Related Posts

New Words = New Lives

One of the weird realities of the current moment is that while we're seeing much more widespread popular energy behind social justice causes, many of these campaigns seem siloed and isolated from each other. For example, over the last few months we've spent much energy tracking the ...

Africa Week 2020 in Beijing

The fourth annual Africa Week event will take place in Beijing from July 20-July 25. Africa Week is a unique series of seminars, excursions, film screenings, and always concludes with a start-up competition for local African entrepreneurs in China:

Rice Was Grown the Traditional Way for Millenia in This Small Ugandan Village Until a Chinese Company Arrived

Rashidah Mpinga, a large-scale rice outgrower in Kalungu, an agricultural district in Uganda’s Southern Region, gets ready to harvest her rice. She’s going to rent a combine harvester and a tractor from Zhong’s Industries Limited, a Chinese private enterprise. She expects to ...

Why We Should All Just Take a Breath and Ignore the Hype Surrounding the Proposed China-Iran Deal

News that China and Iran were in late-stage talks to finalize a 25-year, $400 billion deal generated an alarming response in the U.S. and Europe, prompting widespread concern that a new, enhanced partnership between these two countries would mark a dramatic challenge to United States hegemony and ...

15-Years Ago Three African Countries Were Among China’s Top Oil Suppliers, Today Only One’s Left

Amid the ongoing discussions surrounding African debt restructuring and the proposed multibillion-dollar China-Iran comprehensive partnership agreement, China's oil procurement is a through-line that binds some of these disparate issues together. After all, Angola accounts for approximately a third of ...

Analysis from Cobus van Staden

Revealing Reactions to China’s Festival of Optics

In terms of geopolitical optics, this week was nothing short of a banquet. It served up at least two sets of images that seem to crystallize our historical moment and that will live on in the Wikipedia of history as shorthand for where the world was in 2025.
One is the waves of uncannily synchronized soldiers and a bewildering array of high-tech weaponry gliding down Beijing’s Chang’an Avenue. The ...

Taiwan-Somaliland Deal Sparks Debate About Taipei’s Presence in Africa

Taiwan's recent effort to revive its diplomatic presence in Africa by signing an agreement with the self-declared state of Somaliland to set up representative offices in each other's territories sparked an immediate wave of predictable responses. China and Somalia denounced the ...

China’s Ambassador Stops by the Zimbabwe State House For a Visit With President Mnangagwa

Chinese Ambassador Guo Shaochun paid a visit on Wednesday to President Emmerson Mnangagwa at the State House in Harare. Because Zimbabwe is still largely isolated from the United States and Europe, China plays an outsized role in its foreign policy and is a key source of international ...

Morocco, Tunisia Vie to Become the “New China in Africa”

For years, European companies, like others, have been steadily moving their production from China to lower-cost, less complicated manufacturing hubs in Southeast Asia and other parts of the world. The massive disruption to global supply chains brought about due to the COVID-19 outbreak has only accelerated that ...