Last year, the Africa Cup of Nations, the continent’s biggest international soccer tournament, kicked off in Côte d’Ivoire, in a stadium designed, financed, and built by China. This should not come as a surprise to anyone who follows the sport, nor is it some new development. The first Chinese-made stadium in Africa was completed more than fifty years ago. By the end of the millennium, nine more African countries would open their capital cities to what came to be known as “stadium diplomacy.” The quantity and scale of these stadiums grew alongside an increasingly robust push to quickly build infrastructure in poor African countries. The soccer historian David Goldblatt writes:
In the 1980s, China had been content to foster solidarity in Africa and leverage it to diplomatically exclude and isolate Taiwan. After assessing the post-Cold War landscape in the early 1990s, however, it became clear to the Chinese leadership that Africa offered rather more. China’s burgeoning industrial economy and population would soon require new export markets, land for agricultural purposes and, above all, access to the full range of raw materials its factories consumed. Africa, particularly as its oil reserves grew, offered all of these in abundance and, given the United States’ rapid withdrawal from the continent after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the price of entry looked very low.
Stadium diplomacy has had its problems. Some of the structures have been set up in inconvenient locations. There’s also reportedly very little follow-up from the Chinese, who mostly seem content to drop a big stadium in an African city and let the local government figure out what to do with it. In some cases, stadiums constructed less than twenty years ago have already been effectively abandoned. But from a foreign-policy perspective, China’s investment has more than paid off. Soft power, in many ways, is an economy of symbols. You get a foothold in some wildly public spectacle, throw some money at it, and then hope that the masses conclude that you’re not so bad.
President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, through the first two weeks of their Administration, have unleashed a series of executive orders and purges of the federal budget that may very well benefit China and its seemingly unrelenting appetite for soft power. U.S.A.I.D., the international-development organization that helps to advance American interests abroad, has become Musk’s most recent focus. This is a bit strange given that foreign assistance comprises less than one per cent of the total federal budget. A management consultant who comes into a company to radically slash waste probably shouldn’t get caught up for weeks on the water bubblers in the lounge, but Musk seems fully committed to razing U.S.A.I.D. and salting the earth beneath it. One can speculate why this has happened. Perhaps Musk has been told that he can’t actually overrun the entire federal government and has committed himself to thoroughly dismantling a relatively small program so he doesn’t look weak. Or maybe he just really hates the idea of helping people in other countries,