Author: Cobus van Staden
Dr. Cobus van Staden is an accomplished scholar, journalist, and think tank analyst with more than 20 years of experience in Africa and Asia. Previously, he was the senior China-Africa researcher at the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA) in Johannesburg. Cobus completed his Ph.D. in Japanese studies and media studies at the University of Nagoya in Japan in 2008. He focused on comparisons of Chinese and Japanese public diplomacy in Africa during postdoctoral positions at the University of Stellenbosch and the SARCHI Chair on African Diplomacy and Foreign Policy at the University of Johannesburg before joining the Department of Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2013. His academic research focused on media coverage of the China-Africa and Japan-Africa relationships, as well as the use of media in public diplomacy in the Global South.
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The Pain of Un-Polarity
“THE G2 WILL BE CONVENING SHORTLY!” This post by U.S. President Donald Trump in the run-up to his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping last week may end up leaving a more lasting mark than the actual summit he attended. ...
A screen shows news coverage of the meeting between US President Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping in South Korea, outside a shopping mall in Beijing on October 30, 2025.
Donald Trump and Xi Jinping agreed on October 30 to calm the trade war between China and the United States that has roiled global markets, with Washington cutting some tariffs and Beijing committing to keep supplies of critical rare earths flowing. ADEK BERRY / AFP)
“THE G2 WILL BE CONVENING SHORTLY!” This post by U.S. President Donald Trump in the run-up to his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping last week may end up leaving a more lasting mark than the actual summit he attended.
How to Lure Chinese Financing Back to the Global South: Report
Global South countries face increasing financing pressure, endangering their ability to keep developing while also implementing measures to deal with a growing climate crisis. The disruption of global trade is coupled with a larger megatrend: flows of international capital to the developing world have turned negative. This ...
Weighing the Value of “Values”
I was in Berlin this week for a conference on the EU’s relationship with Africa in the context of the continent’s growing ties with external actors, many of whom Europe finds acutely worrying. The conference eerily landed on the second anniversary ...
Eye-Rolling Through the Apocalypse
November’s COP30 gathering in Belém, Brazil, marks three decades since COP1 in Berlin in 1995, and raises a sobering reminder of how deep we’ve sunk into a climate morass of our own making amid non-stop warnings. The evacuation of millions of people and the deaths ...
Revealing Reactions to China’s Festival of Optics
In terms of geopolitical optics, this week was nothing short of a banquet. It served up at least two sets of images that seem to crystallize our historical moment and that will live on in the Wikipedia of history as shorthand for where the world was in ...
Plugging into African Agency
After several years of declining funding, the African end of the Belt and Road Initiative seems to be roaring back. The newest Griffith University/Green Development Finance Center data on the Belt and Road Initiative shows that engagement with Africa jumped by 395%, while a few big ...
BRICS Announces Numerous New Initiatives
The BRICS group wrapped up its two-day leaders’ summit in Rio de Janeiro on Monday. The summit’s final communique is a 16,000-word doorstop that covers numerous issues from economics to education. The communique avoids any direct mention of the United States, and ...
China-Led Study Proposes Global Energy Network
A globally connected network of solar and wind energy could provide three times the global energy demand by 2050 at a lower cost than independent national power systems. This is the finding of a study led by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in collaboration with researchers from ...
Looking Beyond Mining in the Africa-China Relationship
Last week’s China-Africa Economic and Trade Expo (CAETE) in Changsha, Hunan province drew very little press attention, but it gave a glimpse of the growing centrality of agricultural trade to the Africa-China relationship. The event delivered 176 new project deals worth $11.39 billion. The number ...
China Floats Ideas for “Multipolar” Currency System to Balance U.S. Dollar
China announced several new initiatives aimed at increasing global trade in the yuan and to hedge against the dominance of the U.S. dollar. Pan Gongsheng, the governor of the People’s Bank of China, proposed a future where the global financial system would rely on several currencies.
Africa May Have to Give Up on the United States
It was during the recent meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa — just as the lights dimmed, Trump cued up a video presentation, and the whole encounter veered into political theater — when the question hit me: what is this all ...
Unpacking China’s Offer to Southeast Asia and the Middle East
This week’s landmark meeting between China, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) is arguably one of the most notable international responses to the Trump administration’s attempts to remake the global trading system we’ve seen so far.
How Does the Pause in the U.S.-China Trade War Affect the Global South?
Stock markets soared this week following the announcement of a 90-day lowering of tariffs between the United States and China. Amid the momentary euphoria, many are trying to map the trade landscape emerging from the agreement. As Zongyuan Zoe Liu ...