Anyone who knows a South African will be amply aware that the country is currently undergoing economically ruinous rolling blackouts labeled ‘loadshedding.’ Even if you don’t know them, South Africans are liable to follow you down the street, foam-flecked and shouting about Eskom, the corruption-addled state power utility.
The loadshedding scandal is rooted in corruption. It’s only the most visible part of a historical tragedy: how the ruling African National Congress ...
Day: December 22, 2022
Chinese COVID Variant Shows Up in India, Raising Fears of Asia-Wide Wave
The COVID-19 mutation currently roiling China’s healthcare service could be showing up in India. Indian health authorities have increased the genome sequencing of new cases amid reports of four cases of the Omicron BF7 subvariant currently dominant in China, showing up in the Indian states ...
COVID Wave Drives Chinese Consumers to Indian Generics
As the BF7 Omicron variant pushes China’s public health care system to its limits, the country is running out of antiviral medications like Pfizer’s Paxlovid. These shortages seem to be driving people to the black market, with consumers competing ...
Can Zimbabwe Emulate Indonesia’s Tough Approach to Chinese Miners?
The Chinese mining company Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt is chafing under pressure from the Zimbabwean government to convert its lithium mining operation in the country into a plant producing battery-grade lithium within five years. The company at present, only
How Africa-China Studies Exploded Since 2012
The SSRC report is its first mapping of the Africa-China field since 2012 and shows the field’s rapid expansion. Ten years ago, it found three key subfields in Africa-China studies: trade and aid; the role of multilateral institutions, and migration. By ...
The Sprawling World of Asia-China Studies
SSRC’s mapping of research on the relationship between China and Southeast, Central, South and Western Asia shows both how vast these fields are and how they differ significantly both in terms of research focus and method. More than in Africa and ...
Analysis from Cobus van Staden
A Chinese Giant’s Complicity in South Africa’s Corruption Disaster
Two Themes Dominate Latin America-China Studies
The SSRC’s mapping of scholarship on the relationship between China and South and Latin America and the Caribbean shows that the entanglement of geopolitics and global economics dominate the field. However, the report shows research on the social and environmental impacts ...
Will Infrastructure Boost African Growth? Maybe Not, Says Economist
The Kenyan economist David Ndii published a fascinating paper casting doubt on one of the most fundamental assumptions in Africa-China relations: that the key to boosting growth is infrastructure. Ndii, a prominent critic of the ‘first build a road’ infrastructure-focused orthodoxy, ...