For centuries, cultures around the globe have prized items made from rosewood due to its fine-grained durability and rich coloring. Nowhere has this been more true than in China, where rosewood furniture, with its intense cherry red hues, carries cultural associations of prosperity and life-affirming energy.
Although historically only attainable for wealthy merchants and elite members of the Ming and Qinq-era imperial courts, in recent decades, the rapid expansion of China’s middle class has sparked an unprecedented explosion of demand for all things rosewood. This demand first wreaked havoc on forests across Asia. The decimation caused a wave of logging bans in fragile forest ecosystems, starting with China’s 1998 Natural Forest Protection Program. For this reason, Chinese smuggling rings have increasingly turned to some of sub-Saharan Africa’s most vulnerable forests, brazenly defying a series of bans on rosewood sales there.
From a smuggler’s haven on the Mozambican coast of southeast Africa to a complex network of middlemen in West Africa, Chinese intermediaries have been instrumental in the trade of rosewood, the single most illegally trafficked natural product on earth. Today, growing evidence suggests these vast criminal nexuses provide support to some of Africa’s deadliest terrorist groups, which have increasingly gained access to advanced weapons made by Chinese defense contractors.
West Africa: Where Chinese Interests Mingle With Terrorist Insurgencies
In West Africa, rosewood trees grow throughout the Guinean Forest-Savana Mosaic, stretching across 11 countries from coastal Senegal to western Cameroon. The prized trees also grow in southern Mali’s dwindling, arid forests.
In 2022, 16 countries in the region banned rosewood exports in response to widespread and destructive logging practices to fulfill China’s ever-growing demand. Before these bans, several countries in the region had export controls already in place, starting in the mid-2010s. Although these bans require importing countries to reject any rosewood shipments sent to them, China continues to import logs from the region in vast numbers, albeit in smaller quantities than before.
An extensive nexus of West Africa-based Chinese criminal groups and corrupt officials work to keep West African rosewood exports flowing by targeting some of the region’s poorest communities. For example, in northern Ghana, where two-thirds of the population earns less than $1 per day, illegal Chinese logging companies pay up to $32 per cubic meter of harvested rosewood, and local merchants can earn as much as $130 per cubic meter.
Chinese operatives also engage in high-level corruption to ensure shipments. According to an investigation by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), a U.K. and U.S.-based charity, Chinese and local traders paid over $1 million in bribes to Nigerian politicians and officials in relation to illegal logging between 2015 and 2017. In some instances, Chinese diplomats working in Nigeria even facilitated these bribes.
Because smugglers purchased rosewood from parts of Nigeria controlled by the terror group Boko Haram, the EIA investigation concluded the group may have benefitted from rosewood exports during this period.
In the two years since the adoption of widespread bans on West African rosewood exports, illicit export operations have involved another large regional terrorist group: Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM). The product of a 2017 merger between four al-Qaida-affiliated terrorist groups, JNIM has expanded its operations across much of West Africa’s Sahel region in recent years, conducting attacks in its home base of Mali as well as Burkina Faso and Niger. The group’s involvement in the rosewood trade has fueled much of this expansion, with JNIM fighters providing a lucrative protection racket for illegal loggers in the rapidly shrinking forests of southern Mali.
Although villagers allege that Chinese criminal syndicates pay protection fees to JNIM, there has been no thorough investigation to corroborate these claims. However, recent photos and videos of JNIM militants reveal the group’s extensive cache of advanced weapons produced by Norinco, a Chinese state-owned defense contractor. Norinco has dramatically expanded its presence in West Africa in recent years, opening an office in Dakar, Senegal, and securing contracts to provide weapons to several countries in the region, including the relatively new junta regimes in Mali and Niger. In China, authorities have recently targeted Norinco for corruption, charging two of the company’s former chairmen with widespread bribery and graft in the past three years.
Although it remains unclear how JNIM secured its Chinese-made weapons, China’s vast regional criminal nexus, which has included diplomats serving in an official capacity, may be involved. At the very least, these circumstances warrant further investigation.
Mozambique: Rosewood Smuggling Helps Fuel an Islamic State Insurgency in Cabo Delgado
Commandos from the Mozambique Defense Armed Forces participate in a simulated raid during a U.S.-Mozambique Joint Combined Exercise Training, near Moamba, Mozambique, Aug. 19, 2024. U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Christopher Dyer.
Mozambique has become China’s top supplier of rosewood, sending some 20,000 metric tonnes of the protected trees to Chinese ports in 2023, despite a 2017 ban on the export of unprocessed logs. Most of this wood comes from the northeast province of Cabo Delgado, one of the country’s poorest regions. Cabo Delgado is described as a “smugglers paradise” due to its lengthy unpatrolled coastline and numerous offshore islands that help facilitate an estimated $600 million in illicit exports annually.
Cabo Delgado is also home to an Islamic State-affiliated terror group known locally as al-Shabab (not to be confused with the similarly named Somali terror group), which continues to wage a brutal insurgency that has killed an estimated 4,000 civilians and displaced more than 580,000 others since it started in 2017. According to an EIA report from earlier this year, about 30 percent of the timber logged in Cabo Delgado is at a high risk of coming from forests occupied by al-Shabab.
As in West Africa, local Chinese operatives intimately involve themselves in the illicit Mozambican timber trade. According to a 2018 interview with Mozambique’s deputy director of forestry, Imede Falume, Cabo Delgado’s logging industry is “dominated by Chinese people who go to the bush and convince the poorest people to cut the logs.” Although authorities in China have worked with Maputo in an attempt to crack down on Chinese nationals illegally operating in Mozambique’s timber trade, local Chinese traders have largely escaped justice due to their ability to co-opt local elites.
In 2020, Mozambican authorities arrested eight local public officials and one Chinese national named Zhao in connection with illegal timber harvesting in Cabo Delgado. But according to local reports, three of these officials were released along with Zhao, with the seized wood returned to Zhao personally.
Al-Shabab obtains most of its weapons from enemy combatants, namely the Mozambican armed forces, as well as Rwandan forces, who provide support for Maputo’s operations. Chinese defense contractors have sold weapons to Rwanda for decades, and in July, Beijing announced it would enhance its military ties with Mozambique. In 2021, evidence emerged that many of al-Shabab’s rifles are of Chinese origin, including Type 56, 56-1, and 56-2 AK variants. In this way, as China continues to arm militaries in the region, al-Shabab and other terrorist insurgencies will likely obtain some of these increasingly advanced weapons.
This proliferation of funds and weapons to al-Shabab has already produced blowback for Chinese smugglers in Mozambique, with al-Shabab militants reportedly destroying a Chinese-owned sawmill there in an August 2020 attack.
Conclusion
China’s demand for and role in Africa’s illicit rosewood smuggling exposes deep fissures in Beijing’s decades-long push to build partnerships in Africa. As Chinese government officials and businesses work to engage partners in the region, they must increasingly contend with reports that criminal elements from their country are doing significant harm to regional ecosystems while supporting some of the most dangerous terrorists operating there.
Although Beijing has made efforts to combat transnational crime, the involvement of government officials in some of these dealings underlines the scope of its struggle to contain criminality within its ranks. With this criminality already negatively affecting the interests of partner nations and even Chinese business interests in Africa, China’s insatiable appetite for rosewood continues to produce vast consequences for the strategic interests of Beijing and its partner nations and the people living in these countries.