West Africa has rich natural resources and great potential for development. With the deepening of the Maritime Silk Road, demand for capacity cooperation between West Africa and China has been increasing. Gray relevance evaluation was adopted to study the competitiveness of capacity cooperation between west African countries and China. The evaluation indicators focus on the trade, production, consumption and logistics of west African countries. In terms of trade level, imbalance of imports and exports was regarded as an important indica- tor. Then, generation of coefficients was used to calculate the import and export volume of containers in foreign trade among the sixteen west African countries and the foreign trade imbalances among them were determined. Then, the variation coefficient method was used to determine the weight of each index, and the degree of gray correlation was obtained to reflect the level of competitiveness. The research results show that Nigeria, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, and Benin and other countries, as key targets of China’s capacity cooperation, have strong com- petitiveness in manufacturing capacity cooperation, which has provided important reference for China to explore industrial construction and enhance manufacturing capacity cooperation in west Africa under the “Belt and Road” initiative.