Trade, industry & competition minister Parks Tau and his counterpart from the People’s Republic of China, Wang Wentao, recently signed the Framework Agreement on Economic Partnership for Shared Prosperity.
According to the statement released by the department of trade, industry & competition, this landmark agreement will be followed by the negotiation and conclusion of an Early Harvest Agreement by end-March, providing duty-free access for South African exports to China while also enabling more Chinese investment to flow into the South African economy.
This partnership is consistent with earlier remarks by deputy minister Zuko Godlimpi, who has repeatedly argued that South Africa must urgently diversify its trade partners and export markets to build economic resilience particularly in response to steep tariffs imposed by the US. Geopolitically, the agreement reflects a strategic pivot toward alternative centres of demand. However, developmentally its implications can be understood only within the reality of current trade between the two economies.
Recent (2024) bilateral trade statistics reveal a clear structural asymmetry. South Africa’s exports to China remain overwhelmingly concentrated in primary mineral commodities, particularly ores and related raw materials. These exports function primarily as industrial inputs for China’s manufacturing and construction sectors, positioning South Africa upstream in global value chains and signalling limited progress towards beneficiation and industrial upgrading.
By contrast, China’s exports to South Africa are dominated by manufactured and technology-intensive goods, including electrical machinery, mechanical equipment, vehicles, steel products, plastics, chemicals, textiles and a wide range of consumer goods. This trade pattern confirms that China captures the downstream, value-adding segments of production while South Africa supplies them mainly with raw materials.
Taken together, these flows reproduce a familiar core-periphery trade structure in contemporary global value chains: South Africa exports raw materials; China exports high-value-add products. This structure is not new but it is highly consequential. It shapes employment outcomes, technological capability, fiscal space and long-run economic growth prospects. Most importantly, it determines whether trade deepens industrialisations or locks an economy into persistent commodity dependence.
Taken together, these flows reproduce a familiar core-periphery trade structure in contemporary global value chains: South Africa exports raw materials; China exports high-value-add products.
It is in this structural context that the new partnership must be located and assessed. Duty-free access and expanded investment flows undoubtedly create space for new economic opportunities. Yet trade agreements do not automatically generate development and create job opportunities. Without deliberate industrial policy intervention the likely trajectory is already visible. South Africa will continue exporting raw materials while importing increasing volumes of Chinese manufactured goods.
Investment would concentrate in assembly-type production, especially in sectors such as vehicle manufacturing, generating limited technological spillovers, weak domestic supplier linkages and modest employment creation. The agreement would therefore risk reinforcing rather than transforming the dependency and core-periphery trade structure evident in their 2024 bilateral trade data.
The vehicle sector illustrates this tension clearly. South Africa has already contemplated tariff measures on Chinese vehicle imports to protect domestic production, yet Chinese vehicle firms are simultaneously among the most probable new investors under the partnership. This creates a classic industrial policy dilemma. Foreign direct investment can expand production capacity and employment. However, without strong localisation requirements, technology-transfer conditions and supplier development obligations, such investment may simply assemble imported components for a domestic market increasingly supplied by foreign firms. In that scenario industrial depth and capability remain shallow and long-term competitiveness weak.
However, this outcome is not predetermined. With the right policy architecture the agreement could instead become a platform for structural transformation. Duty-free access to China’s economy could support export diversification into manufactured goods and agro-processing, especially in sectors where the South African economy already possesses partial capabilities.
Carefully structured investment could deliver technology-intensive production, integration into green industrial value chains, and employment-creating industrial upgrading. Rising global demand for minerals linked to the energy transition, with South Africa’s resource endowment, creates a rare opportunity to shift from raw mineral extraction to domestic processing, component manufacturing and green industrial production.
Rising global demand for minerals linked to the energy transition, with South Africa’s resource endowment, creates a rare opportunity to shift from raw mineral extraction to domestic processing, component manufacturing and green industrial production.
The decisive variable is therefore not the agreement itself but the policy framework surrounding it. The central task for the department is strategic co-ordination, which comprises identifying sectors with genuine upgrading potential, including those capable of attracting investment beyond China (this requires aligning trade policy with industrial capabilities rather than assuming that market access alone will generate diversification); mobilising South Africa’s development finance institutions to crowd in industrial capital (particularly because co-ordinated public finance is essential for infrastructure, technology adoption and supplier development); and embedding enforceable conditions into trade and investment arrangements.
These must include local value-adding requirements, technology transfer provisions and robust domestic supplier-development programmes that will particularly empower small, medium and micro enterprises.
Only through such measures can a framework for “shared prosperity” translate into real structural change. Otherwise, the agreement risks becoming another chapter in a long-standing pattern, in which South Africa supplies the minerals of the future while the manufacturing capability, innovation and industrial rents remain elsewhere.
Beyond economics, this groundbreaking agreement also carries consequential implications for policy credibility and state capacity. South Africa’s ability to convert duty-free market access into a huge economy like that of China into industrial upgrading will signal whether the country’s long-standing commitment to creating jobs through structural transformation remains actionable or merely aspirational. Successful implementation would demonstrate that trade partnerships can be aligned with developmental objectives in a volatile global economy. Failure, by contrast, would reinforce perceptions of policy drift and deepen scepticism about the country’s developmental trajectory.
The choice before policymakers is therefore not only diplomatic but also developmental. It is a choice between participating in global value chains and shaping South Africa’s productive position within them. And it is a choice that must be made now, before the promise of partnership hardens into the permanence of dependency.
• Mbatha is with the University of Johannesburg’s School of Economics.
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