THOSE ELEMENTS OF THE AMERICAN MEDIA that take international affairs seriously have made much this week of the jamboree in Tianjin, China, which did not include the United States.

Many if not most concentrated, negatively, on the unholy alliance displayed between China’s President Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Amid their overall disapproval of that big-nation pairing, commentators also cast baleful sideways glances at the added presence of the smaller North Korea’s rather personally large Kim Jong Un. That threesome was quite the photo-op for American writers to tut-tut over.

Putin’s insistent and self-righteous defense in China of his invasion against Ukraine was reported — and it served as yet more evidence to show how decisively Putin had effectively flattened Donald Trump’s woeful efforts at peacemaking for Ukraine, during the recent Alaska summit.

But I couldn’t help feeling that journalistic opportunities were being missed here, in light of America’s very obvious absence from the shindig of 20 or more nations who did participate and were also treated to a parade in the capital, Beijing, that flaunted China’s military might and ultra-high tech armaments.

Nods were made in columns of analysis toward China’s self-presentation as an alternative model of global leadership -- in place of America’s role on the world stage that Trump has so fecklessly abandoned. Xi can now easily, if not justifiably, claim to represent, indeed speak authoritatively for, the entire so-called Global South. Another photo-op seemed calculated to disturb America’s security and diplomacy apparatus; it was the troubling tableau of a new triad, Xi and Putin both holding hands with Narendra Modi as number 3, leader of the world’s most populous democracy, India.

What I missed most of all was any attempt to review specifics – examples in the real world — of how Xi’s rhetorical claim of leadership might be working out in practice. Regular followers of The Media Beat will probably guess where I’m heading here. Yes … toward Africa.

My decades of reporting from that continent can’t fail to be invoked in this context. I nowadays don’t get back to African countries anywhere nearly as often as I used to, and would dearly like to again — but one observation has gotten clearer and clearer over the past two decades. It’s much, much longer ago that China first had a tangible presence on the continent; I reported on Chinese workers helping to build the essential TanZam railroad as far back as 1970, connecting the landlocked Zambia to the coastal port of Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania. And later that same decade I chronicled China’s participation, providing arms and military advisors, in Mozambique’s war of liberation.

*Western broadcasters’ coverage: Joint China-African ventures*

More recently it became impossible to miss, whether I looked across the urban landscape of Namibia’s capital, Windhoek … or the commercial port of Mombassa in Kenya … or in many other African settings … the enormous hulking construction cranes that came to loom everywhere, emblazoned with messages in huge Chinese characters. One, among the many in Namibia put up by the Chinese equipment manufacturer XCMG, was translated for me as saying “For Your Success!” It was left unclear exactly whose success was intended.

Only eight years ago, in Djibouti’s Indian Ocean port in the Horn of Africa, China built its own first-ever foreign military base. And now, the pace of China’s involvement across the whole continent — a major part of its grandiose global project known as the Belt and Road Initiative — is poised to shift gear dramatically upward.

While China was already, as I say, long determined to make inroads into Africa, gaining all the economic, political and sometimes military influence it possibly could, we now see the disturbing, horribly ironic, prospect of the US itself offering China enormously more African opportunities, offering them on what is presumably a “Made-in-America” silver platter.

And China is proving fast to take up these opportunities. Just as Trump is slapping tariffs on imports from 22 African countries, ranging from 15% to 30% … China by contrast is concluding a new continent-wide economic pact that will abolish tariffs on all the 53 African states with which it has diplomatic relations.

*Hong Kong-based ASIA TIMES praises China’s African presence*

This can only reinforce a trend that the financial intelligence giant, Standard and Poors, reported on decisively just this last month. China’s imports and exports from developing countries, Africa included, have doubled in the last ten years, according to the S&P survey, while by comparison Global South trade with the U.S. has risen by little more than a quarter, 28%. Chinese investment in developing countries (that other prong of economic interdependence) has quadrupled during that same decade. It also has to be noted, though, that the balance of trade is currently vastly in China’s favor, since it enjoys a trading surplus of $62 billion with African countries taken as a whole.

From an African point of view, this Chinese upsurge in trade and investment at a time of American withdrawal represents a no-brainer. The analyst Neo Letswalo of the University of Johannesburg has written:

“There is no greater opportunity for African countries to strengthen South-South trade than now. African countries will simply turn to China and make it the next United States.”

There’s an undercurrent of desperate need at work here – as there always is in this deeply inequitable world of ours. We can hardly forget how Trump (then with Elon Musk’s help – remember him?) liquidated the US Agency for International Development, and its roughly 43 billion dollar budget – much of it dedicated to supporting health initiatives in Africa. And what’s the threatened effect of that?

The respected British medical journal The Lancet recently predicted that, as a direct consequence of America’s cuts, an additional 14 million people, a third of them children, will die needlessly in the next five years.

*BroadReach health training session, South Africa*

Many in Africa are convinced that America’s spiteful and cruel disappearance is not the time to mourn or even complain, but to rewire the whole system, moving from dependency toward real, internally-engined development, based on a principle of mutual self-help among African countries themselves. The 55 members of the African Union have a pan-African, 10-year plan for what they call a “social and solidarity economy,” through which locally-rooted businesses and community-led organizations will scale up to deliver public services, create jobs and reinvest profits locally – not least in the field of healthcare. Practical examples already exist, like South Africa’s campaign called BroadReach that is dedicated to improving medical provision in the wake of Trump’s attack on the region’s HIV/AIDS programs.

Such an approach, though, is of course a long-term prospect only. More immediately, there is the hard-to-resist offer to help, being voiced so seductively from Beijing.

You don’t have to be a Sinophobe to feel, with a shudder, that Africa’s undeniable vulnerabilities carry the makings of a highly imbalanced partnership between the world’s second biggest economy and the continent which, like it or not, remains our world’s most impoverished.

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