After several years of declining funding, the African end of the Belt and Road Initiative seems to be roaring back. The newest Griffith University/Green Development Finance Center data on the Belt and Road Initiative shows that engagement with Africa jumped by 395%, while a few big projects boosted engagement in Nigeria alone more than twelvefold.
These shifts indicate a window of opportunity for African electrification. 60% of Africans still ...
Category: Fact Check
No, Brazil is Not Targeting Chinese E-Commerce Trade With a 20% Tarrif
News has been circulating online for the past week that Brazil passed a law purportedly imposing a steep tariff on low-cost imports, specifically targeting goods purchased on Chinese e-commerce sites like Shein. According to the German news agency Deutsche Welle: ...
Ruto’s Visit to Washington Provokes Some Highly Misleading Media Narratives About Chinese Debt
Kenyan President William Ruto met his U.S. counterpart Joe Biden at the White House on Wednesday, marking the first African state visit in 16 years. Although Kenya's burgeoning debt crisis was widely expected to be high on the agenda, that ...
Russian, Indian Media Claim Retired Chinese Diplomat Yang Jiechi to Resurface in South Africa for BRICS Gathering
Major Indian and Russian media outlets circulated an unusual story over the weekend that veteran Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi will come out of retirement to meet with Indian National Security Advisor Ajit Doval on the sidelines of this week's BRICS security gathering in Johannesburg to discuss the worsening Sino-Indian border ...
Viral Video That Purportedly Shows Wife of China’s Ambassador to Pakistan Beating Maid is Inaccurate
A Twitter video that claims to show the wife of the Chinese ambassador to Pakistan, Nong Rong, violently beating a woman on the streets of Islamabad is likely false, according to fact-checkers who were unable to authenticate the source or the date the video was shot.
FACT CHECK: No, Kenya’s Lamu and Mombasa Are Not Being Targeted by the Chinese Military
The prominent Kenyan daily The Standard this week published a breathless front-page story claiming that the U.S. government says it is concerned that China wants to leverage the Kenyan ports of Mombasa and Lamu for military use. The article ...
Analysis from Cobus van Staden
The Indian Pundit Who Created the Discredited Chinese “Debt Trap” Meme is Still Convinced He’s Right
The creator of the widely-debunked Chinese "debt trap" meme is at it again with a new litany of breathless warnings about the risks developing countries take on when they borrow money from China. Indian pundit ...
No, Jackie Chan Didn’t Wear a T-Shirt Promoting Uganda’s First Son to Be “The Next President”
The fact-checking team at Pesa Check debunked a photo that's been circulating on Twitter and Facebook showing Hong Kong superstar Jackie Chan purportedly wearing a t-shirt with a photo of the first son of Uganda, Muhoozi Kainerugaba, with the caption "The Next President."
Almost Every Major Kenyan Newspaper Published Column by Chinese Ambassador That Refutes Debt Trap Accusation
An unusual phenomenon occurred in Kenya over the past few days: the country's normally competitive newspapers all ran the same column written by China's envoy to Nairobi, Zhou Pingjian. Normally, newspapers insist on exclusivity when publishing columns like this. While we have no proof, it's possible that the ...
No, China Did Not “Provide Weapons to Farmajo Regime in Somalia”
Washington's former top diplomat for Africa, Tibor Nagy, posted a highly misleading tweet on Tuesday that accused China of "hypocrisy" over remarks made by Chinese Special Envoy Xue Bing, who told Daily Nation correspondent Aggrey Mutambo earlier this week that "China will send out engineers ...
U.S. Senator Marco Rubio Plays Fast and Loose with the Facts in Condemning China’s BRI
Few other stakeholders in the U.S. despise China as much as Florida Senator Marco Rubio. He's now among Beijing's fiercest critics in Washington (which is quite an accomplishment, given how confronting China has become something of a pastime in the U.S. capitol.) He's been particularly strident about ...
Fact-Checking a Claim That Nigeria Threw Away More Than a Million Doses of Chinese Vaccines
The investigative team at the Chinese news site The Paper.cn published a fact-checking report that debunked accounts circulating on Chinese-language Twitter that Nigeria had destroyed more than a million doses of Chinese-made COVID-19 vaccines. Last December, Nigerian authorities did, in fact, ...