Economics – Trade & AfCFTA · Editorial
By Moakanyi Magazine · China-in-Africa · June 2026
The phrase "Made in Africa" suggests factories, brands and finished goods. Yet the trade now flowing into China under Beijing's tariff concessions is still mostly the opposite: crude oil, copper, cobalt and ore, dug up and shipped out. China has removed the customs barrier; it has not removed the deeper one, which is the continent's thin capacity to process what it grows and mines. The slogan and the cargo manifest point in different directions.
From 1 May 2026 China extended zero-tariff treatment to all 53 African countries with which it holds diplomatic relations, building on a 100-percent tariff-line cut for least-developed countries that took effect on 1 December 2024. According to Chinese state media, the measure lends an edge to cocoa from Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana, coffee and avocados from Kenya, and citrus and wine from South Africa, goods that previously faced duties of 8 to 30 percent. The only African state left out is eSwatini, which keeps diplomatic ties with Taiwan rather than Beijing.
The concession: a real opening, narrowly used
The offer is genuine, but its leverage is limited by what came before. Analysts note that roughly 94.5 percent of African exports to China already entered duty-free, so the new lines mostly help products the continent does not yet make at scale. The concession works at the margin, lowering the cost of the avocado and the wine bottle rather than the barrel of oil that was never taxed in the first place.
The design also reveals where Beijing wants the relationship to settle. For the 20 African non-LDC economies, the zero rate applies as a two-year preferential arrangement while China presses for a longer-term China-Africa Economic Partnership for Shared Development. The temporary form is leverage: it keeps the more industrialised African states negotiating, and ties the permanence of the benefit to a wider agreement reached largely on China's terms.
A tariff cut rewards the goods you already export, not the ones you have yet to learn to make.
The structure: commodities out, manufactures in
The trade ledger remains lopsided. Africa's exports to China are dominated by fossil fuels and metallic ores, with more than half originating in just three economies, Angola, South Africa and the DR Congo, while China sends back machinery, electronics and consumer goods. It is, in essence, an exchange of primary commodities for finished manufactures, the classic shape of an unequal trade.
The cost of that shape is measured in the deficit. Africa's trade gap with China reached roughly US$59.55 billion in the first eight months of 2025, close to the full-year 2024 figure of about US$61.93 billion, and the imbalance kept widening into 2026. A bigger headline trade number, which Chinese sources put at a record US$295.6 billion for 2024, can coexist with a continent that captures less of the value with every passing year.
Selling rock and buying machines is a pattern a lower tariff alone will not reverse.
The bottleneck: rules of origin and processing power
Turning the concession into manufactured exports runs into practical walls. Rules-of-origin compliance, customs delays and weak value-addition capacity all constrain what African firms can actually ship. Regional cumulation, which would let producers combine inputs across borders to qualify for the preference, exists on paper but is little used in practice, partly because intra-African trade itself remains thin and the continent's own market is poorly knitted together.
Experts are blunt that the measure will not by itself rebalance the relationship, because it does not touch the underlying cause: limited industrial capacity and insufficient processing of minerals, energy and crops. The continent's own attempts to ban raw exports and force local beneficiation have often been thwarted by the pull of immediate commodity revenue and the absence of the power, finance and skills a factory needs. A tariff line cannot build a smelter or a cannery.
An open border is only as useful as the factory standing behind it.
The honest version of "Made in Africa" for the Chinese market is therefore a project, not a slogan. The tariff door is open; whether the continent walks through it carrying processed cocoa and bottled wine, or another shipment of unrefined ore, will be settled in customs halls, processing plants and the slow politics of industrialisation, not in trade communiques. The concession sets the stage. It does not write the play, and it does not decide who collects the takings.
Sources: China MFA – FOCAC follow-up outcomes, Xinhua – zero tariffs for African nations, ISS African Futures – openness without industry
