Category: Diplomacy

No matter how often the Chinese debt trap narrative is refuted by leading scholars around the world, policymakers in the U.S. and Europe seem unable to resist using the trope to frame China's engagement in Africa and other developing regions.

Sri Lanka said on Monday it had asked China to defer the planned visit of a Chinese ship to the island country after initially approving its arrival this week, yielding to diplomatic pressure from neighbor India to keep the military vessel out.

Early headlines framed the United States’s new strategy towards Sub-Saharan Africa in terms of China and Russia, arguably because it’s difficult to get people in Washington and London to read anything about Africa without a New Cold War sweetener. 

The United States is embarking on a major shift in its foreign policy towards Africa by downplaying the need to confront China's influence on the continent. It will instead focus more attention on democracy and governance issues. The new approach was ...

Hours before Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the new U.S. strategy for Sub-Saharan Africa, China's nationalist tabloid newspaper began publishing stories that attacked the U.S. for "attempting to bring the continent back to the Cold War" and for "ruining Africa's development prospects."

The Blinken visit to Africa and the unveiling of the new U.S. strategy for the continent were not widely covered by Chinese media on Monday but a few online commentators, some with sizable audiences, offered their opinions. Most echoed the prevailing ...

Visiting U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken triggered an uproar by the Chinese embassy in Pretoria over comments that he made about Taiwan in an interview with South African television news channel eNCA: WHAT BLINKEN SAID: "I think with regard to ...

The seemingly never-ending dispute over supposed Chinese debt traps in Africa flared anew on Monday when Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Hua Chunying launched a lengthy rebuttal to the latest accusation on the issue by a senior U.S. government official.  Last week, prior ...

By Jake Werner Is it possible to find common ground between the United States and China on the fraught question of democracy? The answer at first appears to be no. But the prospects for democracy around the world may depend on ...

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi wrapped up a quick 17-hour visit to Bangladesh on Sunday, marking his third visit to the Indian sub-continent this year.  Wang held high-level talks with both Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and his Bangladeshi counterpart Masud Bin Momen and ...

Chinese officials are not pulling back from the large-scale media campaign they launched last week to gather support in Africa against U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's controversial visit to Taiwan. China continued a seemingly constant media barrage in Africa and other Global South regions in the wake of the ...

While a number of African countries over the past week have telegraphed their support of Beijing's One China Policy, few have reached Somalia's level of enthusiasm. For Mogadishu, the Taiwan issue hits closer to home than for many other African countries. Like ...