Relations between China and Mugabe have been quite fractious over the past year and a half, and the current situation is going to make things worse,” he said.
China is unhappy about Mugabe’s mismanagement of Zimbabwe’s economy and is believed to favor as his successor, Emmerson Mnangagwa, who’s seen as more of an “economic pragmatist,” Matyszak said.
Meanwhile," Chinese is one of the African nation’s biggest investors, trading partners and diplomatic allies.
Mnangagwa was elected Sunday as the new leader of Zimbabwe’s ruling party and is positioned to take over as the country’s leader.
Zimbabwe’s army commander, Gen. Constantino Chiwenga, visited Beijing in early November, around the same time Mnangagwa disappeared. The Chinese Foreign Ministry called it a “normal military exchange,” but the timing raised suspicions that it was anything but.
The countries’ military links date back to the 1960s, when China helped train and supply guerrilla fighters from the Zanu’s military wing in the fight for liberation. Mnangagwa, 75, was part of that effort — he received military training in China in 1963, soon after he joined the fight against white minority rule in then-Rhodesia.
These days, China is a key supplier of military hardware to Zimbabwe. Major sales in recent years include a radar system, jet trainers and fighters, military vehicles and AK-47 assault rifles.
A Chinese company built the National Defense College in Harare, which opened in 2014 and was financed with an interest-free $98 million loan from China. The college, the biggest of its kind in the country, trains soldiers, intelligence operatives and police from Zimbabwe and other Southern African countries.
“China, of course, wants Zimbabwe to maintain a peaceful and stable political environment,” said Wang Xinsong, a longtime observer of China-Zimbabwe relations at Beijing Normal University.
“China’s best interest lies in ensuring a peaceful and smooth transfer of power without major turmoil.”
Once known as the “breadbasket of Africa,” Zimbabwe’s decline accelerated with the seizure of white-owned farms, sending the economy into a tailspin with skyrocketing inflation and widespread unemployment and poverty.
Under Robert Mugabe’s decades-long rule over Zimbabwe, China grew into one of the African nation’s biggest investors, trading partners and diplomatic allies.
Now, as Zimbabwe appears on the verge of its first transition of power since independence, Beijing is poised to be among the biggest winners.
A look at the increasingly close relationship between the two countries.
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