China's Ambassador to Mali, Zhu Liying, handing over donations from the Jack Ma Foundation to local authorities. Image via @LiyingZHU1.
The COVID-19 crisis is nothing if not instructive. It has functioned like an X-ray, revealing hidden weaknesses in systems across the world. This isn’t only true in the narrow sense, relating to health care, insurance, and protective gear manufacturing systems. It’s also true in the wider, political sense.
In some ways, the pandemic reinforces depressing stereotypes about the continent. The discussions around possible debt relief, and regular donations of PPE, ventilators and other medical gear, present a familiar scenario of Africa as a continent acted upon by external actors, defenseless against economic decisions made in Washington, Brussels, and Beijing.
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China’s embassies across Africa are coordinating both public and private donations to local stakeholders battling the spread of COVID-19. The donations appear to be part of a larger Chinese strategy to raise Beijing’s ...
The following column was originally written as a nine-part Twitter thread on January 28, 2020. This is a full transcript with only minor edits for clarity. As a global development consultancy ...
China’s COVID-19 vaccine distribution plan in Africa is slowly starting to come into focus. Yesterday’s news that Cainiao (菜鸟网络科技有限公司), the powerful logistics arm of e-commerce giant Alibaba, is ...
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