Tag: China Africa Research Initiative

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Chinese versus U.S. Foreign Direct Investment in Africa

Deborah Brautigam, a prominent expert on Chinese global financing flows, responded to recent discussions about comparisons in Chinese and U.S. Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) into Africa. It was sparked by a BBC report, which used 2023 data from the China-Africa Research Initiative, a platform pioneered by Brautigam, to ...

China Boosted Pandemic-Era Debt Relief: Report

China’s role in debt renegotiation processes has become very controversial, with U.S. officials like Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen singling Beijing out as a “barrier” to resolving debt distress. However, a new report by a team of prominent Africa-China researchers argues that China conducted ...

New Report Kills off the Mombasa Port Seizure Conspiracy Theory

Kenya’s Standard Gauge Railway is now arguably the most controversial Chinese project in Africa, due to runaway rumors that debt from the notoriously opaque agreement will lead to the seizure of the port of Mombasa by Chinese banks. This controversy prompted Professor Deborah ...

Who is the Bigger Official Lender in Africa: China or the World Bank?

In an oft-cited 2019 working paper titled “China’s Overseas Lending,” we read that China has become the world’s “largest official creditor, easily surpassing the IMF or the World Bank…” Is this true in Africa (All references to Africa in this article refer to all of Africa, ...

CARI: Chinese Lenders Have Provided $7.6 Billion in Debt Relief Since Last Year, Mostly to Africa

Angola is the primary beneficiary of Chinese debt restructuring activities over the past year, accounting for $6.2 billion out of $7.6 billion of total relief provided by Beijing to developing countries in 2020-2021, according to official data compiled by the China-Africa Research Initiative at ...

Analysis from Cobus van Staden

2026: Africa-China Relations in a World Shaped by North-South Geopolitics

When talking about Africa–China relations, one is always moving along a sliding scale. There are myriad interactions with Chinese entities that concern only individual African countries, segueing into trends affecting the whole continent and sliding further into global dynamics shaping the developing world, of which Africa is the heart.

The Africa-China relationship is its own thing, but Africa’s fate can’t easily be separated from factors affecting the wider Global South, ...

Researchers Want Official Washington to Know That China’s Actually Doing Quite a Bit to Relieve the Debt Problem in Africa

While U.S. policymakers are trying to come up with a new, more effective approach to challenge China's engagement in Africa, a trio of scholars at the Washington, D.C.-based China-Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins University want to make it clear that Beijing is actually doing far more ...

Brautigam: Influence and Investment, Not Asset Seizures Are the Primary Drivers of Chinese Lending in Africa

China-Africa Research Initiative Director Professor Deborah Brautigam spoke recently with acclaimed Harvard researcher William Overholt in what was a fascinating discussion about the complexities surrounding the Chinese debt issue in Africa. Professor Brautigam laid out some of the findings ...