In terms of geopolitical optics, this week was nothing short of a banquet. It served up at least two sets of images that seem to crystallize our historical moment and that will live on in the Wikipedia of history as shorthand for where the world was in 2025.
One is the waves of uncannily synchronized soldiers and a bewildering array of high-tech weaponry gliding down Beijing’s Chang’an Avenue. The ...
Tag: fact check
Related Posts
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, ...
Chinese News Outlet Fact Checks Claim That Chinese Mining Company Unduly Evicted Zimbabweans From Their Ancestral Land
The increasingly contentious dispute in Zimbabwe over the behavior of Chinese mining companies is now getting noticed back in China, where the popular online news site The Paper.cn published a detailed fact check report on some of the allegations against Chinese mining companies.
Fact-Checking a Kenyan MP’s Assertions About the Risks of Borrowing From China
Kenya's former majority speaker and current MP from the northeastern city of Garissa, Aden Duale, is not a big fan of China...to say the least. He took to Twitter during Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi's visit last week to tell his 650,000 followers how Africa's ...
Analysis from Cobus van Staden
No, Uganda’s Entebbe International Airport Was Not Re-Branded “China Ebb International Airport”
There have been all sorts of rumors, misinformation, and outright fake news circulating over the past two weeks about the fate of the Entebbe International Airport in Uganda. Many have reported that the airport has been seized by China as a result of Uganda failing to repay ...
No, “Chinese-Africans” Were Not the First to Inhabit Japan’s Islands
This photo of Tibetan nuns has been circulating since 2018 and soon after a fake meme emerged on Facebook that claimed they were the first humans to inhabit some of Japan's islands. The team at AFP Fact Check dug into the ...
AFP Fact Checks Misinformation Circulating About a Recent Fight in Sierra Leone That Went Viral
Regular readers of this newsletter will know that the viral video of a fight between a Chinese employee and safety inspectors at the Tonkolili mine took place in Sierra Leone, but apparently a lot of people online erroneously think it occurred in Kenya. ...
Fact Check: Angola is NOT a Good Case Study of Chinese Debt in Africa
The Economist Intelligence Unit's Global Forecasting Director Agathe Demarais characterized China's loan portfolio in Angola as "a good case study" for Beijing's financial engagement across Africa. "Not really," replied Hannah Ryder, CEO of the Beijing-based consultancy Development Reimagined, "it's ...
Fact-Checking The Claim That Chinese Medical Aid Received in Ghana Has Been Contaminated With COVID-19
Fake news and other rumors started to circulate widely on Ghanaian social media this month claiming that imported personal protective equipment from China was infected with COVID-19: “As long as they allowed materials from china which contains COVID-19 the number of ...
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 ...