News Feed

Tomorrow, the whole world’s eyes will be on the inauguration of Joe Biden. Stepping into a moment of unprecedented domestic crisis, he will probably have relatively little bandwidth for Africa. Indications are that the Biden administration plans to steer away from the Trump era’s unilateralism. While the incoming Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs hasn’t been confirmed yet, many State Department appointments have been filled by veterans from the Obama era. ...

This weekend the Chinese government released a new white paper on development. It comes in unassuming guise – it’s basically a MS Word Doc with the workaday title of China’s International Development Cooperation in the New Era. But in its own way it’s eye-popping.If (like me) you have an irrational fetish for long lists of country names, this document is for you. The bulk of the white paper outlines the different kinds of ...

While scrolling today I came across this great piece by the China expert and former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, laying out the wider implications of China’s much-discussed commitment to achieving carbon neutrality by 2060.

Rudd points out that one of the factors complicating China’s emergence as a global leader on climate is the difficulty of balancing the international demand for responsible climate leadership with domestic pressure to shield the numerous companies ...

Lordeee…I went to bed early on Wednesday night, only to wake up to a full screen of notifications from the New York Times, and pictures of horned men storming the US Capitol. On the edge of the world in Johannesburg, I’m struck by the fact that these events took place in the same week as the mass arrest of pro-democracy politicians in Hong Kong. On African Twitter, some are comparing the events in the U.S. and Hong Kong ...

China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi is in Africa at the moment. It has become a multi-decade tradition that the FM’s first foreign trip of the year is always to Africa. These trips are arguably less important for what they achieve (although announcements of new deals frequently follow) and more for projecting a sense of constancy in the China-Africa relationship.

In Chinese official rhetoric, the China-Africa relationship is always strong, yet ...

As 2020 crawls to its end, it’s becoming clear that, all things considered, China is emerged from the year’s nested crises in better shape than many expected. 

While Europe and Japan seem headed to new slumps, and the American recovery also being buffeted by high infection numbers, China might end up being the only major economy to show any growth in 2020.

China is making use of this opportunity by positioning itself ...

The Financial Times today cited new work by scholars at Boston University on the global reduction of Chinese lending. The big story is that while Chinese lending rivaled that of the World Bank by the mid-2010s, it’s now plummeting.

China Development Bank and the Import-Export Bank lent $75 billion in 2016. Last year they only lent $4 billion. These rates are being driven down by shifts in strategy in Beijing, growing ...

The Guardian this week published a fascinating analysis of how the increasing diplomatic tensions between China and Australia could impact Africa. There are fears that recent Chinese crackdowns on Australian wine, barley, coal, and other commodities could be visited on the country’s exports of iron ore.Australia provides 60% of China’s iron ore imports. Iron ore is key to China’s massive steel industry, and its plans for achieving full, comprehensive development by the ...

This week saw yet another African leader (this time my own president, Cyril Ramaphosa,) calling for international measures to soften the current debt crisis confronting poor countries in Africa and beyond. None of these measures are outrageous. Considering that seven out of the top 10 fastest-growing economies in 2020 are African, it doesn’t even need to be seen as as measures to help Africa – it could be framed as ...

The last few weeks have been marked by a pervasive gloominess about Africa’s future. 

As Zambia was defaulting on its Eurobond debt, the G20 was praising itself effusively for coming up with a debt response unlikely to help anyone. Meanwhile, the depressing talking points kept coming: a lost decade, 25 years of growth down the drain, millions pushed back into extreme poverty. 

These are all realities. However, they might not show the entire ...