Analysis
Diverse voices, unique insights on key issues shaping China’s engagement throughout the Global South.
analysis
Africa-China Nerds, Get Ready!
Today was a landmark day for the China-Africa Project. We got to interview Wu Peng, the Director-General of the Department of African Affairs at the Chinese Foreign Ministry. Director-General Wu is China’s most senior official focusing on Africa, and it was a rare privilege to speak with ...
Q&A: Why Now? The Domestic Politics Driving the DRC’s Review of Chinese Mining Contracts
Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi is fulfilling the promise he made last May to investigate foreign mining contracts to ensure they are fair and equitable. While the President did not single out the Chinese specifically, they're no doubt going to be disproportionately impacted given their outsized role in ...
China’s Tech Lead in Africa Highlights B3W’s Biggest Problem
When Joe Biden took over from Donald Trump, many predicted that Trump’s foreign policy would soon follow him out the door. A few months down the line, it’s become clear that they agreed more frequently than expected even if their styles are very different. One example is ...
Hichilema May Find Out Getting Elected Was the Easy Part, Fixing Zambia’s Debt-Ridden Economy Will Be a Lot Harder
A peaceful transfer of power took place in Lusaka on Tuesday when opposition leader Hakainde Hichilema (photo) became Zambia's seventh president in the post-colonial era. President Hichilema made clear right from the start that the economy, specifically reducing the country's heavy debt load, will be ...
Q&A: Why Banning Chinese Fish Imports Is Not a Good Idea in Kenya
Soon after reports emerged that Kenya’s Agriculture Committee in parliament proposed legislation that would restrict Chinese fish imports into the country, Safina Musa, a fisheries scientist at the Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute, called for a reconsideration of the plan in a column she ...
The China-Mediterranean Observer: Greece Settles Port Dispute With China But Concerns Linger
Although many countries, such as Iraq, Algeria, and Syria, continue to underline the positive outcomes of their relations with China, the search through the media outlets of the wider Mediterranean also showed that there are raising concerns over a rising Chinese political presence in the MENA region, ...
Global Leadership Stories
The United States’s hurried withdrawal from Afghanistan revealed the messy space where the discourse about international leadership meets leadership on the ground. Even as many are criticizing the role that various Western fantasies of nation-building/democratization/containment/management have played in the debacle, it’s still unclear what a Western reckoning ...
Tshisekedi Keeps Promise to Re-Negotiate Foreign Mining Contracts, Launches Investigation Into China Moly
DR Congo President Félix Tshisekedi is following through with his promise to review all foreign mining contracts, mostly with Chinese companies, to evaluate whether the deals that were struck during his predecessor's tenure are equitable.
Why Afghanistan Isn’t Taiwan
By Hugo Jones and Lukas Fiala This week the world watched in real-time the Afghan government collapse, the Taliban’s rapid capture of Kabul, and scenes of abandonment at the capital’s airport. Afghans clinging on to a U.S. Air Force plane in ...
With Smaller, Targeted Loans, China Deploys New Development Finance Strategy in Africa
The huge state-owned power construction company China Three Gorges Corporation (CTG) signed a small $31.22 million contract last week to upgrade a pair of substations outside of the Ghanaian capital Accra. For a company as large as CTG a deal like this is financially insignificant, but it ...
Markets Optimistic Hichilema Will Resolve Zambia’s Debt Crisis
Global financial markets are telegraphing their relief that Zambian opposition leader Hakainde Hichilema decisively won last week's presidential vote and that he'll now have the necessary mandate to bring an end to the country's worsening debt crisis. Both Zambia's kwacha and ...
The Impossibility of Learning from Afghanistan
The story of China in the Global South has always carried a frisson in the West. A large part of that feeling has to do with China’s size, the way it simply doesn’t fit into any of the categories the West uses to classify and understand the ...