China is the first major economy in history to grant unilateral, full-coverage zero-tariff treatment to 53 African.
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Last month, a truck carrying 24 tonnes of South African apples crossed into Shenzhen at midnight, the first cargo to clear Chinese customs under a policy that intends to rewrite the rules of trade between China and an entire continent. China is the first major economy in history to grant unilateral, full-coverage zero-tariff treatment to 53 African countries with which it maintains diplomatic relations. Goods ranging from agricultural produce to minerals, textiles, and manufactured items can now enter the world’s second-largest economy duty-free.
In Africa, the offer has been widely welcomed and has generated optimism. However, the policy requires careful unpacking and critical analysis. African governments, businesses, and institutions must clearly understand the practical requirements of complying with export standards, packaging and processing costs, infrastructure and logistical demands, as well as the financial and technical support required for local industries to compete effectively in international markets. Without sufficient preparation and industrial capacity, preferential market access alone may not necessarily translate into meaningful economic transformation.
Africa has a lot to offer: critical minerals such as cobalt, copper, lithium, and manganese for energy transition and manufacturing finished goods; agricultural diversity, including Ethiopian coffee, Kenyan avocados, Ethiopian and Lesotho textiles, South African citrus, and Ivorian cocoa that feeds the world. The continent’s demographic profile is its most significant long-term asset. A young, growing, increasingly educated workforce set against a rising middle class and a projected population of 2.5 billion by 2050 makes the continent the world's fastest-growing consumer market and the most significant untapped economic frontier on earth. This is not a distant prospect. It is the foundation on which Africa's negotiating power rests, and one the continent must learn to capitalise on. This policy has indeed opened a door. But a door is not a destination. The destination is an Africa that does not merely export what comes from its soil, but builds, processes, designs, and exports what its people produce. This requires industrial policies, skills, finance, and infrastructure. It requires governance strong enough to ensure that trade revenues are used equitably, so that the cobalt miner in Kolwezi and the citrus picker in Tzaneen see something of what this historic trade opportunity could deliver.
China-Africa trade hit a record $348 billion in 2025, growing at roughly 18% faster than any of China’s other trade partnerships. Yet, Africa’s trade deficit with China ballooned to $102 billion, a staggering 64.5% increase in a single year. China’s exports of machinery, electronics, and vehicles grew at 25.8%, while Africa’s exports of crude oil, cobalt, and raw agricultural products crawled at 5.4%, accounting for a little over just 5% of China’s import market, Asia’s 52%, Europe’s 19%, and Latin America’s 8%. The continent is China’s fastest-growing trade partner, yet the balance is skewed in Beijing’s favour. With no colonial history, yet the architecture of the relationship rhymes uncomfortably with one. Africa remains stubbornly at the bottom of the value chain. This reflects broader structural inequalities within global commodity chains, where African economies remain primary exporters of unprocessed raw materials, while industrialised economies dominate processing, manufacturing, and high-value production. Take cocoa, for example: Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire together account for roughly 60% of the world’s supply, yet for decades they have exported raw beans while Europe and North America have added value, built brands, and captured the profits. Zero-tariff trade with China may increase African cocoa exports, but the higher-value stages of processing, manufacturing, branding, and retail remain concentrated in Chinese industries, some operating inside African countries, processing African resources and exporting the proceeds. The same logic applies to Zambian copper, Congolese cobalt, South African iron ore and Tanzanian cotton. The environmental dimension cannot be ignored either, increased export of raw minerals without beneficiation means increased extraction, land degradation, water depletion, and emissions, all happening in the continent most vulnerable to climate change. These ecological costs must be central to policy conversations.
It is here that trade as geopolitical leverage becomes most visible. Eswatini, Africa’s least developed economy, whose textile and sugar industries stand to gain considerably from preferential access to the Chinese market, is excluded from the zero-tariff regime solely because it maintains diplomatic recognition of Taiwan. Beijing is not merely rewarding alignment; it is making the luxury of political independence economically unaffordable. This is not an isolated case, Lithuania and others have also experienced economic punishment for diplomatic decisions. The pattern is consistent, and deliberate political non-alignment is punished through economic exclusion. The audience for these measures extends well beyond the targeted states. China is sending a calculated signal to the United States and its allies that it has both the willingness and the leverage to impose real costs on those who challenge its core interests. In an era where Washington is actively building coalitions around Taiwan, Beijing’s treatment of Eswatini and Lithuania functions as a warning to fence-sitters across the developing world.
Understanding China’s motivations does not diminish the opportunity; it sharpens it. Beijing is foregoing billions in tariff revenue in this deal, doing so in a geopolitical context in which the Trump administration’s tariff escalation has redirected Chinese export flows and compelled it to deepen and diversify its partnerships. The policy also serves China’s global positioning ‘at a time when Western economies are raising trade barriers, Beijing is tearing them down and ensuring the world takes note’. The framing is deliberate; this is a South-South policy, embedded in the broader architecture of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC). It is further sharpened by the expiry of AGOA, the US preferential trade framework now extended only one year to the end of 2026, leaving South Africa and others navigating real uncertainty about its renewal. The zero-tariff window is itself time-bound, open from May 2026 to April 2028, a probationary period after which bilateral partnerships are subject to review and renegotiation. So, Africa has two years, the question is whether it will use them.
This piece argues that the zero-tariff policy grants Africa access. What Africa needs is an advantage. The gap between the two is where the continent’s development agenda within this policy framework may either live or die. Turning access into advantage requires intentionality on several fronts. First, African governments must shift their focus from access to compliance to capacity. Zero tariffs are only as useful as the ability to meet China’s import standards. China’s Green Channel policy, which accelerates border processing and offers priority risk assessment, requires meeting Chinese phytosanitary, food safety, and quality requirements. South Africa’s citrus sector, with its CGA-certified compliance and established export infrastructure, is already well-positioned. South Africa this month confirmed it has become the world’s largest citrus exporter by volume, shipping 2.9 million tonnes in 2025 and overtaking Spain for the first time. What governments must now do is extend that compliance capacity to industries and countries that are not yet ready to support export certification, laboratory testing, and technical standards at scale.
Second, and most critically, Africa must bargain collectively, not individually. China’s five largest African trading partners South Africa, Nigeria, the DRC, Angola, and Egypt dominate the continent’s export flows, while the Least Developed Countries, with the most to gain from zero tariffs, have the least capacity. The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) was designed precisely for this: to build intra-African value chains so that the continent negotiates with the world as a production network, not as a collection of raw-material suppliers. Approach China as SADC and as ECOWAS, use the existing MoU and customs unions, the Southern African Customs Union (SACU), which already facilitates free trade amongst neighbouring countries, to ensure Africa approaches China with the collective weight of regional production capacity, not as a fragmented collection of individual suppliers. For example, South Africa, with its ports, logistics infrastructure, and processing base, must anchor regional value chains as a hub that smaller neighbours export into, process within, and send outward under a collective banner. That is what AfCFTA exists to make possible. That is the difference between access and advantage.
Third, Africa must negotiate technology and skills transfer. China has expertise in manufacturing, renewable energy, agricultural technology, and digital infrastructure. The question is whether Africa can access this as a partner rather than as a raw materials supplier. Mechanisms for skills transfer, joint ventures requiring local equity, and programmes that embed Africans in Chinese institutions should be central to negotiations, not an afterthought. This is critical because human capital is the foundation of industrialisation. Government must invest in beneficiation, now the cost of export is elevated, the financial resources must be used wisely to build manufacturing capacity. Special Economic Zones (SEZs), backed with resources and reliable infrastructure, are the right vehicle, but they must be structured for manufacturing, not only warehousing. The DRC, Rwanda, and Kenya are already experimenting with industrial clustering. Finally, governance of trade must be strengthened because increased access without oversight risks illicit financial flows that undermine the very development gains this policy is meant to generate. Knowing what you are exporting, under what standards, and on what terms is a governance question as much as a trade question.
For ordinary Africans, the stakes are concrete. The citrus industry alone supports at least 140,000 jobs at farm and packhouse level, forming the economic backbone of rural communities across Limpopo, Mpumalanga, and the Western Cape. But the measure of this policy's success cannot stop at export volumes or trade figures. It must be felt in the communities that bear the labour of production the smallholder farmer in Tzaneen, a textile worker in Maseru, and the coffee in Jimma. Empowering these communities means ensuring that the gains from expanded trade are reinvested locally in skills development, in rural infrastructure, in cooperative models that give producers a stake in the value they create. Trade that does not reach the people who make it possible is not life-changing in any way. This requires industrial policies, skills, finance, and infrastructure. It requires strong governance, sufficient to ensure that trade revenues are used equitably. The policy may be Beijing's, but the Agency must be Africa's, and Africa will squander this moment if it does not act as one.
Naledi Ramontja is affiliated with the University of Johannesburg