2024, China MFA – June 2025 readout
