What Africa can learn from China's industrialisation

Is Africa asking the wrong question? Whenever a new industrial park is launched, a railway completed, or a foreign manufacturer announces a billion-dollar investment, the headlines almost write themselves. Jobs created. Investment attracted. Growth unlocked. But beneath the celebration lies a more uncomfortable question that rarely receives the same attention: Who is actually becoming more productive? Because economic activity is not the same as economic transformation. A country can build factories without building manufacturers. It can host industries without owning industrial capability. It can even post impressive GDP growth while remaining trapped at the bottom of global value chains. This is where China’s story matters, not because Africa should become another China, but because China understood something many developing economies still struggle with. Development was never simply about making the economy bigger. It was about changing what the economy was capable of producing. That distinction deserves far more attention in Africa’s industrialisation agenda. For decades, discussions about China’s rise have focused on spectacular growth rates, soaring exports and hundreds of millions lifted from poverty. Those achievements matter. But they are the result, not the strategy. The strategy was structural transformation. China deliberately shifted labour, investment, infrastructure and policy support from low-productivity agriculture into increasingly sophisticated manufacturing. As a result, the share of agriculture, forestry and fishing in GDP value added declined from 27% in 1990 to 7% in 2019, reflecting the country’s broader process of structural transformation. It built roads not because roads generate development by themselves, but because roads connected factories. It invested in ports because ports connected exports. It built industrial parks because firms learn faster when they cluster together. Each policy reinforced another. Growth followed production, not the other way around. What do we measure? Africa today finds itself at a remarkably similar crossroads. Across the continent, governments are racing to establish special economic zones, industrial parks and manufacturing hubs. Chinese, European, American, Gulf and domestic investors are all being encouraged to establish production facilities. Foreign direct investment has once again become a central measure of policy success. None of this is inherently wrong. The problem is what we choose to measure. When policymakers announce that a project has created 20,000 jobs, the obvious assumption is that 20,000 lives have been transformed. Have they? Consider a large infrastructure project. Thousands of people may find work during construction. Food vendors earn income. Truck drivers secure contracts. Local businesses benefit from temporary demand. But when construction ends, what remains? Can the engineers who worked alongside foreign contractors design and manage the next project independently? Have domestic firms learned new production methods? Have local manufacturers entered the supply chain? Has technological capability actually moved into African hands? Or has employment disappeared with the contractor? These questions matter because industrialisation is not ultimately about counting factories. It is about accumulating productive knowledge. China understood this remarkably well. Foreign investment was deliberately strategic, and played an important role in China’s industrial rise. Beijing never assumed that investment alone would create development. Chinese firms spent years learning from foreign companies, absorbing manufacturing techniques, improving production quality and building domestic supplier networks. Over time, that apprenticeship evolved into something very different: Chinese companies stopped merely assembling products for others and began designing, improving and eventually competing with them. That transformation did not happen automatically. For three decades, China has used its Catalogue of Encouraged Industries for Foreign Investment to align foreign direct investment (FDI) with its evolving industrial priorities, progressively shifting from labour-intensive manufacturing to advanced manufacturing and high-tech industries. Africa’s industrialisation – how much value stays? Therefore transformation happened because China consistently asked a question that Africa should also ask: how much value stays behind and how much gets integrated into the local productive capacities. This is perhaps the most important lesson China offers Africa. Not that the state should control everything. Not that every country should copy China’s institutions. Not even that manufacturing alone guarantees prosperity. Rather, that productive capability rarely transfers by accident. It must be negotiated. This applies just as much to Chinese investment in Africa as it does to investment from Europe, America or anywhere else. Foreign investors are businesses. Their primary responsibility is to generate returns for shareholders, not to industrialise host countries. That is neither good nor bad. It is simply reality. The responsibility for ensuring that investment develops local capabilities belongs to African governments. This means asking harder questions before celebrating investment announcements. Are local suppliers entering production chains? Are African engineers moving into technical and management positions? Are domestic firms learning technologies they did not previously possess? Will today’s factory still leave behind an industrial ecosystem twenty years from now? China itself demonstrates why these questions matter. Its factories did not succeed because they were isolated islands of production. They became embedded within dense networks of suppliers, logistics companies, research institutions, vocational schools and engineering expertise. Factories became ecosystems. That ecosystem, not simply cheap labour, is what made China difficult to replace. Africa’s opportunity today is not to compete with China head-on. It is to learn from the discipline with which China built productive capacity over decades. Opportunity alone changes nothing The continent is entering an era in which global manufacturers are diversifying supply chains, while the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) promises a market of unprecedented scale. Those conditions create genuine opportunity. But opportunity alone changes nothing. Industrialisation should not be judged by the number of industrial parks built, the value of foreign direct investment attracted or the number of temporary jobs created. It should be judged by whether African firms become more capable of producing increasingly sophisticated goods year after year. That is ultimately the difference between growth and transformation. Growth makes economies larger. Production makes economies stronger. Africa’s industrial future will depend on understanding the difference. Karani Muthamia is senior Africa-China partnerships manager at Development Reimagined. This piece is the latest in a series with Development Reimagined on “China through African eyes”. Too often the focus on China is either on what it has achieved or as a competitor. The series will explore the “how” of China, and how and when African countries can adapt this into African contexts.