US mentality impediment to better ties with Africa: China Daily editorial

The second US-Africa Leaders Summit the Joe Biden administration held in Washington last week came eight years after the first such summit was hosted by the former Barack Obama administration.

With little having materialized to the benefit of African countries after the first summit, many African observers were justified in asking what could be expected from the latest summit that was hosted at a time when the United States is concentrating on protecting its hegemony like a dog guards a bone.

An important reason why Washington seeks to impress the world, including US society, with such large-scale summits, including the ones it held with Southeast Asian and Latin American countries earlier this year, is that it needs to show that it is not in a disadvantageous position in what it sees as a global competition with Beijing.

But instead of that, all these events have served to do is expose to the world the hypocrisy of the US' value diplomacy. The forced glad-handing the US displays in these interactions with the participating countries is in stark contrast with China's low-profile pragmatic and substantially fruitful economic and trade cooperation with them.

The less-developed countries do not need convincing of the US' military, economic, financial and technological superiority. They need to be convinced that like China, the US regards them as friends, brothers and comrades, not merely as expandable pieces in its geopolitical games.

The judgment on the differences between US and Chinese diplomacy, which is shared by the whole developing world from the Middle East to Africa and from Asia to Latin America, has not been created overnight but formed over a long period of time, during which Washington has been lecturing the developing world on human rights, while Beijing has been helping to improve people's lives.

In that process, the US has never stopped inciting coups and wars in developing countries to serve its own agenda, while China has been doing all it can to help developing countries take the initiative of development in their own hands at an early date.

China expects and looks forward to these countries exercising their autonomy in seeking independent development and striving for a bigger say over issues related to their own interests on the world stage. But what the US seeks from them are obedience and dependency.

Until the US changes its outlook, the more leaders it invites to Washington for such clique-building attempts, the more first-hand experience these countries will have to understand how their host views them.