BRICS Summit Preview

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi confirmed this week the triennial Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) conference that will take place later this year in Beijing will, in fact, be a leaders summit.

Before the FOCAC summit, Latin American and Caribbean leaders will take part in a similar gathering known as the China-CELAC forum. It's rather unusual that both are taking place in the same year and that's got some analysts suggesting representatives from African and Latin American countries would benefit a lot if they got together to compare notes on their deals with China.

Leland Lazarus, associate director of the Jack D. Gordon Institute of Public Policy at Florida University in Miami, and Paul Nantulya, research associate at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., recently co-wrote an article that explains why this kind of South-South dialogue is so important.

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The escalating tensions between China, the Philippines and the United States in the South China Sea highlight how Southeast Asia is now the most dangerous frontline in the burgeoning Great Power competition between Beijing and Washington.

But as this week's ASEAN summit in Australia highlights, there is no consensus in the region over how the Southeast Asian bloc's 11 member states are responding to the rapidly changing geopolitical environment.

This week, Eric spoke with Prasanth Parmeswaran, a highly regarded analyst on Southeast Asian affairs and founder of the widely-read ASEAN Wonk newsletter, for some perspective on how different countries across the region are positioning themselves in this new era.

Show Notes:

• Subscribe to the ASEAN Wonk newsletter on Substack: https://www.aseanwonk.com
• Subscribe to the Sinica Podcast newsletter on Substack: https://sinica.substack.com

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Sierra Leone President Julius Maada Bio is in the midst of a five-day visit to China that included talks with President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Qiang, among other high-level officials. While Bio is getting a lot of face-time with China’s political elites, the more pressing question is what he is actually getting out of the visit.

Tobi Oshodi, a political science lecturer at Lagos State University and a long-time Africa-China scholar, joins Eric & Cobus to discuss the visit and the current state of Chinese engagement in Nigeria. Tobi also shares his outlook on how Nigeria is preparing for this year’s Forum on China-Africa Cooperation gathering that will take place later this year in Beijing.

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A lot of EV consumers bought new battery-powered cars in the hope it would be better for the environment than a vehicle with a conventional internal combustion engine that runs on fossil fuels. By some measures, that's no doubt true.

But many of these early adopters are also unaware their supposedly "green" cars aren't quite as carbon neutral as promised and that there are serious labor and human rights problems related to the metals used to manufacture the batteries that power those EVs.

Krista Shennum, a climate and human rights researcher at Climate Rights International, joins Cobus & Antonia to discuss the situation in Indonesia where Chinese mining companies dominate the all-important nickel sector that's rife with labor and environmental abuses.

SHOW NOTES:

• Climate Rights International: Nickel Unearthed -- The Human and Climate Costs of Indonesia's Nickel Industry: https://cri.org/reports/nickel-unearthed/

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Academics and think tank analysts, predominantly in the U.S. and Europe, spend a lot of time debating whether it's appropriate to use the nomenclature "Global South" to describe developing countries in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, among other regions.

In those regions, it's actually less of an issue where framings like "South-South" are commonplace. The use of the word "South" doesn't seem to be as sensitive an issue as it is for those observers in the "Global North."

This week, Jorge Heine, a research professor at Boston University and former Chilean ambassador to South Africa, India and China, joins Eric & Cobus to give a passionate defense of the "Global South" and why he feels it's more important than ever now to embrace the concept.

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They're still counting the votes in Indonesia after last week's election but it's all but certain that Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto will become the country's next president. While some of the world's major powers like the U.S. and India are holding back their official congratulations, the Chinese weren't so reserved.

Ambassador Lu Kang went to Prabowo's private residence on Sunday and was photographed playing with the likely-president's cat Bobby -- a clear signal Beijing is keen to build a close relationship with the new administration in Jakarta.

CGSP's Southeast Asia Editor Antonia Timmerman joins Eric to discuss the geopolitics now swirling over the archipelago and what's ahead for China-Indonesia ties in the Prabowo era.

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In the increasingly acrimonious competition between the U.S. and China over technology standards, it's often assumed that smaller countries in places like Africa lack the necessary agency to determine their digital destinies.

In some instances, that is, in fact, true, given that technology is developing much faster than most governments, particularly those with weak state capacity, can regulate. But it's also starting to change as a new generation of young thought leaders is laying out a bold vision for how African countries can more effectively assert digital sovereignty.

Folashadé Soulé, a senior researcher at the Global Economic Governance program at Oxford University and a leading Africa-China scholar, led a pioneering research project that explored Africa's digital partnerships in the context of the burgeoning U.S.-China rivalry. She joins Eric & Cobus from Accra to discuss the project's key findings.

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For the first time in years, a few African countries are venturing back into the bond market to raise funds for infrastructure and to pay down their debts. However, borrowing more from private creditors is a risky move given the difficulties that many African governments, namely Zambia, have encountered in restructuring their existing debt portfolios.

And if Zambia's experience is anything to go by, it's taught us that whatever global financial safety net was in place to help countries in distress was wholly inadequate to meet the challenge.

William Kring, executive director of Boston University's Global Development Policy Center, and Marina Zucker-Marques, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of London's Centre for Sustainable Finance, recently published a new article that explored the inability of the current financial system to protect the poorest, most vulnerable states.

William and Marina join Eric & Cobus to discuss the situation in Africa and China's role, in particular, as one of the continent's largest and most important creditors.

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Kenya has a new envoy to China, Willy Bett, who formally presented his credentials to President Xi Jinping this week. Among Ambassador Bett's first tasks will be to follow up on Cabinet Secretary for Foreign Affairs Musalia Mudavadi's promise to craft a new China policy.

Mudavadi, who just returned from a three-day trip to Beijing, said a policy refresh is long overdue. Eric, Geraud and Cobus discuss the key issues that will influence that process.

Plus, Geraud provides a detailed breakdown of DR Congo President Félix Tshisekedi's recent announcement that he finalized a deal with a major Chinese mining joint venture to secure $7 billion of infrastructure financing.

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For much of the past year, there's been a lot of talk about China's new leaner, more focused Belt and Road Initiative that goes by the mantra "Smart and Beautiful." The problem is very few people actually know what it looks like in practice.

But that's starting to change, particularly in regions like Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) where two seemingly contradictory investment trends are taking place: overall Chinese FDI in the region is down but in key areas, so-called "new infrastructure," Chinese investments in LAC countries have been going up.

Margaret Myers, director of the Asia and Latin America Program at the Inter-American Dialogue think tank in Washington co-authored a new report on China's evolving investment priorities in the Americas and joins Eric to discuss why Chinese FDI today looks very different than it even just a few years ago.

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