A New Era: Zambia sets precedent in Africa by embracing Chinese Yuan for mining sector tax payments

SATURDAY JANUARY, 10 2026

By Adam Ihucha, Tranquillity News Correspondent, Zambia

Zambia, Africa’s second-largest copper producer, has taken a quiet but consequential step in the global currency chess game. It has become the first African country to formally accept China’s yuan for mining taxes and royalties—an arrangement that underscores Beijing’s growing financial sway over the continent’s most strategic resource sectors.

The Bank of Zambia confirmed that payments in renminbi began in October, marking a shift not only in how mining revenues are collected, but also in how Zambia manages its reserves, debt and external relationships.

Chinese-owned mining firms are now settling part of their tax obligations in yuan, Bloomberg reported, reflecting China’s dual role as Zambia’s biggest buyer of copper and one of its largest creditors.

Officially, the move is pragmatic rather than ideological.

“A large portion of copper exports go to China and the Chinese mining firms already receive some, if not all, of their payments for their exports to China in renminbi,” the central bank said.

Accepting yuan, it added, helps diversify reserves and better align them with trade flows.

There is another, more pressing incentive: debt.

Zambia owes billions of dollars to Chinese lenders, accumulated during a decade of infrastructure-heavy borrowing that culminated in a sovereign default in 2020.

Holding yuan makes it cheaper to service those obligations, the central bank said, allowing the country to repay Chinese creditors without repeated and costly currency conversions.

In effect, Zambia is matching the currency of its debts with the currency of its earnings—a sensible hedge for a country that has learned, painfully, the risks of dollar dependence.

Yet the implications stretch well beyond Lusaka.

Africa is fast becoming a proving ground for China’s long-standing ambition to internationalise the yuan.

Beijing has encouraged the use of its currency in trade settlement, lending and now taxation, especially in countries where Chinese firms dominate extractive industries.

Zambia is not alone. Kenya converted part of its Chinese debt into yuan last year, a move it says will save about $250m annually after restructuring a $5bn railway loan from China’s Export-Import Bank.

Ethiopia has begun talks to do the same. Zambia itself had previously signalled it was open to such arrangements; it has now gone further by embedding the yuan directly into its fiscal machinery.

To make the system work, the Bank of Zambia has started publishing an official yuan–kwacha exchange rate, allowing mining companies to choose whether to sell dollars or yuan to pay taxes.

The policy builds on rules introduced in 2018 and expanded in 2020, which forced miners to surrender foreign currency earnings to the central bank to shore up reserves during the debt crisis.

What looks like a technical adjustment is, in fact, a strategic shift.

For decades, Africa’s commodity wealth has been priced, taxed and saved in dollars.

Zambia’s move suggests that, at least in parts of the mining economy, the greenback is no longer unchallenged.

China’s influence in Africa has long been visible in roads, railways and mines.

It is now becoming visible in central-bank balance sheets.

If Zambia’s experiment succeeds, others may follow—quietly expanding the yuan’s footprint, one copper royalty at a time.