China and Zambia, alongside Tanzania, have formally kicked off a $1.4 billion overhaul of the Tanzania–Zambia Railway Authority (TAZARA) line, a Cold War–era rail corridor that carries copper from Zambia’s mines to the Tanzanian port of Dar es Salaam.
The upgrade deal was signed during Chinese Premier Li Qiang’s landmark visit to Lusaka — the first by a Chinese premier in 28 years — and is central to Beijing’s bid to secure long-term access to critical minerals such as copper, vital for electronics and green energy technologies.
TAZARA, built in the 1970s by China, Zambia and Tanzania, was originally conceived to give landlocked Zambia a route to the sea that bypassed white-minority-ruled Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa. President Hakainde Hichilema hailed Beijing’s role then and now, saying China “opened Zambia’s trade onto the Indian Ocean” and is again stepping in at a critical moment as the country emerges from a debt crisis.
Under the new agreement, state-owned China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC) will modernise the 1,860-kilometre line, upgrade track and signalling, and supply new locomotives and wagons. Freight volumes are projected to jump from about 100,000 tonnes a year to as much as 2.4 million tonnes once the work is complete, transforming the corridor into a high-capacity export route for copper and other minerals.
Li described China as a “good brother, good friend and good partner of Zambia” and called for an “even stronger China–Zambia community with a shared future,” framing the project as part of a broader push to support Zambia’s industrialisation and “modernisation”.
The visit also underscores China’s financial clout in Zambia. Beijing is the country’s largest official creditor, with around $5.7 billion in loans, and played a key role in the recent restructuring of Zambia’s $13.4 billion external debt — a case both sides now tout as a model for other African states in distress.
Strategically, the TAZARA upgrade is widely seen as China’s answer to the US- and EU-backed Lobito Corridor, a rival westward rail and port route linking Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo to Angola’s Atlantic coast. Analysts say the two competing corridors highlight an intensifying race between China and Western powers to shape Africa’s infrastructure and control access to its mineral riches.
Li’s stop in Lusaka comes en route to the G20 summit in South Africa — the first to be hosted on African soil — underlining Beijing’s message that Africa, and especially its copper-rich heartlands, will remain central to China’s economic and geopolitical ambitions.
