FOCAC AT TWENTY-FIVE: A reflective inquiry into a matured partnership

Daryl Swanepoel
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Updated: 5 hours ago

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October 2025

Author: Daryl Swanepoel

Contents

Abstract

Introduction: A partnership pauses to reflect
FOCAC’s institutional journey
Cultural and intellectual resonances
Governance, multipolarity and the Global South
Expanding fields of cooperation
Knowledge institutions as architects of the future
Youth and intergenerational imagination
Looking forward: Toward a shared horizon
Conclusion
References

Abstract

This report reflects on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) through the insights from a joint symposium convened by the Inclusive Society Institute and the Institute of African Studies at Zhejiang Normal University. It argues that FOCAC has evolved from a primarily developmental platform into a mature, multidimensional partnership that has been shaped by shared intellectual, cultural and governance concerns. The discussions situate China-Africa cooperation within a shifting global order that is marked by multipolarity and a rising Global South agency, emphasising the growing role of knowledge institutions, cultural resonance and youth engagement. The paper reaches the conclusion that FOCAC, at twenty-five, represents a philosophical inflection point, which signals a move away from transactional cooperation and towards deeper intellectual and civilisational co-creation.

1. Introduction: A partnership pauses to

reflect

There are moments in the life of international partnerships when the ordinary tempo of cooperation slows, and a deeper rhythm emerges, the rhythm of reflection. The symposium jointly convened by the Inclusive Society Institute (ISI) and the Institute of African Studies (IAS) at Zhejiang Normal University marked such a moment. Although formally situated within the celebrations of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), the gathering quickly moved beyond ceremonial acknowledgement.

What unfolded was a reflective and at times almost contemplative conversation about the meaning of the relationship between China and Africa, the memory that anchors it and the imagination required to carry it forward. Academic exchanges are often framed as technical discussions around data, research and policy and yet in Cape Town, something more elemental surfaced, an awareness that partnerships, much like individuals, reach a point when they must pause, take stock of themselves and rediscover the deeper reasons they exist.

Prof. Liu Shu (2025), in opening the symposium, captured this sensibility when he framed the gathering as a response to President Xi Jinping’s message in a letter to African scholars, which he said was not to be treated as a mere diplomatic gesture, but as an invitation to deepen the civilisational and scholarly conscience of the relationship. His remarks reminded participants that research is not a passive adjunct to diplomacy, it is an active instrument through which partnerships think about themselves. Liu’s framing created an atmosphere of attentiveness, the sense that everyone in the room was being asked to listen more carefully than usual, to speak with intention, and to resist the temptation of treating the anniversary as a checklist of achievements. From the outset, the symposium leaned toward introspection, thereby signalling that this anniversary would be measured not only in outcomes, but in how understanding is improved.

The keynote reflection by Daryl Swanepoel (2025) reinforced the tone by offering an expansive reading of FOCAC’s institutional development over the past twenty-five years. His account of the Forum’s maturation over a quarter-century emphasised that institutional longevity arises from real alignment, not rhetorical alignment, not ideological alignment, but developmental alignment. He traced how FOCAC began in 2000 as a diplomatic platform designed to stabilise and formalise cooperation, yet gradually grew into a multidimensional developmental machinery encompassing infrastructure, human capital formation, public health, green energy, digital finance and governance reform. The way he narrated FOCAC’s evolution carried a philosophical undercurrent, that institutions, like people, discover themselves over time and they evolve in response to necessity, experience and the subtle accretion of trust. In his telling, FOCAC was not designed fully formed, it became itself through interaction, experimentation and iterative cooperation.

This observation set the stage for the symposium’s broader inquiry, namely that if the first twenty-five years of FOCAC were about discovering institutional purpose, then the next twenty-five must be about deepening institutional meaning. And to understand this meaning requires more than economic metrics, it requires attention to culture, history, intellectual frameworks, identity, symbolism and memory, the human elements that shape how cooperation is understood and lived.

It was precisely this terrain that the symposium sought to explore.

2. FOCAC’s institutional journey

The institutional story of FOCAC is well known in broad outline, yet the symposium revealed a more layered understanding of its development. Swanepoel (2025) described the Forum as being a living architecture that is not a static bureaucratic agreement, but rather, it has developed into a dynamic structure that adapts as Africa’s needs and China’s capabilities evolve. In its earliest years, FOCAC’s focus on infrastructure reflected Africa’s developmental urgency of the time, such as the need for economic infrastructure like roads, power stations, ports, railways and telecommunications that could unlock economic potential and China’s experience with large-scale infrastructure and its capacity to mobilise finance at scale aligned naturally with these priorities.

But as multiple participants noted, the institutional journey did not stop at infrastructure. It broadened into a sophisticated framework for cooperation across diverse fields. What differentiates FOCAC from many other development partnerships, Wang Xiao (2025) observed, is its responsiveness, the capacity to evolve in tandem with Africa’s changing strategic aspirations, for example, when Africa began prioritising industrialisation, FOCAC expanded vocational training, manufacturing cooperation and industrial parks. When digital transformation emerged as a critical frontier, the partnership introduced cross-border e-commerce training, digital customs innovations and partnerships with Chinese technology ecosystems. When Africa’s public health vulnerabilities were exposed during the Ebola crisis and later during COVID-19, new forms of health cooperation emerged, such as the Africa CDC, medical training schemes, hospital twinning arrangements and emergency health infrastructure.

This was echoed by Prof. Liu Hongwu (2025), who described China’s developmental trajectory as having evolved from an agrarian society into a manufacturing powerhouse, which then further evolved into a technological innovator, thereby equipping China with a unique set of experiences from which Africa can selectively draw, but importantly, Africa must guard against simple imitation, because development models must be adapted to local circumstances and not only copied. He then went on to emphasise that China’s experience holds value precisely because it demonstrates that development is possible outside Western frameworks, and under conditions that resonate with African contexts.

Ambassador Gert Grobler (2025) offered a complementary diplomatic perspective, arguing that FOCAC’s durability is a product of consistent engagement, for example, China has shown up, in ministerial meetings, in summit dialogues, in crisis response, in long-term capacity initiatives. International partnerships often falter because intentions fade or political cycles intervene. FOCAC has endured because it has been continuously cultivated and this has created diplomatic reliability and the space for deeper forms of cooperation, which is enabling Africa and China to walk together through shifting global circumstances.

The institutional journey of FOCAC has also has a psychological dimension, which was illuminated by the intervention of Buyelwa Sonjica (2025), who argued that Africa’s engagement with China has helped to disrupt the legacy of dependency that was created by Africa’s colonial and post-colonial relationships with the West. For her, the institutional framework offers not merely aid or investment, but affirmation and a recognition of Africa as a capable, sovereign actor in its own development, a psychological dimension which is not peripheral, in that it shapes how Africans perceive themselves within global systems.

Taken together, the institutional journey of FOCAC emerges not as a linear progression, but as a deepening spiral, where in each cycle the cooperation has broadened the relationship’s scope, expanded its intellectual foundations and refined its ethical commitments.

3. Cultural and intellectual resonances

If the institutional story establishes how Africa and China work together, the cultural story explains why cooperation resonates and it was here that the symposium revealed its most distinctive intellectual contributions.

Stephen Langtry (2025) made a particularly evocative intervention when he dug deeper into the historical presence of the Chinese people in South Africa. Records traced their presence in South Africa from as far back as the 1660s. His storytelling disrupted the common assumption and widely held view that China-Africa relations is a recent development and/or that it has been externally imposed. Instead, it was as he described, a slow, quiet entanglement of lives across centuries, woven through migration, cultural adaptation and shared vulnerability. This historical recovery served an important conceptual purpose, in that it reframed the partnership between the two sides not as an encounter between strangers, but rather as a renewal of an old relationship, albeit that it’s under-remembered in current times.

Langtry then offered a philosophical meditation on ubuntu and Confucian harmony, identifying an ethical consonance between African and Chinese thought: Ubuntu, with its insistence that “a person becomes a person through other people,” and Confucian harmony, with its emphasis on relational balance and moral self-cultivation, both call for forms of coexistence grounded in reciprocity. For Langtry, these traditions illuminate why China-Africa cooperation has a cultural ease absent in many other external partnerships. They resonate at the level of worldview and they reflect similar intuitions about community, humanity and the moral obligations of leadership.

This exploration of cultural resonance found parallel expression in the reflections of Liu Hongwu (2025) when he emphasised that African traditions of pluralism and Chinese traditions of inclusiveness produce a natural affinity. He described how African societies, despite their deep internal diversity, nurture forms of belonging that accommodate difference, which is mirrored in Chinese philosophical traditions that value the similar qualities of harmony without homogeneity. These shared dispositions, Hongwu suggested, helps to explain why the partnership between China and Africa has endured despite the longstanding and often divisive geopolitical turbulence.

Sonjica (2025) took the cultural conversation further by introducing the concept of “intangible deliverables,” which she did by describing how encounters with Chinese society has challenged African perceptions, which have been largely shaped by colonial narratives that positioned the West as the primary reference point for modernity. Seeing a non-Western society achieve extraordinary developmental transformation restores African psychological confidence and it enlarges the imagination of what is possible. In her view, these shifts in mental horizons are as important as material infrastructure. Identity, she argued, is a development outcome.

In a different tone, Dr Yu Guizheng (2025) emphasised the intellectual responsibility of scholars in shaping cross-cultural understanding. He argued that scholarship cultivates interpretive generosity, which allows societies to see beyond stereotypes and misunderstandings, and in his observation, academic exchange nurture “the capacity to learn from difference. ” This struck at the heart of the symposium’s philosophical endeavour.

Meanwhile, the contribution of Berenice Marks (2025), through her recognition of young South African scholars in the G20 essay competition that was co-organised by the ISI and IAS, added a generational layer to cultural resonance. The students’ research, which spanned topics from green development to blue finance and agricultural modernisation, amongst others, showed how young Africans are already engaging China intellectually, and vice versa, shaping their own narratives and resisting reductive framings of the relationship. Their enthusiasm underscored that cultural resonance between the two people’s is not static, to the contrary it is constantly renewed through intergenerational learning.

Together, these contributions, it was argued, transformed culture from a soft addition to cooperation into an analytical cornerstone. The symposium revealed that China-Africa relations resonate because they touch something deep, a shared philosophical orientation toward community, a historical memory of connection, an ethical commitment to relationality and a generational desire for futures not circumscribed by Western paradigms.

4. Governance, multipolarity and the Global

South

As the symposium moved from cultural resonance to the broader questions of global governance, the tone shifted in that it now carried the weight of geopolitical complexity. The participants recognised that the twenty-fifth anniversary of FOCAC coincided with a historical inflection point, namely the weakening of unipolar structures, the fragmentation of global consensus and the emergence of new normative frameworks driven by the Global South. In this context, China-Africa cooperation is no longer merely bilateral or developmental in that it has become an intellectual and political site through which the broader debates about the emerging global order is being contested and reimagined.

Prof. Liu Hongwu (2025) argued that a new era of global governance is emerging, which will be an era in which Western institutions no longer monopolise the authority to define global norms. He also suggested that the fragmentation of the West’s dominance is not the result of external challenges alone, but also because of internal contradictions within their own system, which fractures have arisen due to unsustainable societal issues, such as unequal development, the inconsistent application of norms, and the failure to recognise the cultural and political plurality of the contemporary world. It is in this vacuum that Africa and China, who have each in their own way, found themselves increasingly drawn to articulate alternative principles that are grounded in idea of inclusion, sovereignty, developmental fairness and cultural respect.

Hongwu’s perspective resonated with Daryl Swanepoel (2025), who noted that Africa’s agency in global governance has expanded significantly in recent years, which expansion is evidenced by its role in BRICS, its interventions in climate negotiations and in its invitation to join the G20 as a permanent member. He traced how FOCAC has gradually become a platform through which African states coordinate not only development priorities, but also global governance positions. For Swanepoel, this shift is not incidental; it is the product of accumulated trust, institutional maturity and the recognition on both sides that global governance must reflect the lived realities of the majority of the world’s population.

This political dimension of the partnership between China and Africa was echoed in the diplomatic reflections of Ambassador Gert Grobler (2025), who, his intervention, emphasised the continuity and reliability of China’s support for Africa’s fair and just multilateral participation. Grobler contextualised this support within the broader diplomatic history, by noting that China has consistently advanced African priorities at the United Nations and in other global forums, which he suggested underscored China’s political solidarity not a rhetorical, but as a structural feature of the relationship.

Where Hongwu, Swanepoel and Grobler approached global governance through political analysis, Zhan Mengshu (2025) introduced a different, but complementary dimension, being the role that research collaboration plays in shaping governance outcomes. Zhan argued that governance cooperation cannot rest solely on political commitments, in it must be grounded in shared intellectual frameworks, and so she proposed strengthened research networks, joint policy analysis and deeper engagement between think tanks as essential elements of future governance architecture. Her contribution added an epistemological layer to the discourse in that it emphasised that ideas and evidence shape governance outcomes as much as political will.

Meanwhile, Wang Xiao (2025) provided a diplomatic anchor for these discussions by reaffirming China’s principled stance on sovereignty, non-interference and mutual respect, where in her remarks she highlighted that China views global governance reform not through ideological confrontation, but through the pursuit of balance, representation and developmental justice. This lens, she argued, is one of the reasons that African states have found China to be a reliable partner in navigating global political complexity.

The symposium’s exploration of global governance was not limited to structural analysis, in that it also engaged with the philosophical undercurrents existing within the international community. Langtry (2025), though primarily concerned with cultural identity, observed that the global governance debates often overlook the role of collective moral imagination, because traditions such as ubuntu and Confucianism offer alternative ethical vocabularies for thinking about international cooperation, both of which vocabularies are grounded in relationality, responsibility and balance. The subtle, yet important dimension to the governance discussion that he was making was that political systems do not operate in moral vacuums, they tend to also reflect underlying conceptions of what it means to be human, and what obligations societies believe they owe one another.

This philosophical nuance presented by Langtry complemented Sonjica’s (2025) insistence that governance reform must not only be attentive to institutional efficiency, but that it also has to be conscious to other factors, such as identity, dignity and psychological liberation. In her view, global governance systems that were shaped under colonial or imperial logics, cannot simply be tinkered with, in that they require a far more reaching and complete re-articulation that has to be grounded in the lived experience of those societies that were historically excluded from decision-making due to the imposed logics. For Africa, she argued, global governance cannot merely be considered as a technical question of representation: it must reclaim its authority to shape global norms.

Together, these insights painted a picture of China-Africa cooperation as a microcosm of a broader shift in international relations, which shift requires a partnership that should be increasingly aware of its potential, and its responsibility, to contribute to a more inclusive global order. For Africa it is no longer simply about roads and railways, it is now also about the philosophical, political and epistemic frameworks through which the next century of global governance will be written.

5. Expanding fields of cooperation

While governance considerations set the philosophical horizon, the symposium also examined the concrete forms of cooperation that have emerged under FOCAC and yet, even here, the tone remained reflective rather than technocratic. Participants did not simply list projects, they also explored how these initiatives can reconfigure African developmental possibility.

Swanepoel (2025) revisited the centrality of infrastructure, noting that although the term has become commonplace, its meaning is often reduced to engineering. Infrastructure, which he argued, is fundamentally about possibility, such as the possibility of travel, trade, education healthcare access and economic participation and it is a precondition for dignity. He described how Chinese-built railways, bridges and power grids have transformed not only the economic landscapes in Africa, but so too the imaginative landscape of what development can look like.

This contextual understanding was echoed by Liu Yuankang (2025), whose reflections on digital transformation added a futuristic dimension when he expalined how digital customs systems, smart ports, e-government platforms and educational technologies are becoming new fields of China-Africa collaboration. For him, digital cooperation marks a shift from industrial modernisation to informational modernisation. It creates opportunities for Africa to leapfrog traditional constraints and build governance systems suited to its youthful population. In Liu’s vision, the digital future is not purely technological it is also social, cultural and political.

Public health cooperation also figured prominently in the symposium. Several participants recalled China’s role during the Ebola crisis and later during the COVID-19 pandemic, citing the establishment and strengthening of the Africa CDC, medical training programmes, vaccine cooperation and emergency health infrastructure. These interventions were described by Swanepoel (2025) not as episodic acts of aid, but as manifestations of long-term solidarity which is rooted in shared vulnerability. He pointed to cooperation in the field of health, which he said revealed the underlying principle that lies at the heart of the relationship: that development is inseparable from human security.

Agricultural collaboration also emerged as a vital and expanding area of engagement between the two sides. Liu Hongwu (2025) emphasised that China’s experience in agricultural modernisation, that evolved from a smallholder driven agricultural economy to rural industrialisation, holds valuable lessons for Africa’s own food security and rural development. Agricultural technology demonstration centres, hybrid seed cooperation, irrigation projects and training programmes have created practical channels through which Chinese agricultural innovations can be shared and adapted to African contexts. Participants were of the view that agricultural cooperation, while often overshadowed by infrastructure in the public discourse, may ultimately have more transformative long-term effects for the Africa, because it directly impacts the lives of millions of Africans directly.

Odile Bulten (2025), approaching cooperation through the lens of governance, underscored the importance of transparency, when, she argued, cooperation grows more complex, for example when it spans digital finance, water management, green energy and urban development: accountability and ethical oversight must grow with it. Because for her, the sophistication of cooperation must be equally matched by the sophistication of governance.

Security cooperation also entered the discussion, though in subtler tones, in that while the symposium did not frame security cooperation in militarised terms, it acknowledged the interconnectedness of development and peace. Whether through maritime security, anti-piracy initiatives, peacekeeping collaborations or counter-terrorism support, China and Africa have begun exploring ways to stabilise the environments necessary for development to flourish. These engagements were framed as being pragmatic responses to shared vulnerabilities, as opposed to being instruments of geopolitical influence.

Against the background of Africa facing disproportionate climate risks despite contributing minimally to global emission, climate and environmental cooperation emerged as one of the most future-oriented fields of engagement. Swanepoel (2025) and several Chinese scholars highlighted China’s global leadership in renewable energy technologies, such as solar, wind, hydroelectric and electric vehicles, and its potential role in supporting Africa’s green transition, though for example green industrialisation, climate adaptation, sustainable urban development and ecological protection; which were all identified as areas where cooperation could profoundly influence Africa’s development trajectory.

Taken together, these expanding fields of cooperation between China and Africa illustrated how FOCAC has evolved into a multidimensional ecosystem. It is not a single initiative, but a constellation of interlinked programmes that touch almost every aspect of African life, including economic, social, political, cultural, environmental and technological, amongst others. The symposium therefore articulated a vision of cooperation that is not only expansive, but integrative and a system that seeks to address development holistically, rather than piecemeal.

6. Knowledge institutions as architects of

the future

If cooperation is to be integrative, then knowledge institutions must be central. This was perhaps the most consistent and unifying theme of the symposium. There was a shared realisation among participants that the future of the China-Africa relationship will be shaped not only by government decisions, but by the intellectual infrastructure that thinkers, scholars, universities and research institutes create.

Prof. Liu Shu (2025) framed the entire symposium as an academic response to President Xi’s call for deeper scholarly engagement, advancing the idea that intellectual labour is foundational, not decorative. And scholars, he argued, do not merely observe the cooperation between the two sides, they conceptualise it, critique it and they provide the interpretive frameworks that shape the policy decisions that impact it.

Dr Yu Guizheng (2025) added depth to this idea by describing academic communities as custodians of interpretive generosity, in that they are institutions that model how to read another culture without distortion, how to absorb complexity without flattening it and how to allow oneself to be transformed by intellectual encounter: a perspective that suggests that scholarship is not only analytical, but also relational, and it builds trust by reducing cultural distance between people’s.

Meanwhile, Zhan Mengshu (2025) provided a practical blueprint for strengthening academic cooperation, which plan proposes research mobility programmes, co-authored publications, joint conferences, interdisciplinary initiatives and policy-oriented research platforms. For Zhan, think tanks and universities are not ancillary to development, they are laboratories of governance innovation.

Odile Bulten (2025) emphasised that the intellectual ecosystem also carries responsibilities. Scholars must hold both African and Chinese institutions accountable and they must ensure that cooperation is transparent, ethical and socially responsive. Her intervention served to remind participants that knowledge institutions are not neutral spaces, but moral actors in their own right.

This emphasis on knowledge resonated strongly with Daryl Swanepoel’s (2025) reflection that Africa’s engagement with China must increasingly be guided by Africa’s own intellectual resources, because, he argued, African think tanks must develop the conceptual tools to interpret China from African vantage points. And it must be interpreted not through Western paradigms and not through overly romanticised lenses, but through grounded, rigorous and contextually sensitive analysis.

It was fitting that Berenice Marks (2025), representing youth scholarship, demonstrated that this intellectual future is already emerging. The students honoured at the symposium, for their essays on green development, blue finance, agricultural resilience and sustainable trade, exemplified the next generation of Africa-China scholars. Their work signalled that knowledge cooperation is not a future aspiration, but a living practice already shaping new imaginaries of development.

In this sense, the symposium revealed that think tanks and universities are not simply observers of China-Africa cooperation. They are its architects. They produce the ethical, conceptual and analytical foundations on which future cooperation will rest.

7. Youth and intergenerational imagination

Amid the intellectual, political and cultural depth of the symposium, the voices of young scholars stood out not as an addendum, but as a revelation, because their essays, curated by Berenice Marks (2025) through the G20 essay awards, brought into focus the generational horizon against which China-Africa cooperation must now define itself. If the first twenty-five years of FOCAC established the structural and diplomatic scaffolding of the relationship, the next twenty-five will be shaped by the imaginations and capacities of those who were not yet born when FOCAC began. This intergenerational shift constituted one of the symposium’s most quietly profound moments.

The winning students’ research offered a window into the intellectual consciousness of Africa’s emerging thinkers. Their essays, exploring blue finance ecosystems, opportunities in the grain trade corridors, green development strategy and sustainable agricultural futures, were technically sophisticated, but more importantly, they were conceptually open. They approached their research not through inherited anxieties or romanticised projections, but with a grounded curiosity that has been shaped by their lived realities as young Chinese and Africans that are learning to navigate a multipolar world.

What struck many of the participants was how naturally the youth seemed to integrate China and Africa into their cognitive maps of global development, because unlike earlier generations who grew up in a world structured by Western hegemony and Cold War binaries, contemporary students see the world as a multiplicity of actors, ideas and systems. The African youth, for example, do not perceive China as an external force, but as a normal, inevitable part of the global landscape and one with which engagement is not only possible, but necessary. This generational shift carries enormous implications for the future of China-Africa relations and it means that cooperation will increasingly be shaped not by the logic of geopolitical alignment, but by the logic of shared problem-solving.

For Buyelwa Sonjica (2025), this generational emergence represents one of the most important “intangible deliverables” of the relationship between the two sides. Youth engagement nurtures psychological liberation by expanding the horizons of what Africa believes itself capable of achieving and therefore, when young Africans encounter Chinese innovation, modernisation and cultural self-confidence, they internalise a different story about global possibilities, which is one not limited by the historical narratives of colonial dependency. This shift in self-understanding, she argued, is foundational to development.

From a philosophical standpoint, the symposium’s younger participants offered something even more valuable, they brought into the conversation a sense of temporal humility. They reminded everyone that the institutions, narratives and assumptions shaping China-Africa relations today will be judged, inhabited and revised by people whose relationships to history, culture and identity differ fundamentally from those who currently steer policy. Their imaginations will define the next arc of cooperation more profoundly than any summit declaration.

Youth, then, are not merely participants in the China-Africa relationship, they are its future custodians. Their capacity to think beyond inherited narratives, to engage China and Africa analytically, rather than ideologically, and to situate Africa’s developmental trajectory within a broader global ecosystem gives hope that the next quarter-century of FOCAC, will be more intellectually sophisticated, more culturally grounded and more globally attuned than the last.

8. Looking forward: Toward a shared

horizon

As the symposium moved toward its final reflections, it became clear that the participants were not only attempting to assess the past twenty-five years of FOCAC, but also to intuit the shape of its future. And so each voice contributed a different facet of the emerging horizon, which together formed a compelling vision of what China-Africa cooperation could become in the next historical cycle.

For Swanepoel (2025), the future lay in aligning FOCAC with China’s four global initiatives of development, security, civilisation and governance. He argued that these frameworks were not abstract policy instruments, in that they represent a coherent worldview that is rooted in global interdependence. In his reading, the Global Development Initiative (GDI) encourages pragmatic cooperation, the Global Security Initiative (GSI) emphasises stability without coercion, the Global Civilisation Initiative (GCI) affirms cultural plurality, and the Global Governance Initiative (GGI) invites adaptation, rather than imposition, which together offer a philosophical architecture that resonates deeply with Africa’s own aspirations for dignity, agency and self-determined development.

Wang Xiao (2025) offered a further complementary perspective that is rooted in diplomatic experience, by emphasising that China’s path of modernisation, which is marked by poverty reduction, technological advancement and cultural preservation, provides an alternative reference point for African societies seeking to chart their own developmental futures. Importantly, she underscored that China does not present its experience as a model to be copied, but as a set of lessons to be adapted, which humility, she argued, is essential for sustaining trust in the relationship.

Liu Hongwu (2025), by drawing on his long engagement with African philosophy and political systems, suggested that the next phase of cooperation must embrace an ethic of “civilisational humility,” because, he argued, true partnership requires acknowledging that no single society holds a monopoly on wisdom. China must remain open to learning from Africa’s models of pluralism, social resilience and communal identity and Africa, in turn, must draw from China’s developmental pragmatism and institutional experimentation without subordinating its cultural identity. Hongwu’s reflection restored a moral dimension to the future of FOCAC, which is to be one grounded in mutual learning, rather than competitive assertion.

Zhan Mengshu (2025) projected the conversation into the realm of intellectual architecture and for her, the future of China-Africa cooperation hinges on long-term research collaboration. Joint studies on climate adaptation, digital governance, rural development, peacebuilding, sustainable industry and public administration will produce the intellectual capital that informs policy. Zhan argued that strengthening academic mobility, co-authorship and institutional partnerships will help ensure that cooperation remains analytically grounded and responsive to new challenges.

Meanwhile, Liu Yuankang (2025) envisioned a digitally integrated future in which Africa’s technological ecosystems, fintech, e-government, smart infrastructure and digital trade, become central pillars of cooperation, which digital transformation, he predicted, would reshape not only Africa’s economic life, but also its political institutions, social networks and cultural expressions. Digitalisation, in his telling, is not merely a tool but a new developmental ontology.

Odile Bulten (2025) extended this forward-looking vision by emphasising governance integrity as the backbone of future cooperation, which will become even rmore important as cooperation widens into more complex domains, such as renewable energy, water security, artificial intelligence and environmental protection, transparency and public participation must remain central, because, in her words “without ethical governance, cooperation risks losing legitimacy”.

For Ambassador Grobler (2025), the future will require steady diplomatic stewardship, because, as he reminded participants, partnerships only endure when they are cultivated consistently, especially during periods of global instability; and that requires diplomacy, trust-building and institutional continuity as essential anchors.

Finally, the reflections inspired by youth contributions offered the most hopeful dimension of all, being the recognition that futures are not shaped by documents or communiqués, but instead, by imagination. Young scholars demonstrated that Africa approaches China not with deference or suspicion but with clarity, curiosity and critical engagement. The partnership is no longer defined only by senior policymakers, it is alive in the minds of those who will inherit the global order being constructed today.

Taken together, these perspectives pointed toward a shared horizon defined by intellectual depth, moral imagination, cultural respect, ecological responsibility, technological adaptability and political courage.

The symposium agreed that the next twenty-five years of FOCAC will require not only new policies, but so too new philosophical commitments that need to be grounded in empathy, curiosity and a willingness to reimagine global relations from the vantage point of the Global South.

9. Conclusion

By the time the symposium drew to a close, what lingered, was not the particularities of each intervention, but the subtle harmony of the whole, because it became clear that the partnership between Africa and China has moved far beyond the transactional logic that often characterises South-South cooperation. It has become a space where memory, identity, knowledge and aspiration converge. A space where infrastructure is inseparable from meaning, where governance is inseparable from dignity, where culture is inseparable from development, and where imagination is inseparable from policy.

FOCAC at twenty-five is not simply an institutional milestone, it is a philosophical moment. It signals that Africa and China are ready to engage one another at the depth where civilisations speak, not only through trade and investment, but through worldviews, ethical commitments and shared futures. The symposium made visible the full spectrum of voices required to sustain such a partnership: Liu Shu grounding the dialogue intellectually, Swanepoel mapping its structural architecture, Wang Xiao affirming its diplomatic integrity, Liu Hongwu offering its philosophical foundation, Langtry illuminating its cultural memory, Sonjica revealing its moral and psychological dimensions, Yu Guizheng articulating its epistemic humility, Zhan Mengshu expanding its scholarly horizons, Odile Bulten grounding it in governance integrity, Liu Yuankang charting its technological pathways, Ambassador Grobler anchoring it in diplomatic continuity and Berenice Marks showing that the dreams and inquiries of the young will carry the partnership into the next quarter-century.

In this way, the symposium revealed that FOCAC is not merely an agreement between governments, but a site of intellectual and moral co-creation. It is a place where Africa and China learn to think together, to dream together and to confront the deep challenges of the twenty-first century together. And if there is a single insight to carry forward, it is this: partnerships endure when they allow themselves to grow, to deepen, to question, to imagine and, above all, to become more fully human.

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Yu, G. 2025. Remarks on Academic Communities as Custodians of Interpretive Understanding. Presented at the ISI-IAS Symposium on the 25th Anniversary of FOCAC, Cape Town.

Yuankang, L. 2025. Digital Transformation and Africa’s Technological Future: Opportunities for China-Africa Cooperation. Delivered at the ISI–IAS Symposium, Cape Town.

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This report has been published by the Inclusive Society Institute

The Inclusive Society Institute (ISI) is an autonomous and independent institution that functions independently from any other entity. It is founded for the purpose of supporting and further deepening multi-party democracy. The ISI’s work is motivated by its desire to achieve non-racialism, non-sexism, social justice and cohesion, economic development and equality in South Africa, through a value system that embodies the social and national democratic principles associated with a developmental state. It recognises that a well-functioning democracy requires well-functioning political formations that are suitably equipped and capacitated. It further acknowledges that South Africa is inextricably linked to the ever transforming and interdependent global world, which necessitates international and multilateral cooperation. As such, the ISI also seeks to achieve its ideals at a global level through cooperation with like-minded parties and organs of civil society who share its basic values. In South Africa, ISI’s ideological positioning is aligned with that of the current ruling party and others in broader society with similar ideals.

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