Beijing is deepening its influence in North Africa after Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune signed a cooperation agreement on defence and investment with Chinese President Xi Jinping after a week-long state visit to China.
Both Algeria and China have strong historic ties, going back to Algeria’s national liberation struggle in the 1950s, which the Chinese Communist Party supported to the tune of billions in structural funds through the years.
President Tebboune was quoted in the Algerian media as saying that China would invest $36 billion into multiple economic sectors across Algeria, including transport and manufacturing, after the North African leader agreed to a strategic partnership with China to increase military cooperation.
The cooperation with China comes after President Tebboune bolstered his country’s trading ties with Russia on a state visit to Moscow last month, making Algeria the world’s third-largest importer of Russian military hardware as part of a defence spending spree primarily aimed at neighbouring Morocco.
Algeria has ratcheted up tensions with Morocco in recent years over the question of Western Sahara, leading Western NGOs to bemoan rising authoritarianism and anti-western sentiment from Algiers.
Gas-rich Algeria has increasingly become China’s greatest ally in the Mediterranean and looks to Beijing for financial and political support. The United States and Israel have backed Morocco’s territorial claims in Western Sahara in exchange for rallying the Islamic world against Iran.
From a broader geopolitical perspective, China’s increased economic presence in Algeria could complicate Italian plans to utilise Algeria as the gas hub for Western Europe under the so-called Mattei Plan, a major pillar of Italian geostrategic policy in the region, as Europe gradually suspends energy imports from Russia.
Algeria is already a full-fledged member of the Belt and Road Initiative and has enjoyed substantial Chinese investment in automobile manufacturing, energy production, and infrastructure construction since the 1990s. Chinese and Russian military aid has been essential in keeping the Algerian government in power during the country’s 11-year civil war against Islamists that ended in 2002.
President Tebboune is expected to feature heavily at next week’s Russia-Africa summit, to be hosted in St. Petersburg at the end of the month as Algeria lobbies to become a new member of the BRICS club.
Since the outbreak of war in Ukraine, Algeria and much of the Global South have drifted away from the Western-led order in search of alternative partners, such as China and Russia, to counter European and American hegemony.
