Chinese Infrastructure Projects in Africa Don't Meet ESG Standards

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 Prashanth Parameswaran, 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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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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Editor's Note: we're sharing this bonus episode of the China in Africa Podcast given that the topic is so relevant for our audience interested in China-Global South issues.

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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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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There was a lot of speculation in the U.S. last year that an upgrade of diplomatic ties with Vietnam would prompt Hanoi to be more aligned with Washington in its rivalry with China. While Vietnam did embark on a flurry of diplomatic upgrades with China's rivals in Japan, South Korea and the United States, among others, China nonetheless remains the Southeast Asian country's primary foreign policy priority.

And that's never going to change regardless of what the U.S. and others offer Hanoi, according to Khang Vu, a doctoral candidate in Vietnamese foreign policy at Boston College.

Khang joins Eric to explain why a combination of geography and history require the Vietnamese to always put China at the center of their international strategy.

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Together, the United States and China import $40 billion worth of timber products each year, quite a bit of which is harvested illegally from West Africa's rapidly shrinking forests. But cracking down on this illicit trade is extremely difficult given that many of the region's governments are actively complicit.

The Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), an NGO based in the U.S. and UK, recently traced how Chinese merchants trafficked rosewood timber from the forests Equatorial Guinea back to China and eventually all the way to store shelves at Home Depot in the United States.

Last year, EIA published their findings in a damning investigative report. Ma Haibing, an Asia policy specialist at EIA, was part of the team that worked on that report. He joins Eric & Cobus from Washington, D.C. to discuss the key findings and what he recommends can be done to crack down on this destructive trade.

SHOW NOTES:

• EIA: The Dictator’s Door -- From Crimes in Equatorial Guinea's Forests to Home Depot's Customers: https://bit.ly/3O4McDg
• The Hill: To halt global deforestation, start with the Home Depot by Raphael Edou: https://bit.ly/3HrCmYc

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This year's COP28 gathering is wrapping up in Dubai and it turned out to be the most controversial climate conference in years where China was at the center of many of the most contentious discussions on how to mitigate the impact of global warming.

China's positions at the conference were difficult to decipher. Chinese negotiators positioned themselves as a still developing country that's suffering the consequences of climate change while at the same time aligning many of their critical votes at COP28 with the fossil fuel-producing countries.

Anika Patel, a China analyst at the online news site Carbon Brief, covered the Chinese delegation at COP28 in Dubai and joins Eric & Cobus to share of her insights into China's approach to climate politics at the conference.

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There's mounting concern in the U.S. and Europe that their global reputations, particularly in developing countries, will be among the latest casualties of the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.

In the Global South, anger is rising against the West over what is perceived to be a double standard by the West's unconditional support of Israel even as it bombs civilian neighborhoods in Gaza while at the same time lecturing other countries, namely Russia, for violating the rules of war when it does the same.

CGSP Southeast Asia Editor Antonia Timmerman joins Eric & Cobus from Jakarta to discuss how all of this plays into China's larger campaign to challenge the Western-led rules-based international order.

SHOW NOTES:

Read Antonia's latest column on Explaining Indonesia’s Different Responses To Palestine, Xinjiang, and Myanmar’s Rohingya: https://tinyurl.com/3da3jea6

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Prior to the October 7th terrorist attack by Hamas in southern Israel, China had positioned itself as a new power broker in the Middle East. Chinese officials were brimming with confidence after they finalized a détente between Iran and Saudi Arabia earlier this year, hinting they could do the same in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

But in the wake of a full-scale war that's now underway, those same Chinese officials are much more circumspect.

In this week's episode, CGSP Middle East Editor Jony Essa and Eric speak with three of the world's leading China-Mideast scholars to discuss China's response to the war between Israel and Hamas.

First, Gedaliah Afterman, head of the Asia Policy Program at the Abba Eban Institute for International Diplomacy at the Interdisciplinary Center in Israel, and Jonathan Fulton, associate professor of political science at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi, discuss how the war has impacted China's foreign policy towards Israel and Persian Gulf countries.

Then, Bill Figueroa, one of the world's foremost experts on China-Iran relations at the University of Groningen, joins the conversation to talk about whether Beijing can leverage its influence with Iran to sway Hamas.

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