Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: CHINA’S top diplomat began his annual New Year tour of Africa on January 7, focusing on strategic trade access across eastern and southern Africa as Beijing seeks to secure key shipping routes and resource supply lines.
Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s itinerary includes Ethiopia, Africa’s fastest‑growing large economy; Somalia, a Horn of Africa state offering access to key global shipping lanes; Tanzania, a logistics hub linking minerals‑rich central Africa to the Indian Ocean; and Lesotho, a small southern African economy squeezed by U.S. trade measures. His trip this year runs until January 12, according to a Reuters report. Beijing aims to highlight countries it views as model partners of President Xi Jinping’s flagship “Belt and Road” infrastructure programme and to expand export markets, particularly in young, increasingly affluent economies such as Ethiopia, where the IMF forecasts growth of 7.2% this year.
“The real litmus test for 2026 isn’t just the arrival of Chinese investment, but the ‘Africanisation’ of that investment. As Wang Yi visits hubs like Ethiopia and Tanzania, the conversation must move beyond just building roads to building factories,” said Judith Mwai, policy analyst at Development Reimagined, an Africa-focussed consultancy. “For African leaders, this tour is an opportunity to demand that China’s ‘small yet beautiful’ projects specifically target our industrial gaps, turning African raw materials into finished products on African soil, rather than just facilitating their exit,” she added. On his start-of-year trip in 2025, Wang visited Namibia, the Republic of Congo, Chad and Nigeria.
His visit to Somalia will be the first by a Chinese foreign minister since the 1980s and is expected to provide Mogadishu with a diplomatic boost after Israel became the first country to formally recognise the breakaway Republic of Somaliland, a northern region that declared itself independent in 1991. Further south, Tanzania is central to Beijing’s plan to secure access to Africa’s vast copper deposits. By visiting the southern African kingdom of Lesotho, Wang aims to highlight Beijing’s push to position itself as a champion of free trade.