Category: Public Diplomacy

China's Acting Ambassador to South Africa, Li Nan, spoke on Monday about the obstacles facing China-Africa relations and provided a list of challenges that he feels need to be overcome. This is not the kind of tone we would have heard from Acting Ambassador Li's predecessor, Lin ...

China's ambassador to Kenya, Wu Peng, will reportedly make a quiet exit tomorrow when he boards a flight back to Beijing where he'll apparently take on a new assignment. Wu is the second high-profile Chinese envoy in ...

Chinese diplomats, missions, and media across Africa have been steadily ramping up their messaging about Hong Kong in recent weeks in what appears to be a concerted effort to build support for Beijing's handling of the ongoing political crisis in the territory.

Regular readers of this newsletter may have noticed a new trend. In recent weeks, China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Zhao Lijian has mentioned Beijing's COVID-19 medical relief to Africa in almost every one of his regular press briefings.  The questions ...

The ongoing violent unrest in dozens of U.S. cities to protest police brutality against African Americans is now emerging as a key theme in the U.S.-China narrative battle in Africa. China's state-run media outlets along with its diplomatic social media channels in Africa are publishing a steady ...

Long before it was fashionable, (or, more specifically, permitted,) Zhao Baogang was on Twitter. The Deputy Chinese ambassador in Zimbabwe first opened his account back in 2015, well ahead of most of his peers who are relative newcomers to non-Chinese social media platforms. More recently, Zhao is ...

Confronted with overwhelming criticism in Africa following widespread reports of maltreatment of and discrimination against African residents in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou last month, the Chinese government has been trying (largely unsuccessfully) to reshape the narrative according to their interpretation of the events.

China's ambassador to Nigeria, Zhou Pingjiang, defended his government's treatment of Africans in Guangzhou in an interview published Wednesday with the Nigerian newspaper Punch. Ambassador Zhou stuck closely to the existing talking points on China's handling of the reported maltreatment of ...

China's Consul General in Cape Town, Lin Jing, is emerging as one of China's newest so-called "Wolf Warrior" diplomats who's spending a lot more time on Twitter taking direct shots at the U.S. and other critics of Beijing. Over the weekend, ...

Prior to the recent crisis in Guangzhou, China's public diplomacy momentum in Africa looked unstoppable. Dramatic images of planes filled with donations from Alibaba founder Jack Ma were everywhere on state-run media channels, local news outlets, and diplomatic Twitter accounts, and receiving enthusiastic responses from African leaders. ...

For the most part, the Chinese government has been very effective in persuading African political leaders about its version of what happened recently in Guangzhou. Contrary to widely held public perceptions in Africa, fueled in part by provocative videos that purportedly show Chinese mistreatment and abuse of ...

China's diplomatic Twitter accounts in Africa are pushing back against the surge of negative news that has emerged both on social and traditional media over the past several weeks. In this particular instance, the Chinese embassy in Kampala challenged a widely circulated interview with ...