全天候战略伙伴关系
All-Weather Strategic Partnership

Ethiopia represents the most advanced stage of China’s stadium diplomacy, where infrastructure projects have led to almost complete lack of sovereignty. What started as stadium construction is now part of a dense network of Chinese institutional integration including but not limited to financing, technical expertise and bilateral partnerships that has reshaped the Ethiopian development state. 

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Historically, Ethiopia’s centralized political structure limited public scrutiny of any major projects. For much of the past two decades, the ruling coalition maintained tight control over civil society creating an environment in which large-scale Chinese-funded projects could proceed with minimal citizen input. Chinese-provided surveillance and telecommunications technologies have provided much of the state’s capacity for monitoring and control The construction of the Addis Ababa National Stadium occurred within this highly centralized system, where news outlets and social media were restricted to prevent the spread of dissent. Ethiopian state media plays a proactive and cooperative role in managing relations with China, framing their partnership positively in order to secure additional economic capital, equipment, and training opportunities.

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Chinese firms now operate across multiple sectors of the Ethiopian economy, Chinese financing underwrites key state projects, and Chinese technical standards increasingly shape national infrastructure systems. By 2019, China had financed nine of Ethiopia’s ten largest infrastructure projects. The result is a level of structural leverage that is difficult to unwind, even with future political transitions, because they are built into the physical and administrative fabric of the state. As of 2020, Chinese loans totaled approximately $13.7 billion USD, constituting roughly half of Ethiopia’s external debt. China has provided 30 percent of Ethiopia’s total new public external debt over the past five years and 90 percent of new bilateral debt.

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Ethiopia is the success story that China hopes to replicate in other African countries with stadium diplomacy where infrastructure lays the groundwork for the rest of the system to become dependent. When deployed within authoritarian or highly centralized political systems, stadium diplomacy functions as an entry point for external influence.