Related Posts

Wang Yi’s Quick Weekend Visit to Bangladesh Highlights Growing Importance of South Asia in Great Power Politics

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi wrapped up a quick 17-hour visit to Bangladesh on Sunday, marking his third visit to the Indian sub-continent this year.  Wang held high-level talks with both Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and his Bangladeshi counterpart Masud Bin Momen and ...

China Keeps Mobilizing African Leaders Against the U.S. on Taiwan

Chinese officials are not pulling back from the large-scale media campaign they launched last week to gather support in Africa against U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's controversial visit to Taiwan. China continued a seemingly constant media barrage in Africa and other Global South regions in the wake of the ...

Why the Taiwan Crisis Resonates in Somalia

While a number of African countries over the past week have telegraphed their support of Beijing's One China Policy, few have reached Somalia's level of enthusiasm. For Mogadishu, the Taiwan issue hits closer to home than for many other African countries. Like ...

Blinken Didn’t Want to Talk About China During His African Visit. Good Luck with That.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken kicked off a three-nation African tour on Sunday in Johannesburg in what State Department officials had hoped would be a chance to reset Washington's ties with the continent and downplay perceptions of Africa as an arena in its Great Power rivalry with China. ...

China Posts Double Digit Trade Growth in First Half of 2022

China's total global trade jumped 10.3% in the first six months of the year compared to the same period last year, according to new figures released on Sunday by the General Administration of Customs. In all, the country did $3.49 trillion 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 ...

Dozens of Diplomats From Muslim-Majority Countries Tour Xinjiang

The Chinese government organized another tour of Xinjiang for dozens of diplomats from Muslim majority countries in Asia and the Middle East. In all, 32 diplomats visited three cities (Kashgar, Aksu, and Urumqi) last week as part of Beijing's efforts to counter well-documented accusations that millions of Uyghurs in ...

A Picture Many Thought They’d Never See

Kenyan avocados are finally available to local distributors at the Shanghai Huizhan Fruit and Vegetable Wholesale Market. It took years and years of negotiations for this to happen. (PRODUCE REPORT)