ASCENDANCE INTELLIGENCE | EXPLAINER

How Is the US-DRC Strategic Partnership Different From China’s Approach?

Not a contest for the Congo’s minerals. China already won that. The SPA is an attempt to change the rules of the game.

The question is not whether the United States or China will control the Congo’s minerals. China already does. By the time the US-DRC Strategic Partnership Agreement was signed, Chinese firms held an estimated 80 percent of Congolese mining output. The SPA is the United States trying to change the rules of a game China has been winning for twenty years.

The agreement differs from China’s approach in kind, not degree. China built its position through resource-for-infrastructure barter, negotiated deal by deal and largely out of public view. The SPA is a rules-based framework: a standing committee, access conditioned on reform and transparency, and an ownership rule that schedules competing capital out of qualifying projects over twenty years. One model buys access. The other tries to govern it.

Key takeaways

• China already controls an estimated 80 percent of Congolese mining output. The SPA contests the rules, not a level playing field.
• China’s model is barter: infrastructure and loans traded for mining rights, negotiated asset by asset. The 2007 Sicomines arrangement is the template.
• The SPA’s model is a standing framework with reform conditions and a twenty-year clock that steps competing equity down toward 10 percent.
• Owning the mines is not the decisive lever. China refines roughly three-quarters of the world’s cobalt regardless of who owns the deposit.
• China has a track record, and it is mixed. The SPA has a framework, and it is untested. Delivery is the open question on both sides.

Who actually controls Congolese minerals today?

China does, by a wide margin. Two decades of Chinese state and corporate expansion, during which Western capital largely stayed away over conflict, corruption, and logistics, left Chinese firms holding an estimated 80 percent of Congolese mining output by the time the SPA was signed. Any honest reading of the agreement starts there. The SPA is not the opening move in a competition. It is a late entry into one that is already lopsided.

How does China’s model work?

Through barter. The pattern is infrastructure and financing in exchange for mining rights, negotiated bilaterally and asset by asset, with limited public visibility into the terms. The template was set in 2007, when the Congo granted Chinese miners tax advantages running to 2040 in return for billions of dollars in promised infrastructure. It is transactional and state-led: each deal stands on its own, and the leverage sits in what gets built and financed in return for access.

How does the SPA’s model work?

Through rules applied across the whole field rather than deals struck one at a time. A standing body, the Joint Steering Committee, runs implementation. Access is conditioned on reform and transparency, with the Congo committing to fiscal and regulatory changes under Article XII. Assets are reserved for US-first investment through the Strategic Asset Reserve and its offer waterfall. And under Article VIII and Annex 1, equity held by competing capital is capped at 40 percent today and steps down to 30, then 20, then 10 percent over twenty years. China’s model acquires assets. The SPA’s model sets the terms on which any asset can be held.

Why owning the mines is not enough

Because ownership is not where Chinese control actually sits. China refines an estimated 78 percent of the world’s cobalt and close to half of its refined copper. A US company can own a Congolese mine outright and still ship its ore to a Chinese refinery, because that is where the processing capacity is. Changing who holds the license changes the flag on the mine, not the destination of the metal.

This is why the SPA’s real levers are not ownership alone. The requirement that reserve minerals supply the US market is an attempt to redirect the flow. The Sakania-Lobito Corridor is an attempt to build an export route that does not run through the existing Chinese-aligned system. The reforms are an attempt to make US-aligned projects bankable. Take those away and US ownership of a deposit means little. The agreement is built around that problem, even where it does not say so directly.

Which model has actually delivered?

This is the honest cut, and it does not favor either side cleanly. China’s model has two decades of results and a credibility problem: the infrastructure promised under the 2007 arrangement came in well below what was pledged, and the deal was later renegotiated and placed under audit. The SPA’s model has no results yet. It is entirely forward commitments running on a clock.

So the contrast is not good against bad. It is a mixed record against an untested framework. The shortfall in China’s delivery is exactly why Kinshasa can credibly press the United States to prove it will build what it promises. The structure of the SPA is exactly why Washington can argue that rules and transparency beat barter. Neither claim is settled until the assets move.

The bottom line

The difference between the SPA and China’s approach is not who arrives with capital. Both do. It is whether the next twenty years of Congolese minerals are governed by rules or by barter. China holds the position and the track record. The United States holds the framework and the clock. Which one defines the decade depends on delivery, and delivery is precisely what the barter model has been faulted for and the rules model has not yet been tested on.

Sources: US-DRC Strategic Partnership Agreement, Articles IV, VII, VIII, IX, and XII, and Annex 1, signed Washington, December 4, 2025. Chinese share of Congolese mining output and 2007 cooperation terms: contemporaneous market reporting, 2025-2026. Cobalt and copper refining shares: International Energy Agency (2024) and US Geological Survey (2025). Last reviewed: June 2026.

Washington. Paris. Kinshasa.