This week Eric & Cobus sit down with Wu Peng, the director-general of the department of African affairs in the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for his perspective on a wide range of issues that are impacting relations between the two regions.

The conversation also features questions from a trio of experts in China-Africa relations including:

• Gyude Moore, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development (@gyude_moore)
• Zainab Usman, director of the Africa program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (@MissZeeUsman)
• Aggrey Mutambo, senior diplomatic affairs writer for the Daily Nation and The East African newspaper (@agmutambo)

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Since its inception in 2013, Chinese government officials have insisted that the Belt and Road is solely an economic initiative and does not have any military motivations. But the BRI's civil-military distinction is no longer as clear cut as it used to be. President Xi Jinping himself called for a strong BRI security system to protect China's overseas interests, people and property.

One little-known aspect of the BRI is that much of the overseas construction, particularly ports, must conform to standards that conform to the People's Liberation Army's requirements. So, while today there's little evidence that China is leveraging the BRI for security or military purposes, there are concerns that it is positioning to be able to do so in the future should the need arise.

Daniel Russel, vice president for international security and diplomacy at the New York-based Asia Society Policy Institute, examined the security dimensions of the BRI in a recent paper. Daniel joins Eric & Cobus to discuss what he calls the Belt and Road's "civil-military fusion" in maritime, terrestrial and space environments.

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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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