Analysis

By Hugo Jones and Lukas Fiala For nearly two years, China’s COVID strategy has been at the center of Beijing’s public health diplomacy, being regarded as uniquely successful at keeping case numbers close to zero. However, over the past few months, ...

This week, my colleague CAP Editor in Chief Eric Olander unearthed a startling statistic: China’s trade with Africa so far this year already exceeds all trade between Africa and the United States for the whole of 2021. Think about that ...

By Jyhjong Hwang and Oyintarelado Moses The 2022 update to the Chinese Loans to Africa (CLA) Database, managed by the Boston University Global Development Policy (GDP) Center, recorded 11 new loan commitments worth $1.9 billion from Chinese lenders to African government ...

After months of inaction, there's word now of an important breakthrough in restructuring Zambia's ballooning $32 billion debt. China, widely perceived as the lone holdout, has finally agreed to join a multi-party creditors committee, according to IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva during the group's Spring Meetings that took place last ...

The China-Africa news discussion was consumed this week by the news that a Chinese mining boss was sentenced by a Rwandan court to twenty years in prison for whipping an employee. The incident can’t be separated from its media afterlife. ...

African press outlets are reacting to a new report debunking the idea that China will seize Kenya’s Mombasa port in the event of a default on its Standard Gauge Railway loan. But the diversity of the reaction shows how snarled the issue of Chinese lending ...

As the crisis in Ukraine scrambles European politics and global supply lines, it’s also resurrecting long-buried geopolitical formations. In the rush to get Global South powers into formation against Russian aggression, Western powers have inadvertently added impetus to a reawakened non-aligned movement, with its roots in the ...

By Daniel Bradlow and Magalie Masamba The COVID-19 pandemic has had a particularly profound adverse impact on Africa’s sovereign debt situation. Currently, 22 low-income African countries are either in debt distress or at high risk of debt distress. This situation is likely to ...

Simultaneous disruptions to the largest ports in China and South Africa are threatening to upend one of the world's most important trade routes. The ongoing lockdowns in Shanghai as part of the city's battle against Omicron have led to a major slowdown ...

If 2021 was the year of so-called "vaccine diplomacy" in Africa where the world's major powers stingily distributed COVID-19 vaccines to low-income countries while preaching to their geopolitical rivals, 2022 is going to be the year of "food diplomacy."  The worsening ...

By Hugo Jones and Lukas Fiala As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine enters a new phase and more evidence of war crimes surfaces, it is hard to overstate the significance these events will have for Europe’s security architecture, the West’s relationship with ...

The last few years’ conversations about China’s global rise ran on a few assumptions: that China’s outward trajectory through initiatives like the Belt and Road will continue uninterrupted, that China’s capacity for overseas lending won’t diminish, and that its role as an export economy serving the Amazons ...