Author: Eric Olander
Eric Olander is the co-founder of the China Global South Project, an independent, non-partisan media initiative dedicated to exploring every facet of China’s engagement in Africa. Eric is a fluent Mandarin-speaker and a longtime China-watcher with more than 25 years of journalism experience at many of the world’s leading media companies, including CNN, the BBC, and FRANCE24, among others. He received his undergraduate degree in East African History from the University of California at Berkeley and holds a master’s degree in Chinese Public Affairs from the University of Hong Kong.
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China & Africa: Are the Good Times Over?
One of the prevailing media narratives of China's recent economic turmoil is the effect that it could have on emerging markets, particularly in Africa. Now that the Chinese economy is showing real signs of slowing, the ...
How China's Economic Slowdown Will Impact Africa
The tremors in China's faltering economy are being felt across Africa. Now that China has replaced Europe and the United States as most African countries' largest trading partner, there is understandable concern that slowing demand in the PRC will be felt in Africa's commodity ...
The News Media's Mixed Record in Covering China-Africa Ties
News organizations from across Africa and around the world are devoting more resources to covering China's engagement on the continent. The overall quantity of coverage has undoubtedly increased over the past decade. The key question, though, is whether all of that coverage has produced ...
Growing Demand in China for Africa's Lion Bones
Traditional Chinese medicine, popular throughout Asia, has long prized the supposed medicinal value of tiger bones. Now, though, as the world's wild tiger population is fast disappearing, even facing extinction, the Chinese medicine industry may have found an alternative with ...
South Africa's Inexplicable Love Affair with China
While the recent economic turmoil in China is prompting a number of African countries to reconsider their growing economic dependence on the PRC, not so in South Africa. Both the government and the ruling African National Congress ...
The China Economy: What Lessons for Africa?
When African policymakers scan the globe in search of inspiration on how to structure their economies, that search often leads to Beijing. Not surprisingly, African leaders look at what China has done over the past 30 years ...
Chinese Youth in Kenya: A New Generation of Sino-African Relations
By Yao Zongfu, China-Africa Seed Research Fellow in China House “I only admire three people in Nairobi and they are all here.”Li, a manager of a private company, said at a social meeting of a group of Chinese youth.He admire not only their ability of business but importantly their ...
Chinese Investment in Africa: Surprisingly Small, but Growing Fast
It's a widespread misconception that just because China is Africa's top trading partner, it's also the continent's largest foreign investor. In fact, China's ranks seventh overall in FDI, far behind the United States that has long been Africa's largest source of ...
China's Special Economic Zones in Africa: Lots of Hype, Little Hope
A decade ago China announced it would develop a series of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) in Africa to boost trade and industrialization. Given the phenomenal success of China's SEZs that helped to spark the PRC's three-decades of history-making economic growth, not ...
China's Role in Africa's "Looting Machine"
China goes to great lengths to differentiate its engagement in Africa from the continent's former European colonizers by emphasizing so-called "win-win development." Chinese leaders regularly visit Africa where they emphatically reject the accusation of neo-colonialism and that Beijing is only interested in exploiting the ...
U.S. Not Concerned About Chinese Competition in Africa… But It Probably Should Be
The difference between the U.S. and Chinese foreign policies in Africa was on stark display in July when president Barack Obama made his landmark visits to Kenya and Ethiopia. The president brought along with him a vast agenda that transcended trade, ...
A Kenyan Columnist's Provocative Views on the Chinese in Africa
In Mark Kapchanga's view, the West, particularly the media, really don't understand what the Chinese are doing in Africa. Kapchanga, a provocative Nairobi-based journalist and columnist, isn't shy in arguing his case that on balance China's presence in Africa is net ...