About forty kilometres west of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the Julius-Nyerere Leadership School campus is the extravagant symbol of cooperation between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the ruling parties in southern Africa. The facility, inaugurated in February 2022 during a ceremony at which a message from President Xi Jinping was delivered, was built by a Chinese company and offered by Beijing. Seminars are held there very regularly by professors from the CCP’s executive schools for six parties, all of which have in common that they led the struggle for independence or against apartheid and are still in business today. The flags of Tanzania, South Africa, Mozambique, Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe are displayed alongside the CCP’s red hammer and sickle.
The trainers come from the Central School of the Chinese Communist Party, from some of its provincial branches, but also from Chinese agricultural universities. From October 29 to November 7, 2023, for example, the international department of the CCM organized a session entitled “Forging a Common Future, Workshop for Young Leaders of the CCM” (Chama Cha Mapinduzi, Party of the Revolution, the main party in Tanzania). central committee of the CCP. A few months earlier, in June 2023, China trained one hundred and thirty-six young leaders from the six parties.
This effort demonstrates the full confidence of the Chinese party-state, which considers that, given the economic development that the country has achieved, it not only has no lessons to learn from the West, but can also share its comments. It offers a competitive model to democracies, which would be equally legitimate, especially given its achievements. These exchanges allow the normalization of this Chinese model criticized in the West for the absence of voting and the rule of law. “China wants to help these movements stay in power and, by presenting its model to its promising cadres, it gains a lot of political influence.” sums up Paul Nantulya, a researcher at the African Center for Strategic Studies, based in Washington.
“Establishing the power of the party”
The effort is not limited to the Tanzanian school. A China-Africa institute was opened in 2019, based both at the headquarters of the African Union in Addis Ababa and at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, with the aim of spreading across the continent. In Zimbabwe, China has ensured the renewal of the Herbert-Chitepo ideological school of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party. The group that dominates in Kenya, the United Democratic Alliance, is not far behind: its leaders went to Beijing in May and were offered the construction of their own leadership school in Nairobi. In addition, the People’s Liberation Army Command School, located in Nanjing, regularly hosts promising officers from African forces.
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