Month: January 2020

Swedish scholar Johanna Malm is one of the world's leading researchers on China-DR  Congo relations and now joins the growing number of experts who refute the still widely-held China "debt trap" narrative. In a recent interview published by the government-run Swedish Institute, Dr. Malm explained that there's ...

The "debt trap" meme lives. It just keeps going and going and going. It doesn't seem to matter to China's critics that there isn't actually any evidence to support the assertion that China is using massive, unsustainable loans to poor developing countries in a bid to seize ...

African policymakers up and down the continent will all tell you that one issue, more than any other, stands apart as the key priority in 2020: electricity. Without additional electric power capacity, both generation and distribution, none of their ambitious industrialization plans will be possible. Industries need ...

The Washington Post's West Africa correspondent Danielle Paquette and Maxwell Suuk published a compelling story this weekend on the devastation that subsistence farmers in Ghana are encountering due to donkey poaching. The animal's hides are sought after in China where they're used to make the traditional Chinese medicine ejiao ...

Africa's leading national flag carrier, Ethiopian Airlines, is in the final stages of regulatory approval to launch a trio of new direct routes between its hub in Addis Ababa and major Chinese trading cities. Once it receives the go-ahead from the ...

One of the highlights of Foreign Minister Wang Yi's trip to Burundi was the announcement that Beijing had classified the government there as an "All-Weather Friend." While this may not be an official diplomatic designation, it's nonetheless an important status within the Chinese diplomatic lexicon.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi is on his way back home today after wrapping a busy weekend visiting three African countries to wrap up his latest African tour. He also made an unscheduled stop in Nairobi. For all intents and purposes, ...

For several years now, as debt levels in a number of African countries have risen to alarming heights, Chinese and African officials have reportedly been looking for new ways to evolve the traditional resource-for-infrastructure (RFI) deals that critics on both sides of this relationship contend saddles African ...

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi kicked off his annual tour of Africa in Cairo this week where he met with senior Egyptian leaders to discuss the growing instability in North Africa, the Mideast, and the Persian Gulf.

While Donald Trump may not be very popular in most parts of the world, not so in several of Africa's largest countries, according to new survey data from the Pew Research Center. Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa all recorded much higher levels of ...

China is the second-largest funder of UN Peacekeeping Operations (PKO), behind the United States, and the largest troop contributor to PKOs in Africa among the UN's permanent members of the Security Council. Last December, China's top diplomat for Africa, Yang Jiechi, said Beijing is now willing to ...

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi wrapped up the first stop of his five-nation African tour following a full day of high-level meetings with Egyptian and Arab regional leaders. Security issues in Libya and the situation in Iran were key items on the agenda at several of the ...