Category: Diplomacy

Japan will extend $30 billion in funding to aid African development. This is the major outcome of the eighth Tokyo International Conference on African Development, which took place in Tunisia this weekend.  Speaking virtually, Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida pledged funding across several cooperation ...

Japanese officials may have tried to downplay their rivalry with China in Africa, but the response from Beijing put the inflamed relationship between the countries front and center. China’s state-owned Global Times sharply criticized the commitments announced at the TICAD 8 meeting in ...

A key announcement at TICAD 8 was that Japan will provide $5 billion to the African Development Bank (AfDB) under the fifth phase of the Enhanced Private Sector Assistance for Africa initiative (EPSA) from 2023 to 2025. EPSA is a Japan-led multi-donor platform to ...

While TICAD and the Forum for China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) hone in on similar areas of cooperation (training, connectivity, infrastructure), their approaches differ in important ways.  This article by Peter Fabricius for the South African think tank the Institute for Security Studies lays ...

While the Chinese government hasn't yet released a full list of the zero-interest loans to poor countries, it will write off, that hasn't stopped some African governments from celebrating.  Togo signaled cautious optimism, saying that the write-off will free up funds for ...

As China opens back up after the pandemic, journalists are again being flown in from across the Global South for junkets - a key form of influence-building for Beijing.  If you wondered whether these tours pay off in soft power, tweets like these from ...

By Lukas Fiala and Hugo Jones Over the past week, we’ve been reading the MERICS paper “Beyond Blocs: Global views on China and US-China relations”. Its authors write on the context-specific relations that Bangladesh, Chile, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, ...

27 and 28 August will see the eighth Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) taking place in Tunisia. Japan’s TICAD predates China’s Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) and set the template for the continent’s interaction with Asian economic superpowers. However, TICAD is ...

Perceptions in Beijing that Western powers are trying to constrain its influence is resulting in a concerted focus on building a China-led consensus across the Global South. Under the shorthand of ‘discourse power,’ this involves establishing China as an alternative to the United States in fields crucial ...

The consequences of the devastating heat wave in China, the worst in recorded history, could be catastrophic for the world's poorest countries that are already grappling with surging inflation, food and fuel shortages. 260 ...

The Chinese embassy in Bangladesh organized an online gathering this week for representatives of the local Chinese business community on how to tighten security in their enterprises ahead of the upcoming 20th Party Congress in November. Basically, the embassy wants to ...

Chinese scholars and policy analysts have been poring over the recently released U.S. Strategy for Sub-Saharan Africa to gauge its implications for China and its engagement on the continent. In contrast to the Trump administration's Prosper Africa initiative that openly framed ...