President Xi Jinping's trip to Africa was as refreshing as it was reinforcing. Considering the significant effort and financial commitments of China's foreign policy toward Africa under Hu Jintao's administration, there are concerns as to whether or not Beijing's generous policies will change with the new government. While there was less mention of sizeable multi-billion dollar deals during Xi's time in Africa, this probably reflects the China-Africa relationship as it matures. His three state visits to Tanzania, South Africa and the Republic of the Congo were more about geopolitics than new commercial initiatives.

Yes, China's relationship with Africa is driven by pragmatic commercial interest, but I would argue that the major underpinning factor supporting its foreign policy is geopolitical - Beijing seeks to win friends, build alliances, project influence and be recognized as the emerging great power that it is.

The rapidity and scale of this involvement - through multi-billion dollar transactions and political summits - has resulted in the continent leaning toward China's commercial sphere of influence. This trend has been accelerated by the (Western) financial and economic crisis as African economies reorient toward the emerging rather than the developed world. But as China's strategy toward Africa matures, so too must that of African countries. Beijing is no longer just an actor in Africa's resources sector, but is broadening the scope of its commercial foray into Africa. African governments need to respond accordingly and be more agile in their policy-making vis-à-vis China's engagement.

I believe that China's Africa policy has become increasingly fused with that of the management of its own economy. China's resource intensive growth model - propelled by heavy infrastructure spending and its manufacturing machine - requires large amounts of commodity inputs. Underpinning Beijing's engagement with Africa has been a desire to secure a number of strategic commodity supplies, in particular oil, iron ore and copper. In the mind of the Chinese Government, its own growth model will become increasingly dependent upon Africa's ability and willingness to provide these resources. A politically welcoming environment amongst African governments is of paramount importance for Chinese capital. In Europe, the United States and recently Australia, there have been government attempts to block Chinese investors from acquiring local assets - in telecoms, computer hardware and mining. In Africa there has yet to be any political obstruction of Chinese investment in Africa.

However, recent comments by Nigeria's Central Bank Governor Lamido Sanusi and Botswanian President Ian Khama have been critical of the often skewed nature of their countries' relationships with China. China's foreign policy under President Xi will need to balance its growing commercial interests while accommodating a changing and more assertive Africa.  

Blocking Chinese investment is a massive opportunity cost, considering few resource-rich African states did not adequately foresee and take full advantage of the so-called commodity super-cycle driven by China's insatiable demand for commodities over the last decade or so. This is not the case in Australia, where the economy has maintained robust GDP growth despite the economic crisis on the back of enabling infrastructure and strong demand from China. A number of oil economies - led by Angola - are the exception. Few African governments have been as proactive as Luanda in linking Chinese investments in resources to mega infrastructure build commitments in their economies. With a handful of notable exceptions, African economies could have been doing much more to hitch their resource-reliant economies to the Chinese long-term growth train.

But the game is now changing. While resources have underpinned China's foray into Africa throughout the first decade of its "new" foreign commerce with Africa, a shift is taking place that is not planned by the government in Beijing, but shaped by market forces. The potential move of manufacturing out of China to Africa may be the next thrust. This coincides with the newly appointed leadership in Beijing and what is often referred to in economic terms as "rebalancing" in China.

According to Justin Lin, former chief economist of the World Bank now at Peking University, China is slated to lose up to 85 million labor-intensive manufacturing jobs within the next decade. In the same way that Japan lost 9.7 million in the 1960s and South Korea almost 2.5 million in the 1980s due to rising wages and production costs, the Chinese economy will undergo a similar process, but on a much larger scale. Wages for unskilled workers in China are set to increase four-fold in 10 years. This will create opportunities for developing economies with nascent manufacturing sectors over the medium term.

These rising cost pressures are resulting in a shift in the manufacturing industry as factories move from south and east China to Viet Nam, Cambodia and Thailand. Lin has estimated that Africa has roughly 10 million low wage manufacturing jobs. A back of the envelope calculation indicates that if only 10 percent of China's low-end manufacturing moved to Africa, it would almost double the continent's manufacturing jobs, perhaps putting Africa on the long-term road toward industrialization.

China's relations with Africa under Xi will become less "state-driven" and more characterized by the market and, in essence, more driven by the private sector. This is a result of China's own evolving economy as well as the gradual declining support from Beijing for its state-owned firms in Africa, especially in construction.

African states need to recognize this subtle but important shift and begin responding by courting China's private sector for manufacturing investment. Doing so will allow Africa to capture the job-creating benefits of industrialization.

We need to see African states that are "competitive-advantage creating." In the same way as China has factored Africa into its own future, African countries must factor China into theirs.

(Dr. Martyn Davies is CEO of Frontier Advisory, a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum and is a member of the Forum's Global Agenda Council on China. )