On the morning of September 20, 2024, Ambassador Zhao Weiping had an interview with NBC and answered questions about the 2024 Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation and China-Namibia relations. NBC1 aired the full interview on the morning of September 24, 2024 and shared excerpts on its official Facebook account. Below is the transcript of the interview.

Q: Ambassador, thank you so much for giving time with this interview. So maybe just to start, I mean we just had FOCAC in the early September, could you provide an overview of the significance of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation?

A: Thank you Selima. I am very happy to have this interview with you on the 2024 Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, or the FOCAC.

This Summit is indeed a very big and very important event in the development of China-Africa relations, which was attended by Chinese President Xi Jinping and leaders of 53 African countries including His Excellency President Mbumba.

Talking about the significance of this Summit, first of all, I think it has sent out a clear message that China and Africa are ready to forge an even closer partnership in achieving modernization together and China will provide strong support to Africa in this regard.

As you already know that, President Xi announced ten partnership actions for modernization with Africa, and he also announced China will provide financial support of about 50 billion US dollars for the implementation of these partnerships.

And if you take a look at the ten partnerships in details, you will find they cover a great range of areas such as mutual learning among civilizations, trade prosperity, industrial chain cooperation, connectivity, development cooperation, health, agriculture and livelihoods, people-to-people exchanges, green development, and common security. So it’s a very comprehensive plan aiming to boost African countries’ overall capabilities.

Second, I think this Summit has also clearly shown us that both China and Africa wish to strengthen political solidarity and boost the position of the global south on international stage. As we can see from the Summit Declaration and the Action Plan, China and Africa share the same or similar views on major international and regional issues. China and Africa both advocate for an equal and orderly multipolar world and call for the reform of global governance system. As you may have noticed, during the summit, the characterization of the China-Africa relations has been elevated to an all-weather China-Africa community with a shared future for the new era, which has demonstrated an even higher level of political trust between China and Africa.

I think we have indeed achieved a lot and now it’s our job to implement the outcome of the summit and Namibia will surely benefit from that.   

Q:That’s good. So just look at the win-win cooperation China always emphasizes, what does this concept entail in the context of the FOCAC?

A: Indeed, win-win cooperation is our core idea in pursuing cooperation with all the countries in the world, and we believe that’s something only natural and logical. If only one party is going to win in a relationship of cooperation and the other party has to lose, at the end of the day, who will cooperate with you? So, in this sense, win-win cooperation is a very basic requirement for a fair international engagement.

Actually, cooperation between friends in my view, it should always be more than just achieving win-win results, because we have to take friendship into consideration. Put it simply, as friends, we should never care too much whether we enjoy the same amount of benefits in our partnership. China I believe will continue to be very sensitive to the interests of our African friends, and we are ready to give more rather than take more.

So here I wish to emphasize one point I don’t agree with those people who hold the view that China provides development assistance to Africa in order to trade it for mineral resources or other special favors. We provide development assistance to our African friends, because we are the largest developing country and the world’s second largest economy, and we believe it’s something we should do to help our African friends. We never attach any political conditions to our assistance, and we never use our assistance to seek any special favor in return.

So this Summit, I think it has reflected the win-win spirit, but for me more importantly it has also reflected China-Africa friendship. We all belong to the global south, and the global south countries should help each other to boost our overall position in the international politics.   

Q:That’s an very important point you made there in terms of cooperation. Since its inception, how has FOCAC contributed to enhancing cooperation specifically between Africa and Namibia?

A:The FOCAC was established in 2000. Since then, a ministerial meeting was held every three years and for some years it was elevated to a summit meeting. So far, we have held four summits including the recent one.

Obviously the FOCAC has played a critical role in deepening China-Africa friendship and practical cooperation. Within the FOCAC framework, some new mechanisms of cooperation between China and Africa have been established, a lot of important assistance projects have been carried out, and the two-way investment and trade between China and Africa have been significantly expanded.

So I give you some figures, back in 2000 when the forum was established, the bilateral trade between China and Africa was 10.5 billion US dollars, but it increased to 282.1 billion US dollars last year, so it’s a big difference. And Chinese investment in Africa at the inception of the forum was less than 500 million US dollars, and now it stands at more than 40 billion US dollars. A series of major assistance projects have been carried out including AU Conference Centre, Africa Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, Mombasa-Nairobi Railway and Addis Ababa-Djibouti Railway.  Since 2013, China has trained 1.9 million people in various fields for Africa. These are the achievements we have made.

In Namibia’s case, we have also implemented several major development assistance projects, such as the new airport road B2 section, 4 schools in Zambezi and Kavango West, and the satelite data receiving station. In terms of Chinese investment, we have Swakop Uranium. This is still the Chinese largest single investment project in Africa, and its investment amount is 5.1 billion US dollars.

It’s fair to say that the FOCAC has become the most important mechanism for propelling China-Africa cooperation. 

Q:We understand that we are the first African country to export beef to China and there are also agreements came up on FOCAC, for example mutton that can be  exported to China now. Can you discuss the key outcomes of this year’s forum, particularly in relation to Namibia-China relations?

A:Yes, first of all, I want point out that the ten partnership actions announced by China are all relevant to Namibia. We welcome Namibia to participate in all those partnerships, and we will certainly include Namibia in all the actions we will take so that Namibia will enjoy the benefits.

I will give you some examples, you already mentioned some of them. For agriculture, we will continue to assist Namibia with its drought relief efforts. We will soon ship to Namibia 25 million Namibian dollars of emergency food assistance and we have announced to provide Namibia another 50 million Namibian dollars of such assistance. We are now carefully studying the proposal by the Namibian side for China to help with its borehole drilling project which we know is important for Namibia. We also want to do more to support your agricultural development. Recently we have  dispatched 8 agricultural experts to Namibia, they have already arrived here and they  will stay here for 2 years to train Namibian farmers through FAO programs.

For trade prosperity, During the summit, we pledged to expand market access for African agricultural products. You rightly mentioned that Namibia was the first African country to export beef and this time we have very good news that during the Summit our two governments have signed an agreement for China to import your lamb and mutton. I am confident that we will also sign agreements for China to import Namibia’s grapes and red crabs once both sides finish technical preparation.

For development cooperation and people’s livelihood, we have committed to assist Namibia with police housing project, that’s a very big project and we also announced to provide Namibia 500 million Namibian dollars of new development assistance.

For people-to-people exchanges, now about 300 Namibians go to China to undertake various training programs every year. During the summit we announced to provide 60,000 training opportunities to Africa in the next 3 years, certainly there will be more Namibians to go to China for training. As you may have noticed, we have announced to launch with Africa a Cultural Silk Road program as well as an initiative of cooperation on innovation in radio, TV and audio and visual programs, which I think will benefit Namibian media organizations.We are also thinking of pairing up the vocational education training centers of our two countries so that Namibian VETCs can get support from their Chinese counterparts.

In addition, I wish to emphasize, encouraged by the summit, Chinese investment in Namibia will see a big expansion in the years to come. Recently, we have already heard some news about some new investment in Namibia by Chinese companies such as the acquisition of Osino gold mine and the Tsumeb Smelter as well as the desalination plant to be jointly established by Swakop Uranium and the Namwater. In futute, we may expect Chinese companies investment in the areas of green hydrogen and oil and gas, and even in the nuclear power sector. And of course, Chinese companies are also interested in investing in the agriculture, education and other sectors. So I think we have a very promising future of our bilateral relations.

Q：Ambassador, the Ten Partnership Actions you mentioned agriculture and trade, also people-to-people exchanges, is there any other things about the Ten Partnership Actions maybe you can talk about?

A:Yes, for the other partnerships like connectivity and industrial chain cooperation, green development, common security, for all those partnerships, there will be special programs, and for those programs, first of all, it will depend on the interests of the relevant African countries whether they want to join that, if they want to join that, they are welcome. So I think Namibia may also have in-depth study of those partnerships, and you may come up with your proposal to join those partnerships, and we will discuss some of that.

Q:Do you have any additional comments on the forum and the broader relationship between Namibia and China?

A:First, China and Namibia enjoy profound traditional friendship. That’s indeed the great assets of our bilateral relations. We have been friends for a very long time, we should always remember this point when we talk about our bilateral relations.

Second, we share deep common interests. That’s the important foundation of our bilateral relations. China is the second largest market in the world with 1.4 billion consumers, and Chinese companies are keen in investing overseas. We will continue to be a leading importer of Namibia products as well as a major foreign investor in Namibia.   

Third point is that, there is enormous potential in China-Namibia economic cooperation. I have said on many occasions, that Namibia has enormous potential of economic growth since you are on the way to becoming the 4th largest oil producer(in Africa). It is my prediction that your economy will take off in the next five to ten years. Chinese companies have high expectations on the huge economic opportunities Namibia will present in the years to come. China has much to offer to your industrialization and modernization.   

Q:Thank you so much ambassador for making time, we got all the information we needed.

A:Thank you.