Many African political parties have approached the Chinese Communist Party to build their schools and help strengthen party building, according to Paul Nantulya, a China specialist at the National Defence University’s Africa Centre for Strategic Studies in Washington.

He said those parties were from countries including Burundi, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Morocco and Uganda.

The Chinese Communist Party has already provided US$40 million to build the Mwalimu Julius Nyerere Leadership School in Kibaha, named after Tanzania’s revered founding father, which opened in 2022. Beijing also supported the refurbishment of the Herbert Chitepo School of Ideology in Zimbabwe – the political training school of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front – that was completed last year.

In a report published by the Africa Centre for Strategic Studies on July 29, Nantulya said China seemed to be following the model it used in Ghana, where it has provided successive ruling parties with political leadership training since 2018.

Nantulya said China was expected to receive more than 50 African party delegations this year – double the number hosted in 2015.

He said the Communist Party had stepped up training of party and government officials in Africa. He pointed to the Nyerere School in Tanzania, which trains ruling party members from the Former Liberation Movements of Southern Africa coalition – from Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania and Zimbabwe.

Nantulya said although China had built or supported African party schools since the 1960s, the Nyerere School was the first to be modelled on the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Party School, which trains its top cadres and leaders.

He said the activities of China’s National Academy of Governance – the external name for the Central Party School – were less noticeable. Although it does not have bricks-and-mortar schools it conducts year-round training with governance academies in countries including Algeria, Ethiopia, Kenya and South Africa.

But despite China’s economic growth, many Africans are not convinced by the country’s political model.

“Nearly 80 per cent reject one-party rule,” Nantulya said. “Yet, as many African scholars argue, China’s party and governance training has the potential to entrench single, dominant party models in Africa.”

He noted in the report that the Chinese Communist Party has ongoing relations with 110 African ruling and opposition parties, 35 parliaments and 59 politically oriented organisations including party think tanks. He said China had conducted exchanges, party building and training with every African ruling party except for eSwatini, which recognises Taiwan.

According to Lina Benabdallah, an associate professor in the politics and international affairs department at Wake Forest University in the US, Beijing wants to build leadership or party schools to reinforce ideological affinities where they exist between the Communist Party and African political parties.

“These leadership schools also create an opportunity for the Chinese governance model to become more influential abroad by helping develop curricula, train staff and so on,” Benabdallah said.

She said that for African nations, China’s willingness to financially endorse these schools was a lucrative opportunity.

“It remains to be seen whether these schools actually display an ideological alignment with China in content or whether they are in fact independent and just the building and the outside structure are China-influenced,” she said.

Yun Sun, co-director of the East Asia programme and director of the China programme at the Stimson Centre in Washington, said China trained African leaders in Africa, but also in China.

She said the goal was to consolidate friendly ties and promote the Chinese model of development.

For African political parties, according to Sun, the leadership schools offer a venue and connection with China that could lead to cooperative projects that might benefit them – regardless of whether they are in power or opposition.

She said they did not have to replicate the Chinese model.

“Ten years ago, the Chinese called Ethiopia the best student of the China model in Africa,” Sun said. “But I don’t think the Chinese still refer to the case of Ethiopia any more.”

John Calabrese, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, said Chinese party schools had collaborated with Ethiopian institutions to provide training in political and economic governance, emphasising China’s development experience.

“They have provided ideological training and development model ‘insights’ to the African National Congress [in South Africa]. They have also had some training programmes for members of the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front,” Calabrese said.

“These party-to-party relationships have deep roots, dating back to the national liberation struggles, which China supported politically while not yet having acquired the means to support materially, or at least only to a very limited extent.”

Benjamin Barton, an associate professor at the University of Not­tingham’s Malaysia campus, said building party schools was part of the Chinese Communist Party’s soft power efforts in Africa.

“The construction of these schools represents part of its commitment to fostering long-term relations with these sister parties. They also come in handy not just in promoting a positive image of China globally but they are important for Beijing in terms when it comes to debunking certain myths (or what Beijing sees as untruths) about the CCP or China writ large,” he said.

Barton said under the aegis of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, Beijing had placed a lot of emphasis on African youth leadership. He said that was a calculated move aimed at positively influencing the leaders of tomorrow on the continent – not just about China but about the benefits of China’s interpretation of socialism, Marxism and Leninism.

“The CCP is banking both on the leaders of today as well as the possible leaders of tomorrow,” he said.