Beijing is also building a huge stock of gold, the price of which recently hit a record high of more than $3,000 per ounce, to possibly create a new currency aimed at rivaling the United States dollar, members of Congress were told.
During a hearing titled “Metals, Minerals, and Mining: How the CCP Fuels Conflict and Exploitation in Africa,” several expert witnesses testified that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) model on the continent is based on exploiting Africa’s natural resources to the detriment of U.S. national security.
The strategy is working, they said, to the extent that the United States is struggling to secure adequate supplies of minerals considered essential to its future progress.
The witnesses included foremost security and minerals experts, who warned President Donald Trump’s administration not to neglect Africa but to take significant steps to weaken China’s monopoly over extractive industries.
These could include implementing sanctions against Chinese companies and businesspeople involved in corruption and enforcing stricter regulations on Chinese firms supplying minerals to American companies.
The subcommittee heard that unless the United States establishes a greater presence in Africa, especially in mining sectors, its economy would be weakened and its citizens endangered.
Joseph Nguramo, a security expert specializing in the minerals sector for the Atlantic Council, a think tank in Washington, told the hearing that political and social chaos in Africa benefits China’s economic interests, including its current hold on global critical minerals supplies, by discouraging Western investments and collaboration.
“Concurrently, it props up corrupt political systems held in place by predatory and kleptocratic elites who enrich themselves at the expense of their citizens,” he said. “These systems perpetuate poverty and lead to regional conflicts and wars, as can be witnessed in Sudan and the DRC [Democratic Republic of Congo].”
Nguramo said tens of thousands of children across Africa are being forced to dig for minerals for Chinese buyers without adequate protective equipment and payment.
“Some of these children are under 10 years old, leaving them exposed to toxic substances, causing serious health and environmental problems,” he said, citing investigations by Amnesty International.
Nguramo highlighted that Africa is the world’s most resource-rich region, having 40 percent of the minerals needed for global energy security in the future.
Africa’s minerals—including cobalt, tantalum, and lithium—are also key components in manufacturing microchips and semiconductors crucial to building key infrastructure.
The critical metals are essential elements in advanced weapon systems technology, including missile defense, submarines, and fighter jets.
The subcommittee heard that China has assumed almost full control of Africa’s mining sector.
“Given this situation, the U.S. and its allies’ national security will experience growing dependence on China’s global supply chain,” Nguramo testified.
Sasha Lezhnev, senior policy adviser at The Sentry, an investigative and policy organization seeking to disrupt networks that benefit from conflict, repression, and kleptocracy, told the hearing that nearly half of China’s largest mining investments globally have been in sub-Saharan Africa.
“Such investment has come with significant corruption,” he said. “It is perhaps no accident that the African countries that export the most to China also have some of the world’s worst corruption ratings.”
These countries include South Sudan, the DRC, and Eritrea.
Lezhnev’s research has exposed a litany of human rights and environmental abuses linked to Chinese investment in green energy mineral projects in Africa.
Nowhere have these problems been more acute than in the DRC, the central African country with some of the world’s largest concentrations of critical minerals, and China is by far its biggest mining investor and trading partner, he said.
The DRC is the world’s largest producer of cobalt, accounting for 75 percent of global production, and tantalum, accounting for 40 percent of global production, he added.
In 2024, it became the world’s second-largest producer of copper.
Lezhnev pointed to China signing a $6.2 billion minerals-for-infrastructure deal in the DRC in 2008. Since then, he said, corruption has increased exponentially.
The Sentry investigated the deal and found that the shell company—Congo Construction Company (CCC)—at the center of the scheme received $55 million from “foreign sources,” apparently intended to bribe senior DRC government officials.
Lezhnev testified that the DRC government often takes permits away from Western mining firms and gives them to companies linked to the CCP.
He reported that gold is “at the heart” of the recent escalation of the conflict in eastern DRC, in which 6.5 million people have been displaced and thousands have died.
Rwandan-backed M23 rebels are fighting DRC government troops over control of mineral-rich areas, especially those with vast gold deposits.
The DRC produces more than $1 billion in mined gold annually. But, Lezhnev testified, almost all of it is smuggled out of the country, primarily to neighboring Rwanda and Uganda, before flowing to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), China, and other countries.
“China is purchasing record amounts of gold, including from Russia, potentially in order to establish a new BRICS currency that would whittle away at the U.S. dollar’s dominance or for other competitive purposes,” he said.
China and Russia are leading members of BRICS, a bloc that aims to counter what it considers to be Western control of global architecture, including the United Nations and World Bank.
China is the world’s largest consumer and producer of gold, and it has been active in the conflict gold trade in eastern DRC and elsewhere on the continent, Lezhnev said, with some companies linked to the CCP paying armed groups for access to the precious metal.
He told the subcommittee there are about 450 illegally operating mining companies in the South Kivu region alone, mainly run by Chinese nationals who have been smuggling up to 8 tons of gold annually.
Lezhnev said Chinese operators are illegally extracting gold across Africa—in countries such as the Central African Republic, Ghana, Mali, and Nigeria—and smuggling it to China.
In written testimony, Thierry Dongala, who conducts supply chain investigations for gold and precious metals traders for his company, Accountable Africa, explained that “many years of all stick and no carrot U.S. sanctions in Africa have driven away compliance-friendly trade financiers and allowed China to monopolize artisanal gold mining in Africa.”
He said U.S. sanctions had driven away global banking partners “because they aren’t willing to take the risk of deciphering between good and bad actors in the mining sector.”
This, Dongala said, “drives most of the good actors to join the bad actors” in trading with Chinese companies who eagerly circumvent mining regulations.
“This effectively hands over vast swaths of the artisanal gold trade to Chinese influence and even encourages governments to confiscate gold mines, which are often owned by U.S investors, to hand them over to Chinese operators,” he said.
To prevent this, he suggested that the U.S. government begin issuing special licenses from its Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) to mineral traders “who are compliant with the highest standards of accountability.”
This move, Dongala said, would provide an alternative to Chinese black market financing and trading in the African gold mining sector.
“It will provide an opportunity to distinguish good market participants while gathering market data that allows OFAC to better target bad market participants,” he testified.
Lezhnev said the system of kleptocracy remains the major obstacle to eliminating abuses in African minerals supply chains.
“The kleptocratic system will continue unless there are serious consequences for corrupt activities, and addressing corruption will benefit U.S. companies by leveling the playing field,” he stated.
Lezhnev urged the U.S. Treasury Department to sanction the networks that facilitate grand corruption, particularly mining-related.
“These could include gold refineries and traders in Rwanda, Uganda, and the UAE that trade conflict gold ... [and] key Chinese middlemen and companies and international businessmen; as well as senior officials in the DRC actively facilitating corruption,” he said.
Lezhnev added that the Trump administration and Congress have important roles in combating the illegal gold trade from the DRC to the UAE, China, and beyond.
He suggested Secretary of State Marco Rubio lead a public-private illicit gold initiative, partnering with gold industry bodies such as the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA), the World Gold Council (WGC), and allies, including the United Kingdom and European Union.
“The new body must address gold trade data transparency—a primary problem—by collecting, consolidating, and sharing reliable data,” Lezhnev said.
“There is currently no reliable real-time gold trade data available, leaving sanctions bodies and others trying to combat the illicit gold trade significantly behind the curve of criminal actors.”
He told the hearing that Washington should partner with the UAE to identify gold smuggling patterns and companies and then help indict and prosecute the illicit actors.
Together with the European Union and the United Kingdom, Lezhnev said, Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent should establish an illicit gold task force to “robustly investigate and sanction trafficking networks” with the aim of eroding Chinese profiteering.
Lezhnev also pointed out that China still needs U.S. markets.
“While China may control a large portion of the critical minerals trade, their companies still want to sell to U.S. and Western markets, which are still the biggest in the world for electronics and important for [electric vehicles],” he said.
“Chinese companies supply to Tesla, Apple, Ford … U.S. automotive and electronics companies thus still have important leverage on this supply chain through their combined buying power, which they can exert through due diligence, tracing, and auditing,” he added.
Nguramo said the United States must counter China’s grip on Africa’s natural resources in the interest of America’s own security, democracy, and human rights in Africa.
“Certainly, in the absence of U.S. global leadership and engagement, the vacuum will be filled by autocratic, repressive, tyrannical and authoritarian regimes, as we are seeing in Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, Russia, Sudan, and the DRC—unfortunately backed and aligned with China,” he testified.
