China Targets Africa in Re-Education Campaign--- Why it Matters

For a number of years, China was focused on opening Confucius Institutes on American campuses across the country ---from the University of Washington to the Eastern seaboard. The Chinese Communist Party claimed the institutes were merely an attempt to better acquaint American students with China's rich history and culture.

That was a lie.

Conservatives in Congress and elsewhere soon figured out what they were up to and began threatening to cut funding to the schools hosting these indoctrination institutes.

There are only about 10 left in the US and 530 worldwide. 

Now the Communists are forging a new path to achieve the same ends with their initial primary focus on Africa---rather than the US.

That will come later.

AXIOS, not a conservative news organization, is sounding the alarm.

Be informed, not misled.

AXIOS reported yesterday, "The Chinese Communist Party is teaching African leaders its authoritarian alternative to democracy at its first overseas training school — the strongest evidence yet that Beijing is exporting its model of governing in its push to challenge the Western-led world order."

The CCP has chosen six African countries to launch its planned takeover of the big continent. And the west.

Why it matters politically.

The Mwalimu Julius Nyerere Leadership School has been set up in Tanzania. It is Beijing’s counter to efforts by the U.S. and other Western countries to shape African politics in a fight for influence on a continent rich in raw materials and energy. At the school, the CCP teaches how it fuses the ruling political party and the state, marking a clear departure from Beijing’s previous, more subtle attempts to peddle influence on the international stage---[such as its Confucius Institutes.]

Cultivating an authoritarian-friendly political bloc could help China reshape global institutions and guarantee markets as Western sanctions seek to isolate certain Chinese industries. Such a bloc would also help the CCP deflect criticism for its human rights record and gain international support for its core interests, such as its territorial claims in the South China Sea.

Chinese and African government officials and Chinese state media have presented the school as a way to promote Africa’s economic and social development, and they’ve cast the CCP’s approach there as a way to alleviate poverty and spur economic development through training effective leaders.

But behind the school’s closed doors, economics takes a back seat to political training. Chinese teachers sent from Beijing train African leaders that the ruling party should sit above the government and the courts and that fierce discipline within the party can ensure adherence to party ideology. 

 Axios and the Danish newspaper Politiken were the first Western news outlets to visit the school.

Their reporting is from a geo-political point of view.  

About the school and the first six countries targeted by the Chinese Communist Party.

The school, located on a large swath of land 30 miles outside Dar es Salaam, was funded by a $40 million donation provided by the CCP’s Central Party School, which trains China's top party officials, and was built by a Chinese construction company. Its vast campus has a large banquet hall, gyms, tennis courts, and more than 300 hotel-style rooms with Chinese-made furniture. Like many projects in Tanzania, it’s named after Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, Tanzania’s first leader after it gained independence from Britain in the early 1960s. He is widely revered as the country’s founding father.

The six countries are all majority Christian: Tanzania, where the training center is established, is 61% Christian. Angola, 75%; Nambia, 90%;  South Africa, 79%; Zimbabwe, 87%; and Mozambique, 56%.

I have spent a good amount of time in Africa in the past and am still in touch with a number of pastors and Christian leaders in Africa. They're concerned but are---and will, stand firm.

China denies they are trying to export authoritarianism, but that's exactly what they are trying to do. An assistant professor of political science at Yale University, who focuses on politics in China, says, “There’s been a reluctance from a lot of scholars to say that China is clearly trying to export authoritarianism.” 

He says it’s “remarkable" that there are students who leave the school with the perception that “we need to move to a much stronger one-party state model.”

The CCP has held an exclusive grip on power for more than 70 years using a model Beijing is now trying to establish within the ruling party officials from six African countries who also want to cement their control.

Richard McGregor, senior fellow for East Asia at the Lowy Institute in Australia, told Axios.“[T]he most important part of that model is imbuing revolutionary parties with the idea that they are the permanent ruling party and educating them on how to achieve that aim.” 

 All six nations involved are multiparty democracies, but their governing parties share another key feature: Each has ruled continuously for decades.

The school’s offerings are made available to rising young members of the ruling parties — but not to politicians from opposition parties, even though these countries claim to be "democracies."

Do you see any parallels yet?  

The school’s approach echoes Mao-era policies promoting China as a model to the developing world, but it has key differences.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the CCP supported communist revolutionary movements abroad, seeking to spread its ideology and communist economic policies, including in Tanzania. That support ended after reforms began in 1978. Beijing shifted its focus from party-to-party cooperation toward diplomacy between states.

Except these aren’t revolutionary parties, they are authoritarian parties in power within a nominally democratic system.

Should our country continue on our current path with the current leadership in the White House and the Senate, the United States could become unrecognizable in a matter of years: One-party control within a "democracy" that can push through any legislation, no matter how radical. A fundamentally transformed Supreme Court that legislates rather than deliberates. Top-down federal control over nearly every aspect of American life.

The only thing between us and such a dystopian vision is the 2024 election. 

And much more so, our prayers to Almighty God for forgiveness and a turning from our sins.

The radical Left is hollowing out our great nation. If left unchecked, they will create a perpetual rule within our "democracy," causing our exceptional country to become T.S Eliot's "Hollow Men." 

"We are the hollow men...Leaning together...Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Shape without form, shade without color,  Paralysed force, gesture without motion...ending not with a bang, but a whimper."

However, this is not hopeless. There is reason for hope.

2 Chronicles 7:14

"If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land."

Be Informed. Be Vigilant. Be Diligent. Be Discerning. Be Active. Be Engaged. Be Prayerful.