Xi Jinping’s Africa Policy:The First YearNAI Forum. It has been more than a year since Xi Jinping’s inauguration as China’s new president and his unprecedented visit to Africa in his first overseas trip as the head of state. During the first year of the Xi administration, China’s policy toward Africa has shown several new trends that illustrate Beijing’s evolving priorities and strategies in the continent. These new trends foreseeably will have significant implications for the future of Africa and Sino-Africa relations. Peace and Security in Africa Most strikingly, China under Xi has greatly and assertively enhanced its direct involvement in Africa’s security affairs.
Two months into Xi’s reign, Beijing unprecedentedly dispatched 170 combat troops from the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) Special Force to the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Mali. It remains to be seen whether the move changes PLA’s tacit operating principle of “no troops on foreign soil” given the U.N. authorization and local government consent. Why 1 million Chinese migrants are building a new empire in Africa - Quartz. After days of coordinating with me over patchy cell phone connections, Hao Shengli arrived in Mozambique’s capital city of Maputo.
He’d come to load up on supplies and to collect me for the long ride back to the farmland he owned in a remote southern part of the country. When his white Toyota pickup stopped in front of my hotel, Hao was barking into his phone. He was in a hurry, and he was angry. There was a brisk handshake, followed by a lot more shouting in salty Chinese as he struggled to make himself understood by a country man from whom, I could grasp, he wanted to buy goods.
“China is a big fucking mess with all of its ‘fucking dialects,’” Hao said to me in English after hanging up. As I stood there, already sweating in the midmorning heat, Hao began to train his abuse on John, his tall and sinewy Mozambican driver, who had been coolly smoking a cigarette while rearranging the supplies on the Toyota’s flatbed to make room for my bags. “You, cabeça não bom, motherfucker,” he said. China In Africa. Xi Jinping’s Africa Policy: The First Year. Editor’s note: In this blog, Yun Sun examines the Xi Jinping administration's new engagement with Africa during the first year since his inauguration. For a more detailed look at the evolving relationship between China and Africa, read Sun's latest paper, Africa in China's Foreign Policy.
It has been more than a year since Xi Jinping’s inauguration as China’s new president in March 2013 and his unprecedented visit to Africa in his first overseas trip as the head of state. During the first year of the Xi administration, China’s policy toward Africa has shown several new trends that illustrate Beijing’s evolving priorities and strategies in the continent. These new trends foreseeably will have significant implications for the future of Africa and Sino-Africa relations. Peace and Security in Africa Most strikingly, China under Xi has greatly and assertively enhanced its direct involvement in Africa’s security affairs. New Features of Chinese Economic Cooperation with Africa.
Chinese Investment in Africa Boosts Economies but Worries Many. In a three-part series, SPIEGEL is exploring fundamental changes occurring in Africa -- a continent the West has long written off, but is now being embraced by other countries. This is Part I of the series. An introduction can be read here, while Part II explores the digital revolution's tranformative impact on the continent and Part III shows how women in Africa are making great strides. Everything is as it has always been: decayed rows of houses, weathered doorframes with intricate carvings, potholed dirt roads, fishing boats rotting on the beach and, in the middle of it all, the Boma, a stone fortress built by the former German conquerors in Bagamayo, a sleepy coastal town in Tanzania.
Bagamayo was the capital of the colony of German East Africa from 1888 to 1891, when the administrative seat was moved to Dar es Salaam because the shore in Bagamayo was too shallow for a real seaport. Since then, time seems to have stood still. "This is good for Tanzania, very good. A Win-Win Situation?