Month: April 2022

Kenya’s new Chinese-built Nairobi Expressway is hiking its toll prices, even though it hasn’t opened yet. The government announced that motorists using the motorway will pay 350 Kenyan shillings ($3.03) more than previously announced, bringing the total toll to between 120 and 1,800 shillings ($1.04-$12.54), depending on the ...

Amid excitement and controversy, Kenya is celebrating the opening of its new Nairobi Expressway in the most Kenyan way possible: by running a marathon. It was recently announced that the new Chinese-built highway will be the scenic setting for this year’s Nairobi City ...

The China-Africa news discussion was consumed this week by the news that a Chinese mining boss was sentenced by a Rwandan court to twenty years in prison for whipping an employee. The incident can’t be separated from its media afterlife. ...

As South African policymakers plot their country's economic revival from the past several years of worsening economic crisis, boosting the country's tech industry is going to play a pivotal role in their plans. Grace Yuehan Wang, a researcher at the South ...

Emerging market currencies and stocks are under mounting pressure this week due to the ongoing lockdowns in China.  The South African rand fell again on Tuesday as investors are worried about the impact that a slowing Chinese economy will have on the demand for African raw materials. Those concerns ...

While China's financing of Global South infrastructure faces ongoing criticism from the World Bank (see above,) these traditional development institutions are partly to blame for many Global South countries' inability to boost development.  This is the viewpoint of Justin Yifu Lin, ...

A Rwandan court sentenced a Chinese businessman to twenty years in prison for beating two employees. A video clip showing Sun Shujun using a rope to beat a man tied to a wooden post as other workers looked on went viral last year, sparking widespread outrage.

The Karongi Intermediate Court in Rwanda's decision to hand down a hefty prison sentence on Tuesday to Chinese mining boss Sun Shujun for brutally beating his employees sparked an outpouring of emotion online. "The Chinese are there mining the minerals and stealing ...

With road and rail access to South Africa's main port in Durban still blocked by the damage from the past week of record floods, there's a new urgency to develop alternate trade routes for the vast quantities of natural resources that flow from the mining belts in the southern DRC ...

China’s ambassador to Liberia, Ren Yishang published a long op-ed in Wednesday's edition of the New Dawn Liberia newspaper complaining about a recent article by the former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe comparing the current crisis in Ukraine with the situation regarding Taiwan. ...

While there have been countless seminars on China-Africa relations in Washington featuring scholars, think tank analysts, and journalists, it's quite rare that these discussions feature high-ranking State Department officials. The higher up in the ranks, the more they prefer to keep discussions out of the public eye. ...

Ethiopia’s ambassador to China, Teshome Toga, briefed the Chinese think tank the Center for China and Globalization (CCG) on the ongoing crisis in Ethiopia on Wednesday. While this kind of briefing isn’t news per se, it does provide a rare glimpse into how Chinese positions on thorny issues like ...