Chinese Demand for Rosewood Empowers Some of Africa’s Deadliest Terrorist Groups

Chinese smuggling rings have been instrumental in the illegal trafficking of rosewood. They also provide support to terrorist groups in West Africa and Mozambique.

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.

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.

This is an excerpt from an piece I recently wrote for the Diplomat. To read the full article, click here.