The Belt and Silk Road: Do These Ties Bind China and South Africa?

Abstract

Hundreds of billions spent on China’s BRI targeted a corridor of regions and countries including large parts of Africa. On 2 December 2015, South Africa and China signed twenty-six agreements valued at R90 billion (¥39 bn), which announced the elevation of relations established in 1995 after the collapse of apartheid in South Africa. Whereas this came a year after the two countries adopted the 5–10-Year Strategic Programme, China’s BRI. It had six priorities in South Africa including accelerating South Africa’s industrialisation process, enhancing economic cooperation through special economic zones, growing maritime economic cooperation, infrastructure development, human resource capacity development, and financial cooperation. The 2025 agreement was based on the discourse that sufficient ground had been laid in 2014 to upscale the strategic Programme into a series of agreements including the Memorandum of Understanding on Jointly Building the Silk Road Economic Belt and the twenty-first Century Silk Road. This paper examines 6 years later the meaning of this joint building of the Belt and Silk Road in South Africa, how this contributes to new trends in transnational public solidarity, and how it relates to post-apartheid South African nationalism pursuing fierce independence and cooperation.