China is equipping Burkina Faso’s military and positioning itself for greater influence in the Sahel, filling a vacuum left by the collapse of security partnerships with Western nations, especially the United States and France. The move is part of a broader modernisation plan that the Burkinabe government, headed by junta leader Ibrahim Traoré, announced in late 2023 amid growing insecurity waged by jihadist militants, mostly affiliated with al-Qaeda and Islamic State. After a complex diplomatic history that saw relations first established in 1973 and then severed in 1994, China officially re-established diplomatic ties with Burkina Faso in 2018. While Ouagadougou had historically sourced some arms from China, the restoration of relations set the stage for large-scale military cooperation, which began in 2024 with the signing of a multiphase deal with the Chinese state-owned defence contractor, China North Industries Group Corporation or Norinco. The country has received at least four major consignments from China since early 2024. The latest delivery, filmed at a port facility earlier this month, included VN22B fire support vehicles, PLL-05 120mm self-propelled gun-mortar systems and SR5 rocket launch systems, according to Military Africa, a news platform on African defence, security and military affairs. This follows earlier deliveries of large numbers of CS/VP14 mine-resistant vehicles and other armoured equipment, all manufactured by Norinco, according to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Like other countries in the Sahel or West Africa, where China has vast economic interests, Burkina Faso has been hit by a series of military coups, which ousted president Roch Marc Christian Kaboré in early 2022, and then military leader Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba in September that year. Since Traoré took over in the second coup, Burkina Faso has expelled French troops as part of the broader collapse of Operation Barkhane, the French-led counterterrorism mission in the Sahel. While US forces have not been formally expelled, Burkina Faso has been moving away from its security cooperation with the United States – a shift that has outraged Washington. Traoré has also strengthened military ties with Russia, making two visits since becoming president in 2022 – first in July 2023 for the Russia-Africa summit in St Petersburg, where Burkina Faso secured a deal for free grain supplies and military cooperation, and in May this year for the Victory Day parade in Moscow, where he held talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin and called for deeper military ties. He has yet to visit China, but then Burkinabe prime minister Apollinaire Joachimson Kyelem de Tambela attended the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in Beijing last year. Beyond Burkina Faso, China has stepped up its engagement with other countries in the Sahel, including Mali and Niger, amid waning Western influence. For example, Mali signed a defence deal with Norinco last September for military equipment, training and technology transfer. The deal was signed during a visit by Mali’s transitional president, Assimi Goïta, to Norinco’s headquarters in Beijing. The first batch of 36 CS/VP14 armoured personnel carriers, part of a larger order for 160, was delivered late last month, arriving at the port of Conakry in Guinea before being transported overland to Mali. While Niger also strengthened its security partnership with China in January, it has faced tensions, with the military junta expelling Chinese oil executives over contractual disputes. As demand for Norinco’s military equipment increases in Africa, the company, which already has established sales offices in Angola, Nigeria and South Africa, also opened a new one in Dakar, Senegal, in 2023. China’s push into the region is driven by its vast economic interests and strategic potential, including abundant resources and strategic access to the Red Sea and Atlantic Ocean. Beijing also offers engagement with no political strings attached, whereas the West has historically made demands for democratisation and human rights improvements that elites often saw as a burden, according to Liselotte Odgaard, a professor at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies in Oslo and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington. “China would like to have good access to the Atlantic Ocean as strategic competition with the US heats up,” she said. Odgaard said China, already a major arms exporter to Nigeria, was well positioned to expand arms exports to other West African nations. It made sense for Norinco to open an office in both Senegal and Nigeria, she said, adding that both were of strategic interest to China, so establishing closer security and defence relations was an attractive proposition. She said China had also focused on Burkina Faso with development aid and granted it zero tariffs on exports to China, boosting its trade opportunities. “So China uses a carrot approach, trying to accommodate the needs of these countries, rather than a stick approach of punishing them for undesired behaviour, and that helps create close links,” Odgaard said. David Shinn, a former US ambassador to Burkina Faso and a professor at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, said Burkina Faso and Mali had traditionally obtained military equipment from the West, as well as South Africa, Russia and China. But they had recently received more consignments of military equipment from Norinco to combat the growing insurgency in both countries. Norinco, which has a reputation for offering competitive pricing and flexible financing, has sold military equipment to many African countries for the past two decades. However, because of Russian military commitments in Ukraine, “Norinco may take more sales from Russian companies than South African or Western companies,” Shinn said. “As Norinco increases sales in Africa, it is unsurprising that it is adding new offices.” Lina Benab-dal-lah, an associate professor in the politics and international affairs department at Wake Forest Uni-versity in the US, pointed to the “rise of anti-French sentiment among populations and leaderships alike”. “This has opened the opportunity for alternative providers to come in and take a bigger share of the market. Chinese and Turkish drones, for example, are now popular among several African countries also because of their cost or value relation.”