Category: Politics

I’ve wondered in the past whether ‘the Quad’ – the alliance among the United States, Japan, Australia and India dedicated as a counterweight to China’s influence in the Indo-Pacific region – has taken on such prominence simply because the word is so fun to say. Quad quad ...

In a rare display of bipartisanship in Washington, D.C., the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 21-1 on Wednesday to move a bill designed to counter China's growing influence around the world. Next, the "Strategic Competition Act of 2021" will go to the full Senate ...

There's been a noticeable uptick in the number of engagements between Chinese and African legislative leaders. In Burkina Faso, members of the Foreign Affairs Commission from China's National People's Congress held a video conference with representatives from the National Assembly.

The National Development and Reform Commission (NRDC), China's top economic planning agency, published a new report on Tuesday, according to the South China Morning Post newspaper, that detailed some of the key challenges confronting Beijing's new 5-year plan, with a particular focus on infrastructure development ...

A massive surge of COVID-19 infections in India threatens to make worse what was already a difficult situation for developing countries in Africa and around the world in their efforts to contain the pandemic. A record 274,000 infections were reported yesterday, a figure that ...

President Xi Jinping told attendees of the Boao Forum taking place on China's southern Hainan Island on Tuesday that Beijing will increase the "accessibility and affordability" of vaccines for developing countries. In typical fashion, the President did ...

Two separate international summits took place on Friday. China was a primary actor in one and a prominent theme of the other. And in both the U.S.-Japan summit in Washington and the Franco-German virtual meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, key Global ...

175 former heads of state, Nobel Prize winners and other illustrious eminences added their support to the call for the U.S. government to mandate a relaxing of intellectual property laws to allow countries in the Global South to mass-produce vaccines without fear of being sued. One of ...

One day after the South African government suspended the rollout of the U.S.-made Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine due to worries about blood clots, opposition leader and head of the Economic Freedom Fighters party Julius Malema called on the government to grant emergency approval ...

Today the South African Institute of International Affairs is holding a webinar featuring new work focusing on African agency in the face of Chinese power. How much power African actors have to shape their engagement with China is one of the field’s most ...

As an outfit tracking the Africa-China aspect of COVID-19 since its outbreak, we were aware from early on that the pandemic has laid down a new track in a global geopolitical race. So it’s very interesting to see more commentators in the Global North slowly waking up ...

Namibian President Hage Geingob was visibly frustrated yesterday over the lack of access to COVID-19 vaccines during a video conference with World Health Organization Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to mark World Health Day. The president used an increasingly popular refrain on ...