The International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (ID-CPC) has a long history of interaction with African political parties. It began with support of African liberation movements and leaders, some of whom eventually became the leaders of independent African countries. Under Xi Jinping, ID-CPC person-to-person outreach increased, experienced a pullback during COVID-19 although webinars and video meetings substituted for person-to-person contact, and now has resumed. China and the African Union declared 2026 as the China-Africa Year of People-to-People Exchanges. This will result in increased numbers of political leaders and party-to-party exchanges. In the early years, the ID-CPC’s contact was almost entirely with liberation movements and African ruling parties.  With the passage of time, this approach has changed.  While most of the interaction continues to occur with African ruling parties, the ID-CPC has become much more flexible in its choice of African political party partners. In 2021, China’s State Council stated that the CPC had established official contact with more than 110 political parties in 51 African states. Party-to-party cooperation serves as an important tool for Beijing to promote its governance model and global initiatives, especially the Global Governance Initiative announced by Xi Jinping in 2025.  This brief analysis focuses on ID-CPC interaction with African political leaders and parties in the post-COVID-19 period when frequent travel to and from China resumed. 

The ID-CPC implements party-to-party cooperation in a variety of ways. The most common engagement involves exchange visits with party leaders and cadres. Some exchanges are multilateral involving party representatives from around the world. An example was the 2021 World Political Parties Summit addressed by Xi Jinping and held by video conference because of COVID-19. China announced that more than 500 political parties and organizations from 160 countries participated, including seven presidents or prime ministers in Africa. Other exchanges are organized on a regional basis such as the 7th China-Africa People’s Forum and the 7th China-Africa Young Leaders Forum held in Hunan Province in 2024 and attended by some 200 representatives from 50 African countries. A third category is bilateral exchanges, which often includes a consultation or training component. Between 2002 and 2022, the ID-CPC conducted bilateral exchanges with political parties from all fifty-four African countries except Eswatini and Somalia. The exchange is usually with a single African political party but can include multiple parties from the same country. In 2021, for example, the ID-CPC hosted representatives of Tunisia’s nine main political parties in a video conference when they established an exchange mechanism with the parties (Benabdallah 2021, 3-5; Shinn and Eisenman 2023, 93-102).

The training component of the party-to-party exchanges probably has the greatest impact on the African participants. On visits to China, participants in training courses usually stay one or two weeks and occasionally longer. The training includes numerous topics such as a history of China, CPC party structure, China’s development and governance models, and more specialized issues tailored to the interests of the participants. The ID-CPC often uses the occasion to underscore China’s core domestic interests such as the One China policy, human rights in Tibet and Xinjiang, and convey key foreign policy goals such as the Belt and Road Initiative and the importance of multipolarity. The sessions are also used as business opportunities for China. For example, a discussion of safe city or smart city projects might include an introduction to Chinese surveillance and facial recognition products, resulting in an eventual sale of equipment to an African government. Some party training schools in Africa, for example Algeria, Ethiopia, Kenya, and South Africa, have long-term training partnerships with China’s National Academy of Governance, the CPC’s Central Party School. The African reaction to these party-to-party training programs has generally been positive, although the degree to which they accept Chinese ideology and the thoughts of Xi Jinping is less clear (Benabdallah 2021, 12-15; Hackenesch and Bader 2024, 7-11; Shinn and Eisenman 2013, 104-108; Nantulya 2024).

A critical component of any party-to-party relationship is that of funding. It is challenging to document foreign funding of political parties and candidates for public office anywhere in the world. Political parties in Africa almost never disclose foreign funding sources. Many non-African governments, including China’s, engage in foreign political party and election funding but are also careful to hide that information. Nevertheless, funding of African political parties, including Chinese financial support, is probably commonplace even if it is difficult to document. Opposition political parties in Zimbabwe claimed that China helped fund the ruling ZANU-PF party in the 2013 election. South Africa’s Public Affairs Research Institute (PARI)reported that China, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Malaysia, and Angola made large donations to the ruling African National Congress (PARI 2017, 11). The China State Construction Company built the headquarters of Ghana’s National Democratic Congress (NDC) and China covered the cost but asked the NDC to refrain from mentioning that fact. The ID-CPC also gave the NDC a variety of in-kind gifts such as laptops, cell phones, and office........

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