Category: Politics

A full-blown media and Twitter hysteria erupted on Wednesday in Nigeria over reports that a member of the House of Representatives discovered a clause in a Chinese loan contract that supposedly puts the country's sovereignty at risk in the event of default.

Nigerian Transportation Minister, Rotimi Amaechi, called on the house of representatives committee on treaties and agreements on Wednesday to suspend their investigation into past Chinese loans until Abuja has secured $500 million for three new loans to fund critical transportation projects. 

Policymakers in Canberra are no doubt looking up where Guinea is on a map, after learning of potential threats to Australia's $65 billion of iron ore export business to China.  Australian ties with China have worsened considerably in ...

Zayed University Assistant Professor Johnathan Fulton is seemingly on a one-man mission to try and get everyone to calm down about news of a huge $400 billion, 25-year China-Iran oil-for-infrastructure deal. The deal has sounded alarms in places like Washington, D.C. ...

"Multilateralism" is undeniably Xi Jinping's favorite word these days. If he's scheduled to give an address with even a hint of foreign policy in it, you can put money down that you're going to hear that word or some variant of it. Just this week, in his ...

Ghana's increasingly outspoken finance minister Ken Ofori-Atta is giving voice to the growing frustration across Africa that calls for urgent debt relief have largely failed. In an interview this week with Bloomberg, Minister Ofori-Atta said the global financial system is failing Africa and places ...

The Financial Times newspaper deserves a lot of credit for calling out the world's wealthiest governments for their glaring hypocrisy on the issue of African debt relief. While treasuries in the U.S., Europe, Japan, and China come up with new creative solutions to insulate their ...

The current campaign by the U.S. government and its allies against the Chinese technology firm Huawei ends up being quite revealing. Ostensibly, Washington's pressure on its allies to step away from Huawei as a tech partner is all about concrete concerns: security, spying and external actors like ...

Twenty years ago China had an "Africa policy" but effectively lacked any meaningful engagement strategies at the national level. Now, the situation is very different and a generation of Chinese diplomats, many of whom have served multiple tours on the continent, have been instrumental in formulating country-specific ...

Africa's political importance to China is steadily rising as Beijing's relations with a growing list of countries in Asia, Europe, and the Americas dangerously deteriorate. Conflict has already broken out between China and India, leaving Asia's two largest powers bitterly divided. Even more worrisome ...

I'm afraid I've devolved into the kind of person who checks Twitter before even putting on my glasses in the morning. On good days it jolts me out of my lockdown torpor at least long enough to make coffee. On bad days it makes me want to ...

It's often said that analyzing China-Africa ties is a lot like looking at one of those inky splotches you see on a Rorschach test. If you think China's engagement in Africa is the worst thing that's happened to the continent in ...