Tanzania: China's largest ever foreign aid project in Africa, the Tanzania-Zambia Railway (Tazara), will be rebuilt with assistance from China.
The Chinese embassy in Zambia announced that the China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation has been chosen to conduct a feasibility study on the project.
Chinese ambassador to Lusaka Du Xiaohui said, "China is making every effort to prepare for the reactivation of the railway upon Zambian and Tanzanian request again," adding that Beijing will work with both governments to find ways to make Tazara profitable.

In the meantime, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi stated Beijing welcomes and "supports the decision of Tanzania and Zambia to reactivate the Tanzania-Zambia Railway" at a virtual meeting related to the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) last week.

Through financing, investment, and assistance, Wang continued, "China will continue to actively support and participate in the construction of major infrastructure in Africa."

Under the direction of then-chairman Mao Zedong and then-premier Zhou Enlai, China funded the Tazara about five decades ago, at a time when the young People's Republic was also experiencing financial difficulties and had only recently emerged from the turbulent years of the Cultural Revolution.
When white-controlled Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), which was next door and opposed the transfer of power to the black majority there, cut off landlocked Zambia's only access to the sea—the road and rail through Rhodesia to the seaports in southern Africa—Lusaka became desperate for this railway link.
Zambia's primary export, copper, no longer had a way to reach foreign markets.

China intervened after the US and Russia said they would not provide funding for a new railway because it would not be profitable.

The 1,860km of tracks that connect Tanzania's Dar es Salaam Port to Zambia's copper belt via the Tazara were constructed between 1970 and 1975 at a cost of about a billion yuan (billions of dollars at today's rates) in interest-free loans with the assistance of 50,000 Chinese labourers.
In his 2017 book Winning the Third World, Sino-American Rivalry During the Cold War, US professor and historian Gregg Brazinsky wrote that China hoped to expose its rivals in the region with the project.

Associating China with this pricey, Western-refused modernity symbol "had the potential to permanently inscribe Beijing's vision of Sino-African partnership across a broad [swathe] of the East African landscape," the author wrote.
The first elected presidents of their newly independent countries, Tanzania's Julius Nyerere and Zambia's Kenneth Kaunda, gave it the name "Freedom Railway." But five decades later, Tazara is still underutilised and bankrupt, and Zambia and Tanzania have to keep going back to China to support it.

Less than 8% of the more than 5.5 million tonnes of transit cargo that the Port of Dar es Salaam handled in the Dar es Salaam corridor in 2017—from or to Zambia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Malawi—was shipped via Tazara.
However, the railway still stands as China's single most significant aid project, one that, in the words of Tim Zajontz, research fellow at the Centre for International and Comparative Politics at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, "layed the foundation for close political, economic, and cultural ties with Africa."

Around 70 of the Chinese engineers and workers who lost their lives during construction made significant sacrifices, according to Zajontz. African elites and commoners still value China's contribution to the construction of the so-called Freedom Railway, which is one of the factors contributing to Beijing's unwavering support in many African capitals.
Over 160 railroad workers, including 69 Chinese nationals, lost their lives building the railway line as a result of accidents on the job site, attacks by wild animals, or illnesses like malaria.

On August 10, Zambia dedicated a memorial park in Chongwe, close to the capital city of Lusaka, to honour their sacrifice.
The memorial includes the graves of 36 Chinese engineers and workers who perished as well as a museum of photographs. When commissioning the park, Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema said, "One huge lesson we draw from there is the fact that hard work was put in by the People's Republic of China, Republic of Tanzania, and indeed Zambia."
President [Samia Suluhu] Hassan and our government decided to renovate and recapitalize the Tazara railway line to increase trade and business opportunities between the two sister countries during a state visit to Tanzania, which Hichilema described as underscoring the significance of the project.

The School of Oriental and African Studies in London's Stephen Chan, a professor of politics and international relations, claimed that the Chinese "feel genuinely nostalgic about the Tazara Railway."
The memorial park is a diplomatic gesture from Zambia to China that recognises the sacrifices. Whereas, Zambia and Tanzania have been vocal in their criticism of China for ways to make it viable, such as requiring the use of standard gauge rail, the lack of which has made maintenance and repair challenging.

Zazontz, who teaches international relations at the University of Freiburg in Germany, claimed that Beijing repeatedly injects debt into the project through recurrent intergovernmental cooperation protocols.

Beijing's commerce ministry and state-owned businesses are promoting a long-term, significant Chinese investment in the form of a "rehabilitation-operate-transfer contract," another term for privatization.

Zazontz, who has written a paper on Tzara's dire situation and controversial talks about a Chinese investment, said the Chinese side and shareholder governments have not been able to agree on the terms of such a public-private partnership.

“Tripartite negotiations with China have recently gained new momentum under the new heads of state in Lusaka and Dodoma. As the ailing railways impose unwanted costs on the exchequers of Tanzania and Zambia, mounting fiscal pressure in both countries has undoubtedly raised the prospect. Given that Tzara will be privatized.

As a project completed at a time when the newly independent Southern African nations were looking for new transport and development options that could provide alternatives to the colonial routes that were still dominant at the time, Tzara was still a single point for all three countries. important symbol, according to Jamie Monson, professor of history and director of the Center for African Studies at Michigan State University.

This enables China to show that it has been a steadfast ally over the years, according to Monson, through its "openness" and transition from the country's revolutionary role model to the current economic recovery.

She claimed that despite changes in the world's political and economic landscape, China continues to provide a development model that is seen as a rival to the West, a theme that was relevant even during the Tzara.

According to Associate Professor Benjamin Barton at the University of Nottingham's Malaysia campus, the tzara has significant political symbolism due to its importance at the time and the environment in which it was built.

According to Barton, this served to demonstrate to the world that China and the African nation could aspire to fund, build and operate a logistically complex infrastructure project, despite their significant development differences. "It was the epitome of an act of South-South cooperation, and probably remains so today," he said.

But as Chinese infrastructure projects spread across the continent, they saw Tzara lose some of its original charm and become dilapidated.

According to Barton, discussions about the need to redesign the line are "probably as motivated by nostalgia as it is by commercial interests."

After all, given China's growing mineral demand, Chinese mining companies currently play an important role in Zambia's natural resource ecosystem and will do so in the future.
However, Monson doesn't think Beijing will take on a project like Tzara today, especially with a management structure that includes two governments that have complex operations.

According to Monson, the political imperatives of Tzara's time have been replaced by economic ones.

Perhaps most importantly, she continued, "China will not send thousands of rail workers to work side by side with thousands of African workers on today's projects, an aspect of Tzara that I think is an important part of its legacy."

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