Month: June 2021
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Nigeria’s Twitter Ban is a Big Win For China
Chinese officials are no doubt celebrating Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari's decision late last week to ban Twitter. The move marked the most important endorsement in Africa to date of Beijing's long-held view on "internet sovereignty." The Chinese have never accepted the ...
Biden’s Chinese Tech Dilemma
This week the Biden administration announced an expansion of a Trump-era ban on U.S. investment in 59 Chinese companies seen as having ties to the Chinese military and surveillance sectors. The announcement is another confirmation of how ex-president Trump’s vision of a U.S.-China rivalry has ...
Why Huawei’s Much Ridiculed New OS Could Still Have a Big Impact in Africa
Huawei officially launched HarmonyOS this week, its new mobile operating system. The company was forced to build its own in-house OS after the Trump administration banned it from accessing key U.S. technologies including Alphabet's Android. ...
U.S, China Exchange Jabs Over Vaccine Deliveries to the World’s Poorest Countries
The battle over so-called "vaccine diplomacy" between the United States and China is beginning to intensify as Washington moves closer to finally shipping surplus jabs to developing countries around the world. Foreign policy leaders from both countries issued veiled critiques of ...
Time’s Up. Kenya’s Debt Deferral Deal With China Runs Out at the End of the Month and a Big Payment is Due
The 6-month debt deferral deal that Kenya secured with China back in January under the auspices of the G20 is now coming to an end and the government will either have to come up with almost a billion dollars to begin loan payments or negotiate ...
A 2021 Update On What We Know About Chinese Lending to African Countries
There's ample evidence of a sharp decline in Chinese lending to developing countries, specifically in Africa. But that doesn't mean that China is out of the development financing game altogether. Zainab Usman, director of the Africa Program at Carnegie Endowment for ...
Electric Vehicles’ Politically Charged Global Supply Chain
As EVs become more popular, the politics to secure the resources necessary to power these vehicles are going to become a lot more complex. This is because of how globally dispersed the supply chains are for the key minerals and metals.
Huawei Launched Its New Android-Free Mobile Operating System That Will Likely Soon Find Its Way to Africa
Chinese technology giant Huawei launched its new mobile operating system Harmony OS on Wednesday as part of an effort to recover from U.S. sanctions that crippled much of its smartphone business. This new Google-free OS will debut in Asia ...
When Scholars Talk About How Effective China Is at “Elite Capture” in Africa, This Is It What It Looks Like
In her 2020 book "Shaping the Future of Power," Wake Forest University China-Africa scholar Lina Benabdallah showed how China has been extremely effective in so-called "elite capture" among Africa's governing class. As an academic theory, it's intriguing but often hard to visualize.
Until the U.S. Actually Starts to Ship Vaccines Overseas, Criticism of Chinese Vaccine Distribution Doesn’t Fly With Many in the Global South
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken renewed his criticism of China's so-called "strings attached" vaccine diplomacy around the world during an online roundtable discussion with Japanese media. But the Secretary's comments were not well received among many in the Global South, ...
The Narrative on the Efficacy of Chinese-Made Vaccines is Beginning to Change
Brazil's decision to conduct a real-world experiment that tested the effectiveness of the CoronaVac vaccine made by the Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinovac is contributing to a rapid shift in the perception of whether Chinese-made jabs will protect people from either being hospitalized or dying from ...
Chinese Vaccine Shipments to Africa Increase Slightly, But Still Far Below That of Other Regions Around the World
Chinese vaccine deliveries to Africa reached 20 million doses last week, according to the latest tracking report by the Beijing-based Bridge Consulting. Although that figure is up slightly from previous weeks, Africa still lags far behind Asia Pacific (126.5 million vaccines delivered) and Latin ...