The China in Africa Podcast

For much of the past thirty years, since the end of the Cold War, the United States has been largely unrivaled in its power in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. Today, that is no longer the case as the U.S. faces new challenges both from regional powers like Iran and Saudi Arabia as well as international competitors, including China and Russia. This transition to multipolarity is transforming...

For decades, African governments have tried to lure Chinese manufacturing companies to set up factories in their countries with the promise of an abundant supply of low-cost labor. Other than a few high-profile companies, Chinese companies, for the most part, have balked — preferring instead to offshore production closer to home in Southeast Asia. But now that may be starting to change. With the A...

The three-day Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) summit wrapped up in Beijing on Friday. The big headline from this year's gathering was the announcement that China will provide $50.7 billion in financing to African countries over the next three years. Chinese President Xi Jinping unveiled the customary mega pledge as part of a ten-point action plan that will guide China's relationship with...

U.S. officials have spoken at length about the urgent need to end their country's dependency on China for the critical resources needed to power next-generation mobility and technology. Part of the solution, they say, is to compete directly with the Chinese for lithium, cobalt, and other critical mineral mining rights around the world. The problem is few U.S. mining companies today do that kind of...

This year's Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) summit comes at a critical time for governments in both regions. While China is embroiled in an increasingly contentious great power duel with the United States, African governments are under mounting economic and social pressures. These challenges are prompting Chinese and African scholars to wonder aloud whether it's time to introduce new ref...

Final preparations are underway for the upcoming Forum on China-Africa Cooperation summit, which begins on September 4th in Beijing. This year's event comes at a particularly fraught time amid wars in Europe, the Middle East and the simmering Great Power rivalry between the United States and China. David Monyae, director of the Centre for Africa-China Studies at the University of Johannesburg, joi...

In September 2023, just weeks before Hamas' devastating terrorist attack on October 7th, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his foreign policy advisors were preparing for a summit meeting in China with President Xi Jinping. There were even whispers Beijing would help facilitate a rapprochement between Israel and Saudi Arabia much as it did between Riyadh and Tehran. Now, almost a year later, ev...

African leaders will soon travel to Beijing to participate in the upcoming Forum on China-Africa Cooperation summit, which will begin on September 4th. Many of those heads of state will arrive in the Chinese capital with a rather long wish list of infrastructure development projects they're hoping to pitch to Chinese financiers. Many of those initiatives will be focused on energy generation and di...

African leaders and their delegations are making final preparations to travel to Beijing soon for the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) summit that will begin on September 4th. This year's gathering comes at a critical time in the relationship between these two regions. African leaders are looking for ways to move their economies up the value chain in a bid to capture more revenue and gene...

Chinese President Xi Jinping has long touted the   East's rise and the West's decline , the   kind of   thinking that's triggered his supporters to fantasize about a post-Western geopolitical order. While it's indisputable that U.S. and European countries, which represent the foundational pillars of the Western system, have seen their power diminish in the post-Cold War era, there's little credibl...

The Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) summit is now less than a month away. Chinese President Xi Jinping will host dozens of African leaders in Beijing in the first week of September for the triennial gathering that comes at a critical time for African countries and China. Africa needs China's support for continued infrastructure financing and to buy more of its goods, while China is looki...

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this week on what the U.S. needs to do to better compete with China in Africa and other developing regions. Campbell bluntly told senators Washington "has to do better" to match Chinese finance, trade, and military engagement around the world. But the problem for Campbell and other U.S. stakeholder...

The foreign ministers from China, the U.S., Japan, and Russia, among others, all passed through the Laotian capital, Vientiane, over the past several days, ostensibly for an ASEAN gathering. But the real action took place on the sidelines of the meeting, where the ministers held a series of bilaterals that revealed the hardening battle lines among the major powers. The tense discussions highlight...

Europe is Africa's largest trading partner and its largest source of foreign direct investment. But a lot of that economic engagement is powered by inertia, left over from Europe's long, painful history of colonial exploitation in Africa. Just as in the United States, Europe's politics are decidedly inward-looking where Africa, if it's on the agenda at all, is still largely seen as a "problem to b...

As Chinese engagement in Africa steadily increased over the past twenty-five years, the U.S. has struggled to respond. Africa has consistently been a low priority in U.S. foreign policy, even with China's growing presence on the continent, and that's especially true today as events in the Middle East, Russia, and the South China Sea dominate the agenda. For the past two weeks, Eric, Cobus & Géraud...

So much of the framing of Chinese engagement in Africa is done through the prism of Western media, academia, government, and civil society. Stories about debt traps, malign influence, and exploitation are all firmly embedded in the larger discourse about Africa's relations with China. Conversely, the relationship is also framed in equally binary terms by Chinese media and government narratives. Bu...

South Africa this week joined a growing list of developing countries around the world to introduce tariffs on certain Chinese imports in a bid to protect local producers. Indonesia, Mexico, Chile, and Brazil, among others, also introduced similar duties on Chinese steel and other products. While low-cost Chinese goods are a boon for Global South consumers, they're extremely problematic for manufac...

Protestors in Kenya this week expressed fury against the government and the IMF but interestingly made no mention of China during an unprecedented uprising in Nairobi. It's notable because the Kenyan Treasury spends more money to service its Chinese loans than any other single creditor. For years, across two administrations, the Kenyan government has pleaded with China to reschedule nearly $6 bill...

The violent confrontation between China and the Philippines on June 17th near the Second Thomas Shoal marked a sharp escalation in tensions between the two countries over their rival territorial claims in the South China Sea. After the melee that severely injured one Filipino sailor, the two countries engaged in a second battle, this time in the media, to shape the narrative of what happened and w...

Back in the early 2000s, when Chinese engagement in Africa started to ramp up, China was enjoying double-digit growth and devoured vast quantities of African oil, minerals, and timber to feed its surging manufacturing sector. Fast-forward to the present, and China no longer relies on African resources as it once did. The Chinese economy has matured, and those heady growth days are long past. And n...

The BRICS group has existed since 2009 and has done little to distinguish itself in 15 years. They created a mid-sized development bank, but other than that, the bloc's accomplishments have been rather modest. That's now starting to change as the BRICS doubled in size to ten members, with around thirty other countries now on the waiting list. At the latest BRICS Foreign Ministers gathering in west...

Chinese development finance in Africa today is a small fraction of what it was a decade ago when Beijing's policy banks provided billions of dollars in loans to countries across the continent. But while those heady days of easily accessible finance will likely never return, there are indications major Chinese lenders are once again gearing up to extend new financing for badly needed infrastructure...

With memories still fresh from the first Cold War, leaders in Africa, Asia, and across the Global South have repeatedly said they do not want any part of a second Great Power rivalry. But as tensions between the U.S. and China steadily deteriorate, the pressure on these smaller, non-aligned countries is going to surge. The geopolitical dynamics are changing very fast. Jane Perlez, a renowned Pulit...

Ethiopia's long-held ambition is to one day emerge as a major global manufacturing hub, benefiting from a wave of Chinese offshoring. The East African country's strategic location, abundant labor supply, and welcoming government are all very enticing for cost-conscious Chinese manufacturers. And while Ethiopia has been more successful than many African countries in attracting Chinese investors, th...

BYD announced that it opened its 100th dealership in Brazil, highlighting the South American country's growing importance to the Chinese electric vehicle giant. It's a similar story across the board in tech, agriculture, and natural resources, among other sectors. Trade and investment between China and Brazil is booming and is unlikely to slow anytime soon. Tulio Cariello, director of content and...