Sorry, I'm conflating the Chinese government with the corporations that do the actual work on the ground and generate the revenue. The US does get involved a lot in foreign affairs on behalf of American companies (i.e. reporting on Airbus's attempted bribery of Saudi officials in order to benefit Boeing) but if my experience in Russia is indicative of how it works in China, the government and corporations are far more intertwined. In Russia, to get stuff done like get building permits or guarantee reliable logistics, you quite often have to resort to bribes and anything at the scale of large corporations requires complex relationships between the business owners and politicians/bureaucrats because the latter can easily use "legal" means to take control of the company and reprivatize it to their cronies. These are broad strokes but there are plenty of publicly known examples like Sergei Magnitsky, who died in a prison cell after discovering that high level officers took control of a foreign investment firm and claimed hundreds of millions of dollars in tax returns from the government.
Based on my understanding of this expansion into Africa, the Chinese government is heavily involved in negotiating mineral rights and uses its might to enforce the security of investments that are made by corporations, which are effectively state owned or at the very least can become so on the whims of the Politburo.
Chinese corporations work with despots and unsavoury regimes. US corporations work with despots and unsavoury regimes.