Reflections on the legacy of Jiang Zemin, China’s president from 1993 to 2003, who passed away on Wednesday, emphasized how he presided over a decade of explosive economic growth. Fewer have pointed out that he was also a key architect of China’s current relationship with Africa.
After the Mao era, emblematized by Chinese involvement in African anti-colonial struggles, the relationship went dormant as China focused on building economic ties ...
Tag: international relations
Why Policymakers in the U.S. and Europe Should Feel Nervous After Xi’s FOCAC Speech
It's unlikely that many people in either Washington or Brussels paid that much attention to Chinese President Xi Jinping's keynote address on Monday at the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation conference. Except for news agencies like Reuters and Bloomberg, no major U.S. newspaper, news site, or television network ...
The Impossibility of Learning from Afghanistan
The story of China in the Global South has always carried a frisson in the West. A large part of that feeling has to do with China’s size, the way it simply doesn’t fit into any of the categories the West uses to classify and understand the ...
The Pushback Against China’s Coercive Diplomacy
Although China has successfully leveraged its strengths in COVID-19 vaccine production to replenish its reservoir of goodwill in many developing countries, elsewhere Beijing is facing growing resistance to its increasingly assertive foreign policy agenda. The ...
How Smaller Countries Can Negotiate More Effectively With China
China's enormous size affords it tremendous advantages in its relations with smaller countries, particularly developing states in the global south. Beijing regularly leverages its huge economy, growing military power, and diplomatic muscle in international organizations to both cajole and even coerce ...
Tibor Nagy Reflects on U.S.-China Competition in Africa
The Chinese "are kicking our tails everywhere" warned Tibor Nagy in a recent column published in the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal newspaper in Texas. The former top U.S. diplomat for Africa called on the new Biden administration to do more to confront ...
Analysis from Cobus van Staden
Jiang Zemin Created the Africa-China Relationship As We Know It Today
Tiny Cabo Verde Seen as Big Prize in U.S.-China Battle for Influence in Africa
The small Atlantic Ocean island state of Cabo Verde appears to be taking on a much larger role within the burgeoning U.S.-China rivalry in Africa. On Tuesday, in just his fourth call to an African counterpart, the new U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, spoke by phone ...
Special Edition: The Year Ahead in China-Africa Relations
With the COVID-19 pandemic still raging, the debt crisis unresolved, and preparations underway for the triennial China-Africa leaders' summit now underway, 2021 is shaping up to be another pivotal year in China-Africa relations. In this special edition, analysts and scholars from ...
Africa’s Asian Decade
In today’s China-Africa Daily Brief email newsletter we showcased an article by the analyst and former Liberian Public Works Minister, Gyude Moore, arguing that the pandemic-induced economic crisis will lock in Chinese influence in Africa for at least a decade. He argues ...
Gyude Moore: “The Coming Decade of Chinese Dominance in Africa”
China and Africa will increasingly lean into one another in the decade ahead but for starkly different reasons, argues Gyude Moore in a provocative new column published today in African Business Magazine. Moore, a senior policy fellow at the Center for ...
While China’s International Relations Cool Elsewhere, They’re Warming Up in Africa
Perceptions of China around the world are growing increasingly negative. Not surprisingly, public opinion in the U.S. has plummeted and although Europe seems more divided on the issue, it's safe to say that the likes of Macron, Johnson, and Merkel are hesitant at best about deepening their ...