Africa

More signs are emerging that China is being drawn inexorably into Africa's internal politics and is being compelled to take sides in wider geopolitical disputes. This time, the trigger was the...

Japan is to add another US$4 billion in new concessional loans to Africa over the next five years, outpacing the spending of the China-Africa Development Fund, according to Koji Yonetani, the...

China is taking advantage of the global economic crisis to restructure its mining industry. A 4 trillion renminbi (US$586 billion) stimulus plan, announced late last year, encompasses sector-specific reform measures put...

While China's leading dam-builder Sinohydro was busy dealing with complaints from Western non-governmental organisations about its refusal to engage with local populations, an East African NGO shut down one of Sinohydro's...

The October 2007 merger between the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the world's largest bank, and Standard Bank, South Africa's largest, is finally showing its potential. After a lacklustre start,...

For the next few decades, the Indian Ocean will be the setting for competition between three great powers: the United States adjusting to an increasingly multipolar world, and the rising military...

China sees India more as a stumbling block than a competitor for its ambitions in Asia. Professor Han Hua, a South Asia specialist at Beijing University, said that China lacks...

China would not be taking up tracts of land in Africa to meet its domestic food requirements insisted Beijing's Deputy Agriculture Minister Niu Dun in April, but reports on the...

On 7 May, Taiwan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a long-delayed white paper on foreign aid confirming what Taipei's allies are keenly aware of: Taiwan's foreign aid has dropped...

Taiwanese diplomacy faces an awkward commercial challenge. Stripped of the warm words and diplomatic ambiguities, it is clear that Taipei's biggest trading partners no longer recognise Taiwan as an independent state...