Category: Politics

The post-mortems of last week's Tokyo International Conference on African Development are starting to come in and the reviews, at least from some in the Japanese media, are not very encouraging.  One of Japan's main news agencies, Jiji, said the event ...

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) announced an earlier-than-expected date for its highly anticipated 20th Party Congress when President Xi Jinping will be appointed to an unprecedented third term in office.  The Party's Central Committee said the once-every-five-year gathering ...

India has accused China of the ‘militarization of Taiwan Straits.’ The tweet, issued by the Indian High Commission in Sri Lanka, is a marked escalation of the combative language between the two and from India’s relatively muted response when U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in early ...

U.S. concerns about Chinese influence in the Solomon Islands have crossed a notable rhetorical red line: it is now a talking point on Fox News. This turns it from an obscure geopolitical spat to a topic in the mainstream Republican-Democrat culture war. Fox hosted the Republican insider Newt Gingrich ...

The worrying escalation of xenophobia in South Africa is reportedly now hitting the country's Chinese community. Under the banner of Operation Dudula ('force out' in isiZulu), protesters marched to the China City mall in Johannesburg to protest the presence of foreigners, whom the movement blames for crime ...

Diplomats from African and Asian countries are currently on a Chinese government-organized tour of the Xinjiang region.  Official Twitter accounts and the Chinese state press provide a glimpse of these diplomats' role in Chinese counter-messaging operations amid ongoing controversy over the mass incarceration of ...

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 ...

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 ...