Since 2000, the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), held every three years between Chinese and African leaders, has been garnering increasing global attention. This growing prominence stems from two fundamental outcomes of these meetings.
The first is that the synergy created by the FOCAC summits, along with the successful implementation of their stated objectives, has rapidly advanced China-Africa relations. In other words, these summits have played a significant role in unleashing the strong potential of China-Africa cooperation and in facilitating China’s swift transformation into one of the most influential external actors on the continent.
The second outcome is that the visible contributions of these summits to bilateral relations and to China's growing influence in Africa have prompted other global actors seeking to expand their presence on the continent to adopt similar strategies. Consequently, “summit diplomacy” has become one of the leading instruments in the 21st-century competition among international actors for influence in Africa.
