Zero tariffs: How China is quietly rewriting Africa’s trade future

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OPINION

By Benjamin Musanjufu Kavubu

At a time when trade wars are raging across the world, something remarkable happened. China opened up its market to Africa fully, as it had promised during FOCAC 9 in September 2024.

This write-up will have characteristics of great power contestation concerning the African continent, but it’s not a blind hip of praise for Beijing. It’s a fact that China has not in the past treated Africa with an imperial hand, unlike its counterparts in the West, especially Washington, which only deals with Africa on a vertical level.

President Trump 2.o has decided commercial diplomacy will shape his foreign policy, and Tariffs are at the forefront of his arsenal as the United States deals with the rest of the world, especially Africa. Even when Washington established the famous African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) in 2000 to give African economies duty-free access, at the end of the day, countries that didn’t obey US orders were kicked out. The orders are normally political conditions, such as human rights records that are hypocritical, after all, they set up their country after genocides against native Americans.

China’s policy to grant African countries duty-free access was not an overnight decision; it has been decades in the making, based on pragmatic dialogue between the two sides. It all started back in the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) Ministerial conference in Addis Ababa in December 2003, when zero tariffs were introduced on selected African exports to China from 30 countries, and by 2018 the number increased to 33.

In September of 2024, the 33 countries were formally granted zero tariff treatment to all their experts to China beyond the selected goods from the past, and this took effect in the following December.

Through further dialogues, most notably the most recent FOCAC follow-up ministerial meeting held in Changsha in June of 2025, it was announced that all goods from the 33 African countries, and an additional 20 that have diplomatic relations with Beijing, would be eligible for 100% duty-free access to the world’s second-largest economy.

At the moment, all African countries except Eswatini which recognises Taiwan as a country, have a duty-free access to the Chinese market. Eswatini’s diplomatic stance does not make sense because even the United States doesn’t recognise Taiwan in that capacity. As Africa was still figuring out the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) nothing is going to boost the continent’s main trade vehicle like the Chinese gesture for trade and corporation.

Today, China has the second largest economy on the planet, with a population of about 1.4 billion people, it has a middle class of over 400 million people. This middle class is still growing, and it has the characteristics of other middle classes worldwide; it desires high-quality products of all sorts.

This opens several opportunities for the African continent, for example, through AfCFTA, to meet Chinese demand for beauty products by African startups in that sector across the continent will require collaboration and coordinated efforts to make it into the Chinese market for starters. It’s going to take enhanced regional supply chains that will require regional hubs to facilitate the logistics before they hit the ports to head out for China.

For the youth on the African continent to make it into sectors like fashion on the Chinese market, they have to scale up production jointly across the continent, improve economies of scale and export competitiveness are some of the areas that African women making designer clothes that meet the Chinese standards will have to take on from time to time to survive.

Automatically, to meet the Chinese demand, African governments have to make sure there are policies in place to foster intra-African trade, as industrial diversification will be vital.

On July 15^th 2025, as Trump was proposing to impose 10%+ Tariffs on the global South, Beijing gave every African a chance to experience this remarkable natural trade evolution between China Africa Corporation, it’s not imperialistic, it’s coherent and inclusive.

The question now is how does each African, from an individual level, especially the educated youth, benefit from having access to 400 million people with enough disposable income and consuming everything at the moment, from goods like coffee and shea butter, to services like art and music? Most African governments know exactly what they will be exporting to China, but it’s important that the individuals also position themselves to benefit from the duty-free access.

To get an African product to the Chinese market, there must be agents involved, its not a usual opportunity for Africa to be at the upstream of a supply chain as goods get exported to China. To meet the quality standard, more jobs will be created in agriculture, at rural industrial hubs, and in mining.

Even in fashion, there will be some form of machinery operations. To facilitate logistics, transport is an endless expanse. The best informed will take up the space of an export consultancy. To penetrate the Chinese market, online platforms and e-commerce are a must.

A few policies at state level must be put in place across the African continent under the watch of the African Union and it’s 2063 agenda the backbone of the AfCFTA, but also individuals like you and me must be ready to take up the opportunities that will be present to benefit from Africa’s zero Tariff access to the world’s largest population.

The author is a research fellow at the Centre for BRICS Studies, Uganda