Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s January visit to Tanzania highlighted the East African country’s growing importance to Beijing. It’s a strategically located Belt and Road country that has the potential to serve as a major gateway to inland regional markets along with easy access to some of Africa’s largest ports on the Indian Ocean.

But relations between the two countries have been quite bumpy over the past couple of years. President John Magufuli famously and quite publicly rejected a Chinese deal to re-build the Port of Bagamoyo and there was widespread outrage in Tanzania in response to the poor treatment of African residents in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou.