Going Viral? The Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Sino-African Relations

Abstract

How are we to understand the impacts of COVID-19 on geopolitics and specifically the relations between China and Africa? Is the pandemic a conjunctural event, which will not have lasting impacts, or does it represent a “critical juncture” where the nature of Sino-African relations is recast in significant ways? This paper explores this issue with a focus on African agency in the reproduction and reshaping of Sino-African relations. It argues that while the Belt and Road Initiative is declining in importance in terms of Sino-African engagements, COVID-19 has offered an opportunity for China to increase its soft and “productive-relational” powers on the continent, while reconfiguring some African elites’ “strategy of extraversion.” As such, the impacts of the pandemic seem to be reinforcing extant trajectories and path dependencies rather than fundamentally reshaping them.