Today is a public holiday in South Africa – Human Rights Day. There’s a certain irony in spending the day focusing on China’s President Xi Jinping’s visit to Vladimir Putin, knee-deep in a human rights disaster.
What one makes of the Ukraine crisis increasingly maps on where one lives. This is made clear by a remarkable new set of polling data recently published by the European Council on Foreign Relations ...
Category: Space
Week in Review: Illegal Mining in Ghana, U.S. Disillusionment in the DRC & #ChinaAfricaSpaceTalk
Aisha Huang, aka the "Galamsey Queen," surprised everyone when she was arrested again for illegal mining in Ghana. What does her arrest say about the government's efforts to combat illicit Chinese mining? Plus, a new report says the U.S. is "disillusioned" ...
Thousands of Young People Gather Across Africa to Speak With Astronauts Aboard the Chinese Space Station
Chinese embassies in Africa organized the first-ever #ChinaAfricaSpaceTalk on Tuesday that connected young people across the continent with three astronauts aboard the Chinese Space Station. The event, organized in conjunction with the African Union, was an undeniable public diplomacy ...
Chinese Astronauts Reach Out to African Kids
Three Chinese astronauts are holding a live chat with African youth directly from China's orbiting space station today. The live Q&A session, scheduled for 11:00 GMT, is arguably a powerful soft power play on a continent where youth interest in space exploration and other forms ...
Representatives From 50 African Countries Take Part in Inaugural China-Africa Beidou Forum
More than 600 representatives from almost every African country, including eight ministers and eight ambassadors, attended the first-ever China-Africa Beidou System Cooperation Forum that took place on Friday in Beijing and also online with stakeholders in Africa. ...
Lots of Concern This Weekend That Debris From an Out of Control Chinese Rocket Was Going to Land in Africa
There was palpable anxiety across a number of African countries this weekend that pieces of a Chinese rocket that hurtled back to earth were going to land somewhere in their countries. Newspapers in Ghana, Nigeria and Namibia, among others, fretted about the prospect of falling rocket shrapnel. ...
Analysis from Cobus van Staden
Xi Bets on Global South in Moscow
UAE PM Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Tweets in Chinese to Congratulate Xi Jinping on Mars Mission
It's rare for the head of a foreign state to tweet in Chinese, but today the UAE's Sheikh Mohammed congratulated China, and President Xi Jinping specifically, on the Tianwen-1 spacecraft joining the Emirates' own Hope Probe in its orbit around Mars. ...
China’s Space Program Becomes New Soft Power Message in Africa
China's Ambassador to Botswana Zhao Yanbo was among a number of Chinese envoys and embassies who celebrated this week's launch of the Long March-3B rocket, which carried the new Beidou Navigation Satellite System into orbit. The new nav system presents an immediate challenge to the U.S.-led Global ...
AFP Fact Check: China NOT Ethiopia Launched the Ethiopian Satellite Last Month
The French news agency AFP published a fact check on Monday about doctored photos of last month's launch of the Ethiopian satellite from the Taiyuan launch facility in China. The Ethiopian satellite blasted off in a Long March 4B rocket, not the Long March 5 or Changzheng 5 that ...
Ethiopia’s New Chinese-built Satellite Sends Back First Images
Three weeks after it blasted off from a launchpad in China, Ethiopia's new satellite sent back its first test images Monday. These initial photos were taken over China but officials say the next batch of photos will be done over Ethiopian territory.