In BusinessDay SA: CHINA’s renminbi could replace the dollar as the main currency to finance trade between Chinese and African countries, research by Standard Bank shows. In a sign of China’s growing influence as Africa’s largest trading partner and investor, Standard Bank estimated that up to 40%, or $100bn, of China’s trade would be denominated in renminbi… Read More »
… could have been the title of a detailed piece by The Economist on the actions of the Chinese Queensway Syndicate in Africa: The syndicate is built on links forged during the cold war. It is largely the creation of a man known as Sam Pa. Though he uses several names, he was born Xu Jinghua.… Read More »
China will put up 10 ICT-driven model primary schools in Kenya as part of a project that aims at constructing 1000 such schools across the African continent. Source.
The Chinese market in fake European classical art is growing. Steadily. Something they bring to it? Industrial efficiency. The village of Dafen in southern China has become the centre of a big industry, with about 8,000 artists responsible for creating 60 per cent of the world’s oil paintings.
Deborah Brautigam thinks so. And she should know, since she recently wrote a book on China in Africa, titled The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa. She said this in an interview with the Aid Watch blog: As a donor, China’s way has several advantages. Take the way they operate. They rarely “poach”… Read More »
Part of the anxiety over China’s presence in Africa comes from the challenge they pose to traditional ideas about aid. The Chinese operate with low costs compared to Western aid projects that pay high salaries to foreign experts and put them up in fancy hotels. A 2008 Oxfam study, for example, estimated that donors to… Read More »
Mugabe “thanked the Chinese embassy for its painstaking preparations for the birthday celebration and … hoped to further expand friendly cooperative relations in every field between the two nations”, the foreign ministry said. The ministry’s website (www.mfa.gov.cn) showed pictures of Mugabe cutting a birthday cake in front of a large sign wishing him “Happy 86th… Read More »
How exactly do Chinese loans to African countries work? [China’s] current experiment in Africa mixes a hard-nosed but clear-eyed self-interest with the lessons of China’s own successful development and of decades of its failed aid projects in Africa. The first prong of Beijing’s efforts is to offer African states resource-backed development loans, an initiative inspired… Read More »
is China. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, China overtook Germany in 2009: China took over the mantle of the world’s top merchandise exporter from Germany in 2009, according to the latest figures, aided by a global economic crisis that has taken a greater toll on other trading powers. China exported $957… Read More »
Niall Ferguson, in Financial Times, ascribes the rise of the West in the past 500 years to “six killer apps”: the capitalist enterprise, the scientific method, a legal and political system based on private property rights and individual freedom, traditional imperialism, the consumer society and what Weber probably misnamed the “Protestant” ethic of work and… Read More »