In recent years, China's international status has gradually changed from "benefactor" to "banker", and its overseas spending has shifted from traditional aid to development finance. Based on the data of the Global China Development Finance Database and the survey of African enterprises of the World Bank, this paper uses China's six major productive raw materials and China's foreign exchange reserves as instrumental variables to empirically test the positive role of China's development finance in promoting the growth of African enterprises. These conclusions still hold under a series of robustness tests, including classification, form transformation and enterprise sub-simple analysis. At the same time, it is found that Chinese development finance has a greater impact on enterprises (especially state-owned enterprises) in countries with stable political and government institutions. Further mechanism analysis shows that Chinese development finance can improve infrastructure, relax financing constraints, and standardize market institutions to promote the development of African enterprises, and improve the labor productivity of enterprises. From the perspective of development finance, this paper clarifies China's positive role in the growth of African enterprises, which provides strong support for the effectiveness of "South-South cooperation" under the global development framework.