Category: Culture

Indonesia Deepens Ties With China to Grow $3 Trillion Halal Market

Indonesia is strengthening its position as a global center for halal business, a market currently worth $3 trillion and projected to reach $4.5 trillion by 2030. Halal refers to products and practices that comply with Islamic law, including food, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and financial services, ensuring they ...

Chinese Companies Are Changing the Way They Operate in Africa

By Elisa Gambino and Costanza Franceschini For most of the past 25 years, Chinese construction companies operating in Africa could count on generous financial backing from Chinese banks. Between 2000 and 2019, Chinese funders committed almost $50 billion to African transport ...

Famed ‘Sponge Cities’ Chinese Architect Dead in Brazil Plane Crash

Chinese landscape architect Yu Kongjian, known for his so-called nature-mimicking "sponge cities," has died in a small plane crash in Brazil with two filmmakers documenting his work, police said Wednesday. The 62-year-old was considered a leading figure in sustainable urban planning; ...

China’s Overseas Bullet Train: Malaysians Still Top Foreign Riders

China’s first overseas high-speed rail in Indonesia, the Whoosh bullet train, is carrying a steady flow of foreign passengers, and Malaysians continue to account for the largest share, the operator said. In less than two years since its inauguration in ...

Why China’s Middle-Class Families Are Flocking to Kenya for Summer Trips

In the summer of 2023, a curious travel trend began surfacing on Chinese social media feeds: middle-class parents were flying their children halfway across the world, not to Disneyland or a European city, but to Kenya’s grasslands. For China’s aspirational urban families, East Africa has suddenly become ...

Analysis from Cobus van Staden

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 means that countries are now routinely paying more to service loans than they receive in disbursements.

The vast majority of Global South borrowers ...

How Chinese Takeout Bags Became Africa’s Street-Style Hit

Chinese social media spotted a quirky trend in African cities like Nairobi. Sturdy, brightly printed Chinese takeout bags, the kind you get from a hotpot chain or milk tea shop, are showing up everywhere. These are not souvenirs from China. They sell for over a dollar ...

Chinese Mountaineer Dies on Pakistan’s K2

A Chinese mountaineer died while descending the world's second-highest peak, with Pakistani rescuers waiting on Thursday for weather conditions to improve to recover her body. Guang Jing was descending from the summit of K2 on Tuesday night when she was hit ...

From Dali to Kathmandu: Why Burned-Out Chinese Millennials Are Fleeing to Nepal for a Better Chill

As burnout reaches critical levels among China’s young professionals, a new wave of job-quitters is quietly shifting their escape route. Once drawn to the artsy idyll of Dali in Yunnan, many have now set their sights on Nepal, where the pace is slower, the costs are lower, ...

China’s Hainan Islamic Pilgrimage Stopover Reveals Bigger Plans

China is quietly transforming the island of Hainan, located 20 kilometers offshore in the South China Sea, into a strategic transit hub for Muslim pilgrims from Southeast Asia, starting with Indonesian travelers seeking to make the pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, known as Umrah.

China Eases Transit Rules for Indonesians. Jakarta Should Push for More.

China’s recent inclusion of Indonesia in its 240-hour visa-free transit program is a notable, if not entirely surprising, development. While Indonesia is now among the 55 countries benefiting from this arrangement, the move signals a step forward in the broader relationship between the two nations. For ...

Gay Chinese Couple Fulfil Wedding Dream in ‘Freer’ Thailand

By Sarah Lai When Wang Zengyi, 41, and Song Jihan, 29, first met at a friend's dinner party in China, it was love at first sight. "I thought he was handsome and pure," says Wang. ...

How Apartheid Shaped U.S. Policy on South Africa: China Study

A provocative analysis from a Chinese think tank examines the collapse of U.S.-South Africa relations, uncovering an unexpected driver: the influence of three tech titans—Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and David Sacks—all of whom spent their formative years in apartheid-era South Africa.
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