While the bush taxis, charcoal and chickens remain, the bush is now criss-crossed by futuristic infrastructure. Overhead are overpasses, which see freight train and haul truck traffic, and conveyor belts. Each train and truck are laden with bauxite ore — the source of aluminum, the backbone of modern power infrastructure.     

The cargo, coming from mines that resemble massive dirt-red scars on Guinea’s tropical landscape, is headed for multiple terminals, built along once-pristine mangrove estuaries. There, it is loaded with cranes onto streams of incoming hundred-meter-long bulk carriers, which bring the materials to even larger vessels anchored out at sea. These giants, measuring up to 300 meters in length, bring the precious ore to ports in China, mostly in Shandong province, home to the country’s aluminum-refining industry.

Offering both lightweight and decent conductivity at the same time, aluminum is one of the most widely used industrial materials, and has fed China’s transformation into the global manufacturing hegemon. With China’s push for electrification, both domestically and globally, it is gaining even more importance as an essential component in products such as transmission lines, solar panels and electric vehicles.

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Between 2015 and 2025, Guinea’s bauxite exports increased nine-fold from 20 million tonnes a year to 182 million tonnes, making Guinea the world’s biggest producer of the ore. With approximately 82% of the production bound for China, this surge is largely the product of Chinese capital, which facilitated the construction of the necessary port, road and rail infrastructure.

The production surge shows no signs of slowing down. As recently as last week, a consortium of Chinese companies tabled plans worth $3 billion to construct yet another railway and deepwater port, aiming to unlock another major bauxite deposit. 

Until the recent mining boom, driven largely by Chinese investment, Guinea was one of the poorest countries in the world. This transformation is representative of a wider pattern seen across the resource-rich Global South. Since the late Nineties, when China first experienced trade surplus and became a net capital exporter, it has gradually built up a near-total dominance of global mineral supply chains and offered itself as a reliable strategic partner. 

As of 2025, China accounted for about 60% of the global production of aluminum, and exercised similar dominance in the production and processing of other critical metals. Approximately half of the global supply of steel and refined copper is produced in China. Its supremacy is even stronger in a category of metals known as rare earths — about 20 elements with special magnetic and optical properties critical for the production of high-end technologies. There, China controls 60% of the global mining output and around 90% of the refining capacity. 

With the escalation of the new Cold War, China has shown increased willingness to leverage its near-total control of these supply chains. Perhaps the most humiliating confrontation with reality for the US was the April 2025 “Liberation Day”. Following Trump’s imposition of an additional 34% tariff on Chinese imports, China imposed reciprocal tariffs alongside severe export restrictions on seven dual-use rare earths – prompting a brief escalation followed by full-blown TACO, whereby Trump suspended all the newly imposed tariffs. 

But the weaponization of rare earths has continued. Last month, Reuters reported that some Chinese suppliers refuse to ship rare earths to the US for fear of repercussions from Beijing.    

The Trump administration appears to have acknowledged this as a problem. “We outsourced the manufacturing so we could focus on designing these goods. And then one day we woke up and we realized we had outsourced our economic security and our very future,” said Marco Rubio in his opening remarks at the Critical Minerals Ministerial held in Washington in February. It was easy to detect regret of the four decades of neoliberal dogma that have held sway over American economic policy-making, dictating minimal state intervention and free trade. “We were at the mercy of whoever controlled supply chains for these minerals, so my hope is that we are gathered here today as the first but important step to rectifying this mistake,” he said to a room filled with delegates from 55 partner states, with whose cooperation the administration hopes to counter China’s strategic dominance. 

But these efforts appear to have run aground. This is, for what it seems, not necessarily a function of policy-making incompetence but more reflective of deeper structural forces that allow China to engage in capital-intensive and risky projects offering only long-term payoffs. 

Freed from the whims of the four-year electoral cycle, the system allows for long-term economic and social planning. In the case of China, policies are implemented with decades-long strategies in mind.     

With unrestrained state intervention and high levels of state ownership, policymakers allocate resources to the priority sectors. In the Eighties, these were steel, cement and coal. In the 2020s, these sectors are dominated by high-tech renewable energy, electric vehicles, advanced robotics and artificial intelligence. 

As China transformed into the global industrial powerhouse, its trade surplus grew significantly, spiking from $8 billion in 1994 to a historical high of $822 billion in 2025. With this massive surplus of international currency, China has obtained substantial capacity to export its capital across the globe. 

This came in the form of concerted efforts to develop infrastructure and build access to strategic resources, mostly in Asia, Latin America and Africa – activities that in 2013 took on the moniker of the “Belt and Road Initiative”.

Guinea was an obvious target for Chinese capital. Home not only to the world’s largest bauxite reserves but also to Simandou, the largest untapped deposit of high-grade iron ore, it has always been of high speculative interest for mining investors. 

The first Francophone African country to gain independence, Guinea is still deeply marked by the legacy of its totalitarian, inaugural leader, Sékou Touré, who ruled the country from 1958 until his death in 1984 – creating an oppressive and invasive state apparatus that quickly metastasized into a tool of extraction. 

Plagued by political violence and instability, deeply embedded corruption and non-existent infrastructure, the country was long considered unbankable. Rio Tinto, for example, kept its rights to the Simandou deposit, which it acquired in 1997, at arm’s length for almost two decades.

Things only started moving when the country fell into China’s line of sight. In its first major investment in the country in decades, a subsidiary of the state-owned China Three Gorges Corporation completed a 240 MW hydropower plant in 2016, more than doubling the country’s electricity generation overnight. This was followed by the construction of another 450 MW facility in 2021, which again doubled Guinea’s power supply. The total investment from the two projects came to $1.6 billion.

At the same time, rich bauxite deposits in the hinterlands were being connected to the coast — where a string of new ports were under construction — by a network of railways, conveyor belts and dirt roads, equating to roughly $5 billion in investment. 

It was likewise Chinese capital that finally got the Simandou project rolling into motion. Underpinned by an investment of roughly $20 billion, the project involved several port terminals and a 670-kilometer long railway — arguably the biggest mining infrastructure investment in African history — with an estimated three-quarters of the capital coming from Chinese sources.

It was here that the dark side of Chinese engagement took shape. In September 2021, Guinea’s incumbent president, Alpha Condé, who had extended his rule into a third term with an unpopular constitutional change, was overthrown in a coup staged by the head of his presidential guard. An imposing figure at 6’5” tall, Mamadi Doumbouya — married to a former French gendarme — ultimately soured on the democratic handover he had initially promised, instead eliminating virtually all political opposition through a campaign of kidnappings, disappearances and bloody clampdowns on protests.

As the Chinese government’s 2025 Guinea Country Guide to Outward Investment and Cooperation indicates, Beijing is well aware of the regime’s brutality. But China refrains from judgment, concentrating on what these actions imply for the regime’s durability and thus investment security. “Although there have been occasional mass incidents or small-scale riots in various places, the military government has been able to handle them effectively,” it notes, adding that “the military government demonstrates a strong ability to maintain control”.  

When Doumbouya eventually dared to face the electorate in late 2025, he was able to present a track record of concrete development — a convincing counterweight to the rise in political violence and the suppression of freedoms. Since he took power, Guinea’s GDP per capita has grown by more than 50% With Chinese help, the Simandou works were completed just a month before polling stations opened.

Billboards bearing Doumbouya’s likeness — clad in sunglasses and magisterial white robes — next to the slogan “Simandou 2040, Guinea’s economic transformation” became omnipresent in the streets, while Doumbouya’s ministers toured the country promising a windfall of cash and staging dance competitions to pro-Doumbouya pop music.

What the US is able to offer pales in comparison. The collective West has just a single bauxite asset in Guinea. Producing about nine million tons of bauxite a year, Alcoa’s mine relies on infrastructure built largely in the mid-20th century.

Owing to its noncompliance with good governance standards — which include controlling corruption, upholding human rights and democratic elections — Guinea was historically excluded from the American infrastructure-development initiatives such as the Millennium Challenge Corporation. 

A privately-funded American initiative, centering on an iron ore deposit that neighbors Simandou, has yet to see the light of day. This inertia is perhaps reflective of financial markets’ unwillingness to take long-term bets in high-risk states. And elsewhere on the continent, examples of US mining and infrastructure success stories are virtually nonexistent. Much of the discourse around the American mining investment on the continent has centered around the Lobito Corridor in Angola, which, in 2025, secured a $553 million loan from the US International Development Finance Corporation, created under the first Trump administration to counter the Belt and Road Initiative.

The fund was used to enhance the capacity of a railway connecting an Atlantic port in Angola to the Central African Copper Belt, split between the DRC and Zambia, and secured several additional billions in commitments to implement associated projects. But awkwardly, even Lobito bears the mark of Chinese capital. The former colonial railway, almost entirely destroyed during the Angolan Civil War, was originally, between 2006 and 2014, rehabilitated with the help of a $2 billion Chinese loan — part of a bigger $30 billion loan package that China spent on rebuilding Angola’s infrastructure. 

Trump’s other supposed success story, the US-DRC Strategic Partnership Agreement — signed in December 2025 and granting the US preferential access to Congolese minerals in exchange for settling the conflict with the Rwanda-backed rebels in the east — likewise turned out to be not much more than a PR exercise to signal Trump’s deal-making genius. 

More than a year on since the US promised to bring peace to the region, the conflict continues to rage, and American capital inflows remain to be seen.                   

This impotence has come alongside the wider recession of Western influence in the Global South. With China churning out unprecedented volumes of capital, tied to the development of hard infrastructure, the West has ultimately come up short and is incapable of offering anything remotely competitive.

For decades, the only way for developing countries to access aid was through agreeing, even if in a token way, to comply with Western norms of good governance and liberal values. This era seems to be over. Uninterested in seeing its face reflected across the globe, China is content to let partner states abide by their own norms.

The spike in Chinese investment has, therefore, given dictators and rogue regimes, previously largely reliant on the West as a sole source of meaningful finance, freedom of choice and leverage, and as the case of Guinea shows, legitimized their rule.

It is, however, questionable whether these countries were ever viable targets of liberal democratic evangelism, and the fact remains that China brought cash and development to regions with no historical experience of substantial capital inflows. Perhaps the ultimate, uncomfortable truth is that China has produced an extractive-authoritarian equilibrium that actually works, offering a modicum of stability, infrastructure and growth.

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By Josef Skrdlik and Oliver Dunn

In Guinea, Doumbouya’s militaristic regime, continuing a total war against political opponents, is set to preside over a growth rate of 8.7% this year, according to IMF, making the Guinean economy the fastest growing in Africa only after Ethiopia. IMF estimates that government revenues from Simandou alone could amount to 3.4% of GDP between 2030 and 2039, compared to just 2.2% of GDP for all mining government revenues in 2022.  

Ever more fearful of a mutiny among his armed forces, divided along ethnic lines and subject to long-standing frustrations, Doumbouya has nevertheless apparently done a decent job in entrenching his rule. With little transparency over how the proceeds of the mining windfall are being spent, the security apparatus has ballooned. Since 2021, Groupement des Forces Spéciale, Doumbouya’s de-facto praetorian guard, has grown from 500 to at least 2,500 well-paid men. Downtown Conakry, where the presidential palace is located, is now guarded by modern surveillance systems and armored vehicles and gunmen stationed at every crossroads, pointing machine guns at passing traffic. The Hotel Kaloum, a Chinese-built five star hotel not far from the palace, hosts a high-tech surveillance suite on its top floor. Doumbouya’s personal survival is not guaranteed, but the repressive state apparatus will be a formidable asset for whoever might come next.

While it is hard to argue with fast economic growth being ultimately a good thing in a cash-strapped nation like Guinea, its fruits, at least for now, are being distributed very inequitably. The mining industry is extremely capital-intensive, thus creating very few jobs. In the absence of comprehensive redistribution mechanisms, the mining boom has benefited primarily a handful of lucky contractors and those close to power. It has also come along with community displacement, rise in violence and full-blown environmental destruction — pristine forests have been erased, estuaries polluted and wildlife endangered.

This warrants some nostalgia about once non-negotiable conditionalities in the allocation of developmental help and investment, and demands a response from the West. But the current economic model seems incapable of providing one that is adequate. Proselytizers of free trade and a small state have gone noticeably quiet. In the Trump administration’s attempts to play China at its own game, however, it is merely doing a version of it that is both incompetent and ineffective. As the fruits of China’s decades-long strategic planning continue to materialize, the collective West may find itself forced to rethink the very foundations of the existing neoliberal economic order of small government, free trade and unrestrained financial markets, built upon the dollar as the global reserve currency. As Branko Milanovic thoughtfully pointed out some years back, Trump, incapable of understanding the complexity of the institutions underpinning the system over which he presides, might turn out to be America’s very own Gorbachev. 

A moment later, a pick-up truck, carrying four masked, heavily armed members of the National Guard, lurches down the street before grinding to a halt by a nearby construction site. Here, workers from sub-Saharan Africa are gathered. The soldiers dismount, snatching one of the workers at random. He submits without resistance, and is hoisted onto the empty truck bed as the vehicle speeds away.

Half an hour later, the same vehicle looms into view. The truck now carries a full cargo of migrants. Simultaneously, police are raiding workplaces around the city. At night, they venture into people’s homes, breaking down doors. Those apprehended are detained and later dumped at the borders of Mali and Senegal.

Until recently, the Islamic Republic of Mauritania — a sparsely-populated desert nation sitting on the border between the Arab and African world — was an attractive destination for migrant workers from West Africa. Offering relatively high salaries, it also had a patchily-enforced immigration regime. But in March this year, that regime came to an end. Deportation raids suddenly started in Nouakchott, the country’s sun-baked capital, before gradually spreading across the country.

Home to both Arab and black African ethnic groups, Mauritania — the last country to abolish slavery — has long been afflicted by racial tensions. These tensions were compounded in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, when political upheaval across North Africa led to a surge of Sub-Saharan migrants through the country. Mauritania becoming a major transit point for migrants heading north, many of whom settled there among the politically dominant Beidane Arabs.

“We are a nation of 4.5 million, but in my opinion, we have at least eight million migrants here. They bring crime and drug trafficking and bad morals,” said Ahmed, a telecommunications executive, while driving his Toyota Hilux through the concrete sprawl of the capital Nouakchott. “Now, finally, the government is doing something about it.”

But the Mauritanian government has not publicly explained why it has started deporting migrants en masse. A €210 million migration partnership deal with the EU, signed in 2024 — the EU being concerned about arrivals to Spain’s Canary Islands from the country — may have been a factor. For its part, the EU has never explained how the funds were meant to be used. Ten months into the deportations program, it is to know precisely how many people have been expelled. But judging by the effect on industry, rather than non-existent official statistics, the deportations have been in the tens of thousands. The campaign has caused immense damage. The country’s African migrant communities have dwindled in number, with many deported under brutal and violent conditions. Meanwhile, factories, farms, and construction sites lie empty, deprived of the migrant labor upon which they depend.

All this means that the desert nation has become an unlikely testing ground for the kinds of mass-removal policies that, in Western states, are threatening to elbow their way through the Overton window. Mauritania’s experience suggests that these policies are less about political will than about what a state must become to enforce them. It also demonstrates that such an operation demands enormous state capacity and resources, lest it descend into chaos and lawlessness.

One evening, police raided a compound in Nouaudhibou that was home to Ibrahim, a 25-year-old from Côte d’Ivoire. He was arrested alongside six others. Despite having the necessary documents to remain in Mauritania, Ibrahim was told dismissively to get into a pick-up truck. He was then brought to a detention center and held for five days together with 200 other men. During this period of detention he was given no food.

Suleyman, a 27-year-old Guinean, spent eight months in prison after being violently robbed. The police accused him of initiating the incident. The moment he stepped outside the prison walls, he was arrested over an expired visa. Several days later, he was dumped at Mauritania’s border with Senegal.

The process for determining whether migrants were legally in Mauritania was largely arbitrary. Youssouf, a Guinean factory worker who is in his early twenties and from the Fulani ethnic group, was arrested when police broke down the door to his room early one morning. Youssouf had been asleep beside a black Mauritanian — also Fulani — with whom he shared the accommodation. Both lacked identification, but Youssouf’s roommate was let go after demonstrating proficiency in Hassaniya, the local dialect of Arabic. Youssouf, speaking in Fulani, claimed to be from a village in the Mauritanian south. Unconvinced by his accent, police grilled him with questions about his ancestry. Because Youssouf was unable to verify his story, he was identified as an illegal alien and deported.

On the ground, the campaign has metastasized into a giant rent-seeking exercise — a function of a perverse incentive structure and systemic incompetence. Traore, an Ivorian construction worker in his mid-20s, was arrested three times in less than a week. Each time he regained his freedom after paying bribes of not more than £22. “It’s just about whether you have something to give them,” said Musa, a 24-year-old Gambian construction worker who was deported after police raided his room while he slept.

Seemingly indifferent to their assigned mission, police focused almost entirely on self-enrichment. Before being brought to a detention facility, Youssouf, the Guinean Fulani factory worker, had his pockets searched and the small amount of money he carried on him — the equivalent of £2 — confiscated. Elizabeth, an elderly Nigerian woman, recalled police breaking down her door while she slept naked, handcuffing her before she could dress. Upon finding that she held a valid residency permit, they stole her television, calmly carrying the loot towards a pick-up truck parked nearby.

Such behavior has caused a degree of confusion among Mauritania’s migrant population. “These Mauritanians, they have no IQ,” said Ruth, a street vendor from Sierra Leone when describing her interactions with Mauritanian police. Even though Ruth has valid documents, the police continue to pester her for money.

The inevitable economic disruption wrought by Mauritania’s deportation campaign seems to have had little influence over authorities’ decision-making. As raids intensified in Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, construction sites stood empty and factories came to a halt: many workers were deported, while others feared coming to work for fear of arrest. “There are no workers now, no people who can go to the sea to fish, because they are picking up people who have no documents,” said the owner of one of Nouadhibou’s largest fish-processing factories.

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In the south, along the Senegalese border, the campaign took on a more self-defeating form. For no obvious reason, the government took it upon itself to roll out the deportation campaign in Rosso, a region whose farms — Mauritania’s agricultural backbone — rely almost entirely on foreign labor. Migrant workers were then forced to retreat deeper and deeper into the bush, far beyond the reach of military pick-ups. “They were harassing me a lot. Every day I had to run,” said Ibrahim, a laborer from Guinea-Bissau in his early twenties, while cooking over an open fire in a remote migrant camp where he lives with other workers from Mali and the Gambia. Forced to live off the land, bushmeat — including monitor lizards and other reptiles — is often seen roasting in camps along the River Senegal.

In these riverine bush areas, the farcical nature of the campaign becomes clear. It has achieved little in terms of its presumed goals beyond inflicting extensive human suffering and demonstrating the state’s capacity for cruelty. Those unlucky to be caught in Rosso and deported to Senegal can easily return within a day. “If they catch you, deport you, you go Senegal. Then tomorrow another way you return,” said Samba, a thirty-something Gambian rapper who works in agriculture on a seasonal basis. Migrants, familiar with the terrain and routes through the riverside marshes, would typically pay for fishing canoes to return them to Mauritania for as little as £4.

For others, returning to Mauritania is just a question of having the money to bribe their way through the countless checkpoints along roads between the borders and major economic centers. Those without cash are just waiting for the operation to cool down before they can return and rebuild their lost livelihoods.

Still, mass-removal policies have gained political traction in the West. In response to the shooting of two National Guard soldiers in Washington DC by an Afghan migrant, President Trump called for the denaturalization of migrants who undermine domestic tranquility and the deportation of those incompatible with Western values, alongside an outright ban on immigration from third-world countries. “If they can’t love our country, we don’t want them,” he later said.

Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration tsar, went a step further. “Trump’s plan to stop the invasion of small towns in America: remigration!” he tweeted — remigration referring to the use of state-enforced expulsions to reverse existing migration-driven demographic trends. Miller’s comments came days after the State Department tweeted that “mass migration poses an existential threat to Western civilization and undermines the stability of key American allies.”

More recently, the fatal shooting of a civilian by an ICE agent in Minneapolis — and the uproar that has followed — shows how calls for mass removals can translate into chaotic and volatile forms of state violence when put into practice.

In the UK, too, calls for mass deportations and remigration are becoming more commonplace, with Reform UK and the Conservatives squabbling over who gets to claim credit for mainstreaming mass removals as a policy option. Surprisingly, these proposals fail to confront the realities of what their implementation would involve. When asked whether the first Reform UK government could realistically deport 500,000 people, Zia Yusuf limited his response to, “Totally, yeah.”

Discussions of possible obstacles rarely extend beyond potential legal hurdles. A 2025 paper by Restore Britain — an advocacy group led by former Reform UK MP Rupert Lowe — advertised, in its own words, as “the most comprehensive deportation policy ever produced in Britain”, fails to account for what mass deportations would look like on the ground. Its analysis of logistics is largely limited to how to exclude migrants from work and public services, alongside schemes to incentivize snitching. It provides no guidance on what is supposed to happen between the intention to deport an “illegal chancer” and the moment he enters a chartered flight. When Restore Britain’s Harrison Pitt, who co-authored the paper, was interviewed by GB News, the practicalities remained undiscussed.

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Yet the Mauritanian case suggests that the questions of practical implementation — and state capacity — are, in fact, the most critical elements of any mass removal operation. Such operations rest on six basic requirements: identifying “targets”, apprehending them, detaining them, transporting them, expelling them, and preventing their return. In these respects, Mauritania has benefited from an extensive intelligence-gathering apparatus, despotic governance, the absence of rule of law, and little respect for human rights, thus exercising a certain competitive advantage over Western states. Mauritanian police were able to proceed with an efficiency-maximizing approach, prioritizing high numbers of arrests over any broader considerations.

While it might seem that Mauritania’s failure to prevent human suffering and excessive collateral damage is particular to its incompetent governance and inability to effectively enforce policy, it points to broader contradictions in mass deportations as a practical strategy. Contrary to what much of the current discourse would suggest, the viability of mass removals rests on far more prosaic questions about what the state can actually do, and at what cost.

Mauritania was able to turn the concept into action only because it is seemingly willing to exercise despotism and brutalize those it now deems unwelcome. It remains unclear whether there is another way to implement the policy. Any government wishing to implement a less arbitrary and brutal approach — providing at least a façade of legality — would need to develop a large, permanent apparatus of surveillance, detention and enforcement capable of tracking and controlling millions of people. This would inevitably come in combination with an expansion of state power and administrative coercion that chronically limited public budgets would struggle to sustain, even amid a scenario of sustained public support.

A completely different, yet equally important, consideration is how mass removals would change the moral fiber of our societies. While proponents of mass deportations might stress that migrants could be encouraged to leave voluntarily, through incentives rather than coercion, it remains questionable whether significant numbers could be persuaded to leave in exchange for a financial reward alone. Such a decision would mean sacrificing the prospect of a life-long existence in the West, and as of yet there are no convincing examples of successful cash-for-voluntary returns schemes adopted on a mass basis. If the ambition is not merely to marginally increase returns but to reverse demographic trends decades in the making, voluntary self-deportation schemes seem unlikely to deliver the numbers required.

Thus, any attempt to make such a campaign effective might necessitate radical changes in everyday life: neighbors denouncing one another, landlords and employers acting as auxiliary immigration officers, and routine identity checks becoming a normal feature of streets, shops, and workplaces. While public opinion on mass deportations continues to shift, it is one thing to endorse these ideas in the abstract, but quite another to live with the methods required to enforce them at scale. As the Mauritanian example suggests, the gap between these two positions is where the real political and moral costs lie.