China will host a summit between Iran and the Gulf Cooperation Council later this year, reports the Wall Street Journal. The summit with the six-country bloc (made up of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait) will further solidify the normalization of diplomatic ties between Iran and Saudi Arabia, brokered by China this weekend.
The announcement follows December’s first summit between China and Arab states, where GCC leaders welcomed President Xi Jinping’s ...
Day: December 17, 2019
China’s Groundbreaking Use of “Non-State Actors” as Part of its Public Diplomacy Strategy in Africa
Typically, public diplomacy initiatives are carried out either by embassies in different countries or state-led media organizations (VOA, FRANCE 24, etc…). Rarely do governments entrust this kind of outreach to private organizations, or "non-state actors" (NSAs) as they're known in government-parlance. ...
A Zambian Ambassador Issues Forceful Denial That Senior Lusaka Leaders Involved in Illegal Timber Racket
Ambassador to Ethiopia and Permanent Representative to the African Union, Emmanuel Mwamba, published a scathing rebuttal to allegations made by the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency that accused senior government leaders of running a "cartel" to illegally harvest and export endangered mukula timber, largely to China.
China’s Cobalt Mining Giant in the DR Congo is in Trouble (Again)
The phone many of you are using to read this article and all those electric vehicles on the roads rely on cobalt, a strategically vital metal that comes from one of the saddest places on earth in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Most consumers have ...
African Media Houses Should Design Own Policies on How to Report on China
China is featured prominently in the news media and deservingly so for several reasons. It has grown from a relatively obscure, poor country in East Asia into a global power. China’s economy is the world’s second-largest and by some measures, ...
Are IMF Loans Being Used to Counter China in Africa?
The growing influence of China in world politics has not gone unnoticed in Washington. In 2018, while presenting the U.S. national defense strategy, which set priorities for the Pentagon, then U.S. Defence Secretary Jim Mattis declared in very clear terms that the United States was entering ...
