Africa’s political importance to China is steadily rising as Beijing’s relations with a growing list of countries in Asia, Europe, and the Americas dangerously deteriorate. Conflict has already broken out between China and India, leaving Asia’s two largest powers bitterly divided. Even more worrisome is the increasingly toxic relationship between the United States and China, which many observers believe has settled into a new, more volatile era that foreshadows a potentially devastating military engagement between these two rival powers.

In Europe, public opinion of the Chinese has similarly plummeted in recent months in response to Beijing’s more aggressive (aka “Wolf Warrior”) diplomatic stance on the COVID-19 outbreak, faulty PPE, the mass internment of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang and the Chinese incursion on Hong Kong sovereignty with this month’s introduction of a new national security law.