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Africa’s Cynical Democrats Face the Development Dilemma

by Cobus van Staden
Hong Zhang is an expert on development and Africa-China relations at Harvard University

The Biden administration frames its fight with China for influence in the Global South as a struggle between democracy and autocracy. Both sides argue that their systems boost development. The result is that Africa’s development space is increasingly clogged with geopolitics. 

The prominent Africa-China researcher Stella Hong Zhang, a China Public Policy Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, recently added some rare on-the-ground nuance to this discussion. 

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