Category: Debt Trap

So long as there's no official word from the Chinese government as to how they specifically plan to address the $150 billion of outstanding debts that African governments owe Bejing, everyone's speculating as to how they'll likely proceed. Professor Deborah Brautigam, ...

The recent visit of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Africa came at a time when the US relationship with the continent is decidedly mixed. The wrangles about whether U.S. forces in Africa will be reduced and the political fallout from the administration’s expanded restrictions ...

Prior to U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's arrival in Africa for his three-nation tour that wrapped up in Ethiopia on Thursday, Gabon-based China-Africa analyst Cornelia Tremann wrote a column for The Lowy Institute's "The Interpreter" website where she made a series of recommendations for what ...

On his final stop of a three-nation African tour, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was in Addis Ababa on Tuesday, where he held talks with Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and Foreign Minister Gedu Andargachew, among others. And just as he did in Senegal and Angola,

One of China's leading English-language newspapers took aim at Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during his ongoing three-nation African tour. In a sharply worded editorial published on Monday, China Daily described U.S. policy as "demeaning" and "arrogant."  The newspaper also rebutted ...

Swedish scholar Johanna Malm is one of the world's leading researchers on China-DR  Congo relations and now joins the growing number of experts who refute the still widely-held China "debt trap" narrative. In a recent interview published by the government-run Swedish Institute, Dr. Malm explained that there's ...

The "debt trap" meme lives. It just keeps going and going and going. It doesn't seem to matter to China's critics that there isn't actually any evidence to support the assertion that China is using massive, unsustainable loans to poor developing countries in a bid to seize ...

Professor Deborah Brautigam, Director of the China-Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins University, published a new paper this month that explores the Chinese debt trap theory that is widely propagated by U.S. government officials and a common theme in international media coverage of Chinese engagement in Africa. ...

Chinese ambassadors are notoriously media-shy, particularly with U.S. and European news organizations like the BBC who Beijing often regards as adversarial. And when these officials do grant interviews, they're often very stilted, constrained by ground-rules and limited to pre-approved questions. But ...

The top energy diplomat for the United States, Francis Fannon, issued a clear warning to African governments to avoid taking oil and gas investments from "opaque forces" that could lead to erosion of their countries' sovereignty through debt-dependency. He didn't ...

On its own, South African Deputy President David Mabuza's week-long trip to Beijing, which starts today, will probably not generate a lot of headlines. But his arrival in the Chinese capital caps a month of small but important milestones that all point to deepening of Sino-South African ...

For many Kenyans, the Port of Mombasa is much more than just a container terminal that facilitates shipping trade with the outside world. It's a prized national asset that serves as an indispensable economic hub for all of East Africa and a facility that hundreds of thousands ...