In a recent article for Counterpunch, Joshua Frank accuses China of “green economic imperialism” in Africa and Latin America – alleging that Chinese investment in critical minerals and renewable supply chains amounts to a new form of colonial plunder. The piece appeared just days after French President Emmanuel Macron, at the Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi, condemned China for operating with a “predatory logic” across the continent.
In the following article, our co-editor Carlos Martinez responds. He shows that Frank’s case rests on a series of substantive misrepresentations – about China’s energy transition, its mining operations, its lending practices, and the meaning of imperialism itself. Whatever Frank’s intentions, the function of his piece is to manufacture left-wing consent for the US-led New Cold War on China.
In a recent article for Counterpunch, Joshua Frank revives a now-familiar accusation: that China is engaged in “green economic imperialism” in the Global South, plundering critical minerals to fuel its renewable-energy industries while propping up dependent regimes through resource-backed loans. Chinese engagement with the Global South, Frank concludes, is “economic imperialism (which is very much rooted in colonial policies)”.
This is a remarkably timely reproduction of the argument made by French President Emmanuel Macron at the Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi the previous week. Macron accused China of operating with a “predatory logic” across Africa and of “creating dependencies” by insisting that critical mineral processing takes place on Chinese soil.
That should give pause. As observed on this website, Macron made his Nairobi remarks at a summit explicitly designed to “rebuild French influence in Africa” after France’s humiliating expulsion from Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. He spoke as the head of a former colonial power controlling a currency, the CFA franc, which is used to extract foreign-exchange reserves from 14 African states into a French Treasury account. When the head of an actually-existing neocolonial entity denounces Chinese “predatory logic”, it’s not a bad idea for leftists to do their due diligence.
The coal canard
Frank opens by noting that China is “still building coal-fired power plants at a faster pace than any other country” and that “air pollution in China kills 2 million a year”. Both claims are substantively misleading.
China’s new coal plants are predominantly advanced supercritical or ultra-supercritical facilities – far more efficient and cleaner than the legacy plants still in operation in the US – and most are planned explicitly as backup capacity for variable solar and wind generation, with a typical ratio of roughly 1GW of coal for every 6GW of new renewables.
Coal’s share of China’s electricity mix has fallen from around 80 percent at the start of the century to around 50 percent today. Renewable capacity overtook coal capacity for the first time in 2023. China’s greenhouse-gas emissions probably peaked in that same year, seven years ahead of the official target. According to the Ember China Energy Transition Review 2025, China is the engine driving the global transition away from fossil fuels.
As for air quality, Beijing PM2.5 concentrations have fallen by around 70 percent since 2013. The 2 million figure Frank cites comes from older data and a static methodology that ignores precisely the trajectory of improvement.
Honest engagement with China’s environmental record should grapple with these facts.
Green imperialism?
Frank’s central charge is that China’s “critical mineral operations” in Africa and Latin America constitute “blatant capitalist (in China’s case, state-run) exploitation”. His evidence consists of market-share figures: 90 percent of Zimbabwe’s lithium, 70 percent of DRC copper and cobalt, near-total dominance in processing.
These numbers describe trade and investment relationships. They do not describe imperialism. Imperialism, in any meaningful Marxist sense, requires domination and coercion – the political subjugation of peripheral economies to the demands of a metropolitan ruling class. None of Frank’s assertions demonstrate anything of the kind.
What they do demonstrate is that African (and Latin American, Asian, Caribbean and Pacific) governments are choosing, in significant numbers, to do business with Chinese state-owned enterprises rather than with Western mining majors. They are doing so because Chinese investment and loans come without IMF-style structural-adjustment conditions; without political demands; and without coercive measures of any kind. Jason Hickel is absolutely right about this, even if Frank considers him to have “missed the mark”.
Meanwhile, it should be noted that China is not simply shipping minerals out and attempting to hold African countries in a permanent position at the bottom of the value chain. Rather it is actively and positively supportive of African countries’ efforts to develop their refining and processing capacities, and hence realise value added. For example, China’s Sinomine Resource Group recently committed to building a 400-million dollar lithium sulphate processing plant in Zimbabwe, cooperating with the Zimbabwean government’s strategy of ending unprocessed lithium exports.
China’s relationship with Africa has involved no coups, no military interventions, no proxy wars, no assassinations, no unilateral sanctions, no extractive currency arrangements, no political conditionality. Chinese state banks have financed the bulk of Africa’s new power generation capacity – over 40 percent of Chinese loans to Africa have gone to power generation and transmission, on a continent where 600 million people still lack reliable electricity. China has built West Africa’s first light rail (in Lagos), Africa’s first fully electrified cross-border railway (Ethiopia-Djibouti), and the new African Union headquarters. A New York Times article in December 2025 observed that “cheap solar is transforming lives and economies across Africa”. Chinese medical teams have been operating in Africa for over sixty years. On 1 May 2026, China implemented unconditional zero-tariff access to its 1.4-billion-strong market for all 53 African countries with which it maintains diplomatic relations.
Forever debt?
Frank’s claim that Chinese loans are “resource-backed” and therefore constitute “a new form of forever debt” is worth examining. Resource-backed lending is a standard instrument in commodity-rich economies, used by Western banks and multilateral lending institutions for decades. What distinguishes Chinese lending is precisely that it does not impose macroeconomic policy conditions, that its interest rates are substantially lower, that it is more flexible on debt relief and restructuring than its Western counterparts, and that it has financed genuinely productive infrastructure rather than the asset-stripping that characterised the structural-adjustment era.
Deborah Bräutigam, who runs the China-Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins SAIS and has done the most detailed empirical work in this field, has repeatedly debunked the “debt trap” narrative – including, definitively, in the case of Sri Lanka’s Hambantota Port, the foundational myth of the genre.
Who benefits from Counterpunch’s attack on China?
There is, inevitably, plenty to criticise in any economic relationship between a large industrial power and resource-supplying countries. Working conditions on some Chinese-operated projects in Africa, especially those operated by private companies, no doubt leave much to be desired, and indeed these are on a positive trajectory thanks to government intervention on both sides. Environmental impacts of mining are real wherever they occur. But such issues cannot be conflated with imperialism.
The function of Frank’s argument, regardless of its intention, is to bolster an anti-China propaganda war being waged by the US ruling class. It manufactures left-wing consent for a New Cold War whose objective is precisely to keep the Global South dependent on the West.
