TRANSLATION: Chinese Ambassador Zhu Jing Reflects on His First Visit to the Congo’s Strategically Vital Southern Mining Zone

Chinese ambassador to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zhu Jing, is back in Kinshasa now after a week-long tour earlier this month to the country’s strategically important mining zones in Lualaba and Katanga Provinces. Those two regions are at the heart of a rapidly escalating geopolitical competition among the world’s major economic powers over who will have access to the DRC’s vast supply of cobalt and other metals/minerals that are used to power electric vehicles.

China, for now, is the dominant foreign player in the Congolese cobalt extractive sector, and Zhu’s visit was widely perceived as a way to convey to international rivals in Washington, D.C., Brussels and elsewhere that Beijing’s standing in the region remains formidable.