Authoritarian learning with Chinese characteristics? China’s party cooperation in Africa

Under Xi Jinping’s presidency, China articulated its ambition to shape the regional and global order and to share the lessons of its own experiences with one-party rule. This foreign policy shift has been initiated when Xi Jinping has come to power and it has recently intensified with the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion in Ukraine. One key actor tasked with implementing this shift in Chinese foreign policy is the International Department of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP-ID). The CCP-ID maintains the kind of collaborative network that is hypothesized to be a channel of policy diffusion and authoritarian learning. This article systematically compares the activities of the CCP-ID in three African countries to better understand the patterns of interaction and, even more importantly, the topics and content of engagement. Party-to-party relations are used for both promoting China’s foreign policy interests and diffusing authoritarian practices. Our comparison of the CCP-ID’s engagement in Ethiopia, Tanzania and South Africa suggests that the CCP’s cooperation strategies have changed considerably over time with authoritarian learning become a more important aspect of the CCP-ID’s activities. Moreover, domestic power structures and interests of the CCP-ID’s counterparts shape considerably shape cooperation patterns.