This week’s ‘Extraordinary China-Africa Summit on Solidarity against COVID-19’ was largely uneventful. The initiatives announced in President Xi Jinping’s address were either projects that had already been announced before (China building the Africa CDC, which will now be accelerated) or long-term Chinese standard operating procedure (cancelling some zero-interest loans maturing in 2020. Zero-interest loans are cancelled relatively often, and they only make up a fraction of China’s total lending to Africa.) 

In many ways, the summit was more notable for what wasn’t announced: no blanket debt repayment freeze beyond the limited initiative already announced by the G20 (although Xi expressed support for the length of the freeze to be extended,) no stimulus package to help Africa tide over the crisis and no mention of the plunge in African foreign direct investment due to the crisis (the UN Conference on Trade and Development predicted this week that FDI flows to some African countries will fall by 40%.)