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The News Feed is a curated selection of the most important China-Africa news edited by CAP’s editors in Asia and Africa.

Chinese Vaccine Shipments to Africa Slow But More Deliveries Going to Sub-Saharan Countries

China shipped just a million doses of COVID vaccines last week to countries in Africa, according to the latest data from Bridge Consulting’s Vaccine Tracker Report, a sizable drop from the usual ...

Belt and Road Energy Conference Opens in Qingdao, Ethiopia’s Ambassador to China Among First Day Speakers

Ethiopia's ambassador to China Teshome Toga speaking on the opening day of the Belt and Road Energy Partnership conference in Qingdao. Image via @TToga9.
Representatives from 32 countries attended the opening day of the Belt and Road Energy Partnership conference in the northern port city of Qingdao on Monday. Ethiopia’s ambassador to China Teshome Toga (photo) was ...

How the Biden Administration’s New Africa Policy is Perceived in China

Chinese policymakers and analysts have been closely studying U.S. foreign policy in Africa to determine how much is actually new and what is a holdover from previous administrations, namely during the Trump period.

A Chinese Mining Company in the DRC Pushes Back Against “Unverified Media Reports” That It Polluted the Environment

File image of a Xiangjiang mining facility in Tshopo province in the DR Congo.
The Chinese-owned Xiangjiang Mining Company is attempting to reverse last August’s decision by DR Congo Deputy Prime Minister Ève Bazaïba to revoke the firm’s two mining licenses in central Tshopo province. The ...

First-Ever African Students Forum Convenes In Beijing

Students from 36 different African countries gathered in Beijing on Sunday to take part in the first-ever African students’ forum organized by the China-Africa Institute with the support of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, ...

Sicomines Wanted a Dialogue With Congolese Labor Advocates… And They Sure Got an Earful

The management at the embattled Sino-Congolese mining company Sicomines reached out to local labor activists for a dialogue about the working conditions at the Chinese-run joint venture.  They got an earful last week, particularly from ...

China’s Largest EV Battery Manufacturer Wants to Move Beyond Cobalt

Image via CATL.
While Chinese companies are investing billions of dollars to build new cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo as part of a broader effort to control the global electric vehicle battery market, they’re also ...

Biden Met With an African Leader Last Week, Didn’t Mention China by Name

Visiting Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden in the oval office. Image via @POTUS.
U.S. President Joe Biden appears to be taking the advice of advisors and scholars, who’ve told him repeatedly over the past eight months to avoid talking about China when discussing Africa.  During a brief visit ...

China Could Factor Into the U.S. Debate Over Duty-Free Trade with Ethiopia

A lively debate is underway in the United States now over whether Trade Representative Katherine Tai should remove Ethiopia’s duty-free access to the U.S. market as part of the African Growth and Opportunity Act or ...

Beijing Responds to Media Reports that the U.S. Embassy in Zimbabwe is Paying $1,000 For Journalists to Write Anti-China Stories

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian responded last week to unsubstantiated news reports that the U.S. embassy in Zimbabwe hired an agency to train local journalists to write stories critical of China. Zhao told reporters ...

The Chinese Embassy in Mogadishu Seethes Over Taiwan’s Presence in Somaliland

Although China has not said much of Taiwan’s trade office in the self-declared state of Somaliland since it opened last year, it’s nonetheless evident that Taipei’s official presence in the Horn of Africa gives them ...

Burundi Takes Delivery of Its First Shipment of Chinese COVID Vaccines

500,000 doses of Sinopharm vaccine donated by the Chinese government to Burundi. Image via Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Once a holdout on the COVID-19 vaccination front, Burundi is now accepting vaccine donations from countries around the world, including China. A batch of 500,000 doses of Sinopharm arrived last week in the economic hub ...

Week in Review: Xi Opens COP15, Zambia Takes Action Against a Chinese Mine & SA Busts Chinese Abalone Ring

President Xi Jinping delivers a keynote speech via video link at the leaders' summit of the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP15) on Oct 12, 2021. [Photo/Xinhua]
The UN’s biodiversity convention, known as COP15, opened on Tuesday in the southern Chinese city of Kunming. President Xi Jinping delivered the keynote address and announced that China will commit $230 million to help developing countries ...

Two Totally Different Messages Emerge on the Same Day Over the Health of the Kenyan Economy

Yasuyoshi CHIBA / AFP
Kenya’s Treasury Cabinet Secretary Ukur Yatani provided parliament with an upbeat forecast of the country’s economic recovery in the post-pandemic era. Yatani reaffirmed on Wednesday his earlier projection that economic growth would remain ...

Analysis from Cobus van Staden

The Lives of African Youth Need to Be on the Climate Agenda in Glasgow

Our podcast conversation this week with the Kenyan economist Anzetse Were was a feast of insights. Among these was her point that there is a massive lag between financing for climate mitigation versus climate adaptation. The former refers to measures directly aimed at reducing future greenhouse gas emissions that further worsen global warming. The latter relates to how we’ll adapt our societies to deal with the emissions already in our atmosphere. These ...

The Case For Better African Governance in Managing Chinese Development Projects

The embattled Chinese-financed and constructed Standard Gauge Railway in Kenya that now faces a critical test as to whether it will be able to survive the worsening economic crisis. TONY KARUMBA / AFP
There’s been mounting criticism of Chinese development projects in Africa by both political and civil society actors in response to rising debt levels, environmental degradation, and the maltreatment of local workers by Chinese managers. While ...

China’s New Ambassador to Djibouti Speaks With Jeune Afrique in One of His First Interviews With International Media

It’s still relatively rare that Chinese ambassadors in Africa do interviews with the international media and even it’s more notable that a relatively new envoy makes himself available to publications like the Paris-based magazine and ...

In What Could be An Ominous Sign For Other Developing Countries, Vietnam Reports Severe Supply Shortages From China

Shoppers in Vietnam's largest city, Ho Chi Minh City, browsing mobile phones that are now in short supply due to supply chain disruptions from China.
Electronics retailers in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s southern commercial hub, are reporting acute shortages of laptops, mobile phones, and other electronic devices imported from China. Logistics experts there say the disruptions are due to ...

SolarTaxi: The Hot Ghanaian Start-Up Powered by Low-Cost Chinese Tech

Promotional image of a Chinese-made electric vehicle that is sold and serviced in Ghana by SolarTaxi. Image via SolarTaxi's Facebook page.
Tech entrepreneur Jorge Appiah wants to revolutionize how people and goods get around Ghana by making transportation cheaper and, more important, cleaner. The CEO and Founder of SolarTaxi, a start-up launched in ...

WHO’s Call for Some Recipients of Chinese Vaccines to Get Booster Shots Will Further Complicate Africa’s Battle Against COVID

Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP
A World Health Organization panel of experts is recommending individuals 60 years and older who received injections of Chinese-made vaccines from either Sinopharm or Sinovac to get a booster shot.

Low-Income Country Debt Now Closing In on a Trillion Dollars, Activists Blame G20 States For Ignoring the Problem

Outside of the World Bank headquarters in Washington, D.C. Daniel SLIM / AFP
Borrowing among the world’s poorest countries jumped 12% last year pushing up the total amount owed to a record $860 billion, according to a new report released on Tuesday by the World ...

Chinese-Owned African Pay-TV Giant StarTimes Launches New Propaganda Show

Nmanka Godfrey, host of the StarTimes-produced show “China-Africa Express.” Image via StarTimes.
The Beijing-based African pay-TV operator StarTimes launched a new program on Monday that appears aimed at bolstering official Chinese government messaging on the continent in the run-up to the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation summit that ...

Forget Cobalt, China Wants More of the Lithium Market To Power Electric Vehicles

File image of a worker with car batteries at a factory for Xinwangda Electric Vehicle Battery Co. Ltd, which makes lithium batteries for electric cars and other uses, in Nanjing in China's eastern Jiangsu province. STR / AFP
The Chinese copper and gold mining giant Zijin Mining Group Co. took investors by surprise last week when it bought the Canadian company Neo Lithium Corp.’s South American lithium mining assets for $770 million. The deal ...

Chongqing: The Former Rustbelt City at the Heart of the World Economy

Chongqing is a massive industrial city in China’s heartland that many outsiders are unfamiliar with despite its enormous size. The city alone has a GDP of $386 billion, larger than both South ...

China Targets the U.S. Over Vaccine Shipments to Developing Countries

Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Zhao Lijian took aim at the United States on Monday for what he claimed was Washington’s inability to meet its vaccine distribution promises to countries in the Global South. ...

Chinese Vaccine Shipments to Africa Jumped by Almost 4 Million Doses Last Week

Large shipments of Chinese-made vaccines to Tanzania and Mozambique among other countries last week helped to push total deliveries to the continent past 76 million doses, according to the latest Bridge Chinese ...

More Robbery Attempts at Chinese Residential Compounds in the DRC Mining City of Kolwezi

Copy of the incident from the private security contractor Frontier Services Group regarding an attempted break-in at a Chinese residential compound in Kolwezi, DRC.
For the second week in a row, robbers attempted to break into a Chinese residential compound in the southern DR Congo city of Kolwezi. The suspects, though, didn’t get very far. After struggling to break ...

China’s New Ambassador to Tanzania Presents Her Credentials

China’s newly-arrived ambassador to Tanzania, Chen Mingjian, presented her credentials on Friday to Foreign Minister Joseph Sokoine. Uncharacteristically, the Chinese embassy did not update the website with Ambassador Chen’s biography (they’re usually very ...

Youth Activists at France-Africa Summit: “We Expect to Be Part of the Process”

The young African civil society activists who attended last week’s France-Africa summit in Montpellier gave voice to the surging frustration over their countries’ ties with France, and by extension other foreign powers. Among the key ...

NGO Describes 2008 China-DR Congo Sicomines Deal Described as “Unconscionable”

It sounds like the soon-to-be-released report by the Congolese branch of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) is going to be unsparing in its criticism of the 2008 Sino-Congolese deal that created the Sicomines joint ...

Photo of the Day: The PLA is “Under the Party’s Command”

Image via the Chinese embassy in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
This image of newly arrived Chinese blue helmets in the DRC provides an important reminder that, unlike most other militaries that operate under the command of their national government, the PLA is “under the Party’s ...
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