Month: May 2021
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Don’t Worry America, Africans Aren’t Going to Start Using China’s New Digital Currency… At Least Not Right Away
There's growing unease in Washington that last month's launch of a new Chinese digital yuan threatens the dollar's preeminence as the world's reserve currency. Questions about the new cryptocurrency have come up repeatedly in recent weeks during Congressional testimony, particularly regarding places like Africa, where U.S. anxieties ...
Understanding China’s Outlook on Global Aid & Development
The Chinese approach to global aid and development is very different than that of traditional donors in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. While Beijing is leveraging much of the existing global development infrastructure, including organizations like the IMF, the WHO, and ...
Even If the DRC is Able To Re-Negotiate Its Mining Contracts With The Chinese and Others, It’s Still Not Going to Help Ordinary People, Says Expert
A leading Congolese mining expert wants to dispel the notion that President Félix Tshisekedi's efforts to renegotiate foreign mining contracts is going to benefit ordinary people. "It is, of course, a first step," acknowledged Jean Pierre Okenda, a well-known expert in DRC mining issues and head of the extractive ...
Almost a Third of the World’s Cobalt, Mostly From the DRC, Went to China Last Year
32% of the world's cobalt output went to China, according to the latest annual report published by The Cobalt Institute, an industry-financed organization. In addition to being the largest consumer of cobalt, China is also the dominant producer of refined cobalt that is used ...
China’s Role in the Complex, Brutal History of Cobalt Mining in the DR Congo
The New Yorker magazine published a sweeping long-form article in its latest edition that delves into the painful history of Congolese cobalt -- a metal that is now indispensable for any consumer who owns a mobile phone and a strategic resource that is in the ...
China Controls 90% of the World’s Manganese Market, Another Strategic Ingredient for Electric Vehicle Batteries
Governments and automakers in the U.S., Europe and Asia have become steadily concerned in recent years over China's dominance of the strategic minerals and metals supply chains that are used to manufacture batteries for electric vehicles. Their primary concern ...
With Iron Ore Mines in Guinea and Sierra Leone Now Coming Online, China is Making It Clear That It Wants to End Its Dependence on Australia
The Chinese government is signaling both through its actions and propaganda messaging that the days of being overly reliant on Australian iron ore are coming to an end. When precisely? Well, no one knows for sure, but given the burst of ...
Chinese Officials and Environmentalists Exchange Fire Over That Controversial Fish Port in Sierra Leone
China's ambassador to Sierra Leone, Hu Zhangliang, paid a visit on Monday to the Foreign Ministry to rally support with the government for a controversial development project to build a fish port in the environmentally pristine Black Johnson beach area. After the meeting, Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Mamadi Gobeh ...
The Other Side of Agency
Last week I ran into a friend who’s a media studies scholar. We caught up about our work – she’s busy with a paper about the media representation of face masks. What am I working on? A paper on China’s provision of coal-powered electricity in Africa. Oh, ...
The China-Mediterranean Observer: Mixed Feelings in Iran and China About Strategic Cooperation Deal
We start this issue of the ChinaMed Observer with the debate in Iranian media over the signing of the Iran-China 25-year Cooperation Program. In this regard, Abolfazl Olamayifar, Director of the China Desk at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, from the pages of the economic newspaper Donya-ye ...
New CSIS Report Examines Huawei’s Burgeoning Cloud Services Business in Emerging Markets
While so much of the attention about Huawei's role in emerging markets like Africa focuses on the company's 5G technology, the reality is that the Chinese telco equipment giant is now expanding far beyond hardware, to offer a number of new services that are becoming increasingly popular ...
Be Wary of All Those “Hyperbolic” Reports Warning of the Dangers of Chinese Technology
The fear that China is going to export digital authoritarianism and repression to Africa is way overblown and oversimplified in Western media reports and think tank analysis cautions Iginio Gagliardone, a media scholar at Wits University in Johannesburg and one of the world's foremost scholars ...