The Chinese model cannot possibly work in Africa, or should we say, not at all desirable for Africa because:

1. This kind of export-led growth strategy championed by the IMF will turn these countries to be reliant on countries importing from them, which is why China today has a huge domestic consumption problem and finds itself unable to transition away from the IMF model
2. It will only turn Africa into the world’s factory ready to be exploited by the Western imperialist powers who are much wealthier and can create the demand for their products

A more realistic (though still requires lots of things to come together) would be this:

1. The African countries need to come together and decide how and amongst themselves, whom to secure energy and food self-sovereignty, through nationalization and protectionism to prevent foreign capital from intervening in their energy and agricultural sectors
2. Make a grand bargain with China with the following conditions:

• China will use $800 billion of its foreign reserves to pay off all of Africa’s external debt
• China will share its technology with Africa to strengthen its energy and food self-sovereignty
• Africa will NOT accept unequal treaty with China that gives preference to Chinese companies over domestic companies
• Africa, in turn, will allow yuan to flood the continent in order to import goods and services from China, turning itself into a consumption region to alleviate China’s over-investment problem

This is effectively the genius of the Marshall Plan, where the lessons can now be applied to the Global South countries to emancipate them from foreign financial imperialism.

China’s model cannot work because it will only drag down the wages. However, a Chinese-style Marshall Plan will give the African countries the free money needed to purchase and alleviate the oversupply of Chinese goods. This will raise the wages of the Chinese working class, and in turn, allowing them to import from the African countries and raise the wages of the African working class too. Most importantly, it solves the huge trade imbalance problem under neoliberalism that the US-China is currently experiencing (and under which the rest of the Global South suffers).

The political and ideological obstacles are massive though.

First, China has to realize that they can create new money through the central bank, instead of relying on earning export revenues from foreigner or borrowing from financial institutions (the IMF approach). If China refuses to run the deficit and create the free money (aka freeing itself from the IMF ideology), then it will continue to be stuck in a neoliberal model, which cannot challenge the American dominance and thus fails to resolve the Global South problems.

Second, African countries have to resolve their intra-continental political issues among themselves to ensure a high level of cohesion in their grand bargain, otherwise they’d be played against each other and carved out by the foreign powers. The key issue is that each African country will have something to contribute, and they will have to form a pact that ties their political and economic futures together. If the energy-producing or the food-growing countries sell out, then the game is over.