Step right up to the ninth 'strategic dialogue' in Addis Ababa, a number so impressively high it suggests either a profound lack of progress or a pathological addiction to hotel catering. This month, the African Union and China gathered to launch the '2026 China-Africa Year of People-to-People Exchanges,' a title so laden with saccharine optimism it could give a stone statue diabetes. As someone who has watched the world’s power players trade masks for decades, I find the sheer, unadulterated gall of this rebranding exercise almost—almost—refreshing. We are told the agenda is framed around 'modernization, connectivity, and industrialization,' three words that, in the dialect of international relations, translate roughly to: 'We’re going to build some things, you’re going to owe us everything, and we’ll both pretend it’s about friendship.'

Let’s dissect the 'People-to-People' farce first. Which 'people' are we talking about? Certainly not the cobalt miners in the DRC or the assembly line workers in Shenzhen who will never see the inside of a diplomatic banquet. No, when bureaucrats talk about 'people,' they refer to themselves—the thin layer of administrative grease that keeps the machinery of global exploitation sliding along. It’s a 'dialogue' in the same way a vacuum cleaner has a dialogue with a carpet. One side provides the suction, the other provides the dust, and the result is a cleaner surface for the owners of the house to walk upon. The African Union, ever the desperate debutante at the global ball, has decided that China’s brand of 'no-questions-asked' investment is far more palatable than the West’s performative moralizing. And who can blame them? If I had to choose between a lender who demands I fix my human rights record while they ignore their own, and a lender who just wants my mineral rights and a signed NDA, I’d take the guy with the checkbook and the silence every time.

The loudest conversations in global politics right now are being conducted by people who wouldn't know 'connectivity' if it hit them in their offshore accounts. The West is currently hyperventilating about 'bloc politics,' a quaint Cold War throwback that suggests the world is divided into teams of good and evil, rather than competing dens of thieves. They view China’s influence in Africa with the same jealous rage a jilted lover feels when their ex starts dating a billionaire. It’s not that the West cares about Africa; they just hate that they’re being outspent. Their 'rivalry' is performative, a series of sternly worded letters and symbolic sanctions that achieve nothing but a higher sense of self-worth for the people writing them.

Meanwhile, the 'workable partnership' being touted in Ethiopia is the ultimate cynical victory. It’s the triumph of the tangible over the theoretical. China provides the bridges, the ports, and the digital surveillance infrastructure—sorry, 'smart city technology'—and in exchange, they get a continent-sized buffer against Western hegemony. It’s modernization as a subscription service. You don’t own the progress; you just rent it until the interest rates catch up with your sovereignty. But for the smaller states involved, this isn't about long-term survival; it's about making it through the next fiscal quarter without a total collapse. It’s a race to the bottom where the winners get a shiny new airport they can’t afford to maintain.

Industrialization, the third horseman of this diplomatic apocalypse, is perhaps the most hilarious promise of all. The idea that the AU and China are going to magically transform a continent into a manufacturing powerhouse without repeating the horrific mistakes of the 19th and 20th centuries is a fantasy suitable only for the most gullible of investors. What they really mean is that China needs a place to outsource the labor that is becoming too expensive for its own middle class. It’s the circle of life: one nation’s growth becomes another nation’s sweatshop. To call this 'modernization' is like calling a foreclosure a 'real estate transition.'

Ultimately, the scene in Addis Ababa is just another chapter in the long, boring book of human greed. The Left will decry the 'neocolonialism' while ignoring their own dependence on the cheap electronics produced by this very system. The Right will scream about 'communist expansion' while checking their stock portfolios for gains in African lithium. And in the middle, the 'people' of the 'People-to-People Exchanges' will continue to be exactly what they have always been: the collateral damage of 'strategic dialogues.' It’s a fractured world, certainly, but not because of the politics. It’s fractured because the people at the top are all playing the same game, and they’ve finally realized that they don't even need to pretend to like each other to split the bill. So, here’s to 2026. I’m sure the exchanges will be lovely, the speeches will be long, and the results will be exactly as vapid as the people who organized them.