The Silk Road Economic Belt—the overland component of Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)—promises to bind China to Central Asia and beyond through a new infrastructural network. Connecting through China’s far western Xinjiang...
During the past 15 years, China’s demand for primary commodities has triggered a dramatic increase in natural resource extraction in the developing world.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, booming demand for natural resources transformed China and its frontiers. Historians of China have described this process in stark terms: pristine borderlands became breadbaskets. Yet Manchu and Mongolian archives reveal a different story. Well before homesteaders arrived, wild objects from the far north became part of elite fashion, and unprecedented consumption had exhausted the region’s most precious resources.
Beijing-based investment attorney Kai Xue joins Eric and Cobus to discuss why he thinks Africa is no longer appealing to Chinese companies. Kai Xue is a longtime Sino-African affairs analyst and carefully monitors trade, foreign...
Despite repudiating American foreign policy, China now borrows heavily from U.S.-style Middle Eastern diplomacy
Quartz’s Africa correspondent Lily Kuo recently returned from a reporting assignment to Rwanda where she discovered a very different side of China’s engagement in Africa. Rwanda lacks many of the resources and large markets that...
Rwanda doesn't fit the usual narrative of China's interest in Africa-- namely that China is only interested in the continent's resources
China’s role in Africa is changing from resource extractor to long-term strategic partner. Djibouti is a prime example
Can the shift to more domestic output be met without blanketing China's cities in smog?
Plans for deep-sea platform—used for mineral hunting and likely military purposes—have been accelerated....
In The China Triangle, Kevin P. Gallagher traces the development of the China-Latin America trade over time and covers how it has affected the centuries-old (and highly unequal) U.S.-Latin American relationship. He argues that despite these opportunities Latin American nations have little to show for riding the coattails of the ‘China Boom’ and now face significant challenges in the next decades as China’s economy slows down and shifts more toward consumption and services.
China’s trade with Africa grew to $222 billion last year, making it
China’s Commerce Ministry publicly admitted that Chinese investments to Africa had fallen by 40 percent in the first half of this year.
As we approach the sixth Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) Summit in Johannesburg, we try better to understand the main issues that surely will arise when Chinese President Xi Jinping and South African President Jacob Zuma meet on...
China goes to great lengths to differentiate its engagement in Africa from the continent’s former European colonizers by emphasizing so-called “win-win development.” Chinese leaders regularly visit Africa where they emphatically reject the...
When critics of the Chinese in Africa make their case, the Collum coal mine in Zambia is invariably on their list of grievances. The controversial mine has been the site of violent labor disputes that have severely injured, even killed, both...
China is promoting a Chinese-built, cross-Andes rail link that would allow Brazilian ore and soya to be shipped from Pacific ports in Peru to Asia.
China often faces blistering criticism for its voracious appetite for Africa’s natural resources. Chinese companies are spread across the continent mining, logging, and fishing to feed both hungry factories and people back home. In most, if not...
Eric X. Li enumerates the defects of a U.S.-centric international system that he perceives to be crumbling, praises the deftness and strength he sees in China's statecraft, and predicts a coming period of international volatility as China...
In the past thirty years, China has transformed from an impoverished country where peasants comprised the largest portion of the populace to an economic power with an expanding middle class and more megacities than anywhere else on earth. This remarkable transformation has required, and will continue to demand, massive quantities of resources. Like every other major power in modern history, China is looking outward to find them.
The recent Antarctic rescue of a Russian vessel highlights China's comprehensive polar strategy.
The country's excessive past investments in coal have produced a surplus, and today, lowered prices mean mining barons are struggling to pay off loans.
It is true China’s boom has brought many benefits to Africa. But in many countries, China’s demand for ore, timber and oil is forcing African states to specialise at the bottom of the value chain in areas with low productivity gains....
China has identified the Arctic as a strategically and geopolitically valuable region and having a seat at the table, albeit only as a permanent observer, has long been an essential part of the country’s regional strategy.
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This Spring 2013 China is expected to finish the first phase of its gigantic South-North Water Transfer Project, though the project highlights the limits of engineering solutions to problems of basic environmental scarcity....
China’s current and planned investments in Greenland raise concerns, not only about Chinese access to more of the world’s resources but also about China’s longer term objectives and the foothold in Europe that a strong partnership with Greenland...
On May 9, China National Offshore Oil Corp.’s (CNOOC) first deepwater drilling platform began operating in the South China Sea. The world-class vessel is stationed in the Liwan 6-1-1 field, about 320 kilometers southeast of Hong Kong, in waters...
China's impressive economic performance since 1978 with a growth rate of GDP of 9.5 percent per year has been mainly in the industrial and commercial sectors and is concentrated in urban areas; as a result, urban water demand has increased by...
Over the past year, increasing attention has focused on China’s growing interest in Latin America. Most analysts appear to agree that China’s primary interest in the region is to gain greater access to needed resources—such as oil, copper, and...
