Analysis
Diverse voices, unique insights on key issues shaping China’s engagement throughout the Global South.
analysis
The China-Funded Mobile Browser That’s Zeroing in on the African Market
Four years ago, Opera was most famous for Opera Mini, a simple data compression browser, gaining traction in African countries with high data costs. Today, Opera’s software holdings have developed into an interconnected nexus spanning file sharing, news, digital payments, ride hailing, food delivery and news.
Finally, Some Straight Talk on Chinese Loans to Africa
Seemingly fed up with the past week of overheated controversy in Nigeria over Chinese loans, Transportation Minister Rotimi Amaechi is telling it like it is. People may not like the Chinese, they may not like the terms of Chinese loans and they may not like the debt they're ...
Nigeria’s Conversation About Chinese Debt
The first thing to say about the ongoing controversy about Chinese loans purportedly compromising Nigerian sovereignty is that it's based on a misreading of standard language found in loan contracts. Rather than stating that, in the case of a default, China will have the right to seize ...
A China-Africa “Wish List”
With China-U.S. ties rapidly deteriorating, the South China Morning Post's "China Briefing" columnist Wang Xiangwei mused in his latest article on Saturday what Beijing could do to resuscitate its tattered international reputation as it embarks on a new era in its relationship with Washington.
The Country, the People, and the Debt
The news last week that South Africa has received a $4.3 billion loan from the IMF to help tide it over the COVID-19 crisis resulted in a revealing moment online. Rather than celebrating this lifeline to an economy that was already weak before the pandemic, ...
Djibouti’s Chinese Debt
On July 15, 2019, Ilyas Moussa Dawaleh, Djibouti's Minister of Economy and Finance, tweeted to announce that the restructuring of China's ExIm Bank loan for the construction of the Djiboutian section of the Djibouti-Addis Ababa railway line would be completed even though "a few small details" ...
Q&A: Measuring the Effectiveness of Chinese Agricultural Assistance in Africa
China has a long history of involvement in agriculture in Africa. As far back as 1959, China offered food grants to Guinea, and especially since the 2007 introduction of China’s “Agriculture Going Out” initiatives – a set of policies that encouraged Chinese agricultural companies to invest in ...
Multilateralism With Chinese Characteristics
"Multilateralism" is undeniably Xi Jinping's favorite word these days. If he's scheduled to give an address with even a hint of foreign policy in it, you can put money down that you're going to hear that word or some variant of it. Just this week, in his ...
The Message From the Global Financial System to Africans Seeking Debt Relief Is Clear: You’re on Your Own
Ghana's increasingly outspoken finance minister Ken Ofori-Atta is giving voice to the growing frustration across Africa that calls for urgent debt relief have largely failed. In an interview this week with Bloomberg, Minister Ofori-Atta said the global financial system is failing Africa and places ...
Meaningful Debt Relief Probably Isn’t Going to Happen. We Should All be Worried.
The Financial Times newspaper deserves a lot of credit for calling out the world's wealthiest governments for their glaring hypocrisy on the issue of African debt relief. While treasuries in the U.S., Europe, Japan, and China come up with new creative solutions to insulate their ...
Huawei in Africa: Problems? What Problems?
While Huawei is facing intense scrutiny in certain European countries, the United States, and parts of Asia, the Chinese telecom giant is seemingly unimpeded in African markets. Just as in the brewing political standoff between the U.S. and China, where African leaders are doing their best to ...
The Idea of “The West”
The current campaign by the U.S. government and its allies against the Chinese technology firm Huawei ends up being quite revealing. Ostensibly, Washington's pressure on its allies to step away from Huawei as a tech partner is all about concrete concerns: security, spying and external actors like ...