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 the frontline role that Southeast Asia now plays in this burgeoning geopolitical competition that appears to be intensifying over disputes related to Taiwan, the South China Sea, and surging Chinese influence in the region.

Prashanth Paramaswaran, writer and creator of the popular ASEAN Wonk Substack newsletter, joins Eric to discuss what happened in Vientiane and the latest on the stand-off between Beijing and Manila over territorial rights in the South China Sea.

SHOW NOTES:

• ASEAN Wonk: Why New Japan-Philippines Reciprocal Access Agreement Matters
• ASEAN Wonk: China Crisis Rocks Philippines Second Thomas Shoal Strategy
• ASEAN Wonk: Vietnam Foreign Policy Futures After Nguyen Phu Trong Passing

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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 be fixed." When policymakers do raise the issue of heightened engagement with the continent, it's often in the context of what the EU can do to counter China's influence in Africa.

A new report published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace aims to change that by outlining a more proactive, positive vision for why Europe should focus more attention on Africa in pursuit of a more balanced relationship.

The report's editor, David McNair, an executive director at the anti-poverty NGO ONE.org, and contributor Saliem Fakir, executive director of the African Climate Foundation, join Eric & Cobus to discuss why Europe needs Africa.

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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 crisscrossed the U.S. capital to meet with scholars, analysts, diplomats, and policymakers to get firsthand perspectives on how the China-Africa relationship in 2024 is seen from Washington. These discussions took place at a critical time when the political momentum shifted in Donald Trump's favor and one month before Chinese President Xi Jinping will host an African leaders summit in Beijing.

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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.

But there's growing demand from African stakeholders to tell a radically different story about this relationship, one that is far more nuanced and puts African interests at the center.

A new collection of papers published by the Africa Policy Research Institute explores the emergence of non-Western-centric narratives. Eric & Cobus spoke with Lina Benabdalla from Wake Forest Univeristy, Yu-Shan Wu from the University of Pretoria, Yunnan Chen from ODI, and Folashadé Soulé from Oxford University, four of the world's leading scholars in this field who contributed to this collection for their perspectives about what a new Africa-China story looks like.

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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 manufacturers in these countries because it's almost impossible to match the "China Price."

Chinese factories can produce goods at a scale and cost that remains unrivaled, and now, according to a new report by the consultancy Rhodium Group, they're flooding markets in Africa and other developing regions.

Camille Boullenois, a director of Rhodium Group's China projects team, and Austin Jordan, a senior analyst at Rhodium Group, join Eric & Cobus to discuss their new report and why this trend is potentially debilitating for many of the world's least developed countries.

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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 billion of outstanding loans, all to no avail. And the cost of servicing that dollar-denominated debt has skyrocketed due to the depreciation of the shilling.

This week, Eric, Cobus & Geraud discuss the role that Chinese debt plays in Kenya's current economic distress and provide updates on the fate of a Chinese oil pipeline caught in the middle of a simmering conflict in West Africa.

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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 where this burgeoning crisis goes from here.

Alex Vuving, a professor at the Pentagon-backed think tank Asia-Pacific Security Studies Center in Honolulu, joins Eric to discuss why the events of June 17th have prompted Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. to recalibrate his strategy.

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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 now, with the BRI in place, China doesn't rely on Africa for resources anywhere near as much as it did 20 years ago.

A new paper published by two of the world's leading scholars on China-Africa ties, Zainab Usman from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Professor Tang Xiaoyang from Tsinghua University in Beijing, details five key economic trends re-shaping the relationship between these two regions.

Zainab joins CGSP Africa Editor Géraud Neema to discuss how this evolving economic relationship will impact African countries, in particular.

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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 western Russia last week, new initiatives harmonizing AI standards, currency transfers, and developing new business parks were among the issues on the agenda. While these may seem trivial in this era of war and Great Power rivalry, getting lots of small things done is actually a big deal.

Gustavo de Carvalho, a senior researcher at the South African Institute of International Affairs, is among the world's foremost scholars on the BRICS and joins Eric & Cobus from Johannesburg to discuss why it's time to start paying closer attention to this group.

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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 projects in Africa.

Tarela Moses and Tim Hirschel-Burns from Boston University's Global Development Center closely follow the latest Chinese financing trends and join Eric & Cobus to discuss why there's reason for modest optimism.

SHOW NOTES:

• CGSP: The African Development Bank and the Role of China in Africa’s Call for Changes in the Global Financial Architecture by Tim Hirschel-Burns and Oyintarelado Moses: https://bit.ly/3V85E4R

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