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Forget debt traps, Huawei ‘back-doors’ and vaccine diplomacy. They might be the disputes that define our current polarized moment. But I’m willing to bet they won’t have the staying power of the one – the original – dispute that has haunted Chinese engagement with Africa since the late 1990s: labor.

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This week, the climate crisis became a lot more concrete. Heatwaves and fire across North America overlapped with massive floods in Germany and China. I say ‘concrete’ but of course climate change has been pretty concrete for millions of climate refugees across the Global South for a while now. Rather, in the words of the New York Times, this week made clear that “Climate change comes for rich countries.” Of course, it does ...

As things slowly settle down in South Africa after the last ruinous week, the debates about who’s really to blame are catching fire. It’s now being called an insurrection attempt, and President Ramaphosa has referred to those responsible for fueling the protests as ‘enemies of democracy.’ One of the problems underlying the current crisis is that he’s both right and wrong. South Africa is indeed, as Ramaphosa called it, a ‘hard-fought-for democracy.’ ...

So…How have you been? Since we last spoke, my country exploded.

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Despite seemingly coming from the same naming tradition that gave us Melania Trump’s Be Best campaign, the Build Back Better World (B3W) initiative is firmly pointed away from the recent past. It seems driven by a new willingness to face the many barriers that shape our current system.As articulated by Gregory W. Meeks, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the B3W is a flurry of good intentions, littered with ‘should’ ...

The revelation of what appears to be massive illegal Chinese gold mining and logging operations in rural Sierra Leone could open a contentious new front in Africa-China conversations. Or more accurately, it could revivify one of the ur-themes underlying the whole relationship: the idea that China is a neocolonial force in Africa.This blast from the past came at a moment when the larger relationship seemed to be opening new frontiers. A recent paper by ...

One of the interesting divisions emerging from the Biden administration’s campaign to re-energize the G7 and NATO against China is its attempt to divide the world into ‘democracies’ and ‘autocracies,’ and to insist that the two groups are squaring off against each other as if they’re in a superfriends-versus-the-empire-of-evil cartoon from the 80s.In order for this division to make sense, one needs to ignore many inconvenient details. These include the fact ...

For those tracking the development (and high-level normalization) of ‘the new cold war,’ this week has been a doozy. U.S. President Joe Biden departed for the G7 summit in Cornwall with a rare bipartisan win in his pocket. His U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, a $250 billion bill aimed at countering Chinese competition in a number of hi-tech areas like semiconductors and robotics, passed with a 68-32 majority. Some predict that it could ...

This week, the prominent Financial Times commentator Gideon Rachman argued that the upcoming G7 summit in Cornwall could be ‘the west’s last chance to lead.’He acknowledged that the seven rich democracies that make up the group (the U.S., U.K., France, Italy, Germany, Japan, and Canada) have seen a rapid loss in global economic influence. When they first met in 1975, the seven made up 80% of the world’s GDP. That share has ...

This week the Biden administration announced an expansion of a Trump-era ban on U.S. investment in 59 Chinese companies seen as having ties to the Chinese military and surveillance sectors.The announcement is another confirmation of how ex-president Trump’s vision of a U.S.-China rivalry has set the terms of subsequent interactions between the two sides (and set ‘the two sides’ as a defining paradigm for the rest of the world.)The measure unsurprisingly targets ...