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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The European Commission's Global Gateway initiative will turn three years old in December. The $300 billion infrastructure initiative was launched with great fanfare to provide developing countries in Africa and elsewhere with an alternative to China's Belt and Road Initiative.

Many European stakeholders also hoped that Global Gateway would catalyze a new EU foreign policy agenda for Africa, which many critics contend is now unmoored.

Ahead of the upcoming anniversary, the European Centre for Development Policy Management, an independent think tank in Brussels, published a new report exploring African responses to Global Gateway. Mariella Di Ciommo and Pauline Veron, two of the report's authors, join Eric & Géraud to discuss the current state of Global Gateway and how it measures up against the BRI in Africa.

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Chinese Premier Li Qiang is in Pakistan this week to get ties with its South Asian neighbor back on track after a series of terrorist attacks this year. The latest incident occurred earlier this month near the airport in the southern port city of Karachi when separatist militants with the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) killed two Chinese nationals in a suicide bombing.

Pakistan has vowed to crack down on the militants but, so far, to little avail. In turn, Beijing has become increasingly frustrated with Islamabad's inability to better protect Chinese interests in the country.

Eram Ashraf, a China-Pakistan relations scholar, explained in a column published in The Diplomat how the violence is taking a toll on this vital Chinese diplomatic relationship. She joins Eric & Cobus to explain what's at stake for both sides if the Pakistani government can't contain the BLA.

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U.S. President Joe Biden was supposed to be in Angola this week, fulfilling a pledge to visit the continent he made back at the 2022 U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit. But with massive hurricanes pounding the southern United States, the president was forced to postpone the visit.

The trip to Angola would have marked a major milestone for Biden. The southwestern African country is the showcase for the president's global infrastructure investment program, which is widely seen as Washington's effort to rival China's Belt and Road Initiative.

What does the president's cancellation of his trip this week say about Washington's larger Africa policy? Not a whole lot, according to Judd Devermont, the former senior director of African Affairs at the National Security Council and now an operating partner at Kupanda Capital in Washington, D.C.

Judd joins Eric to discuss the latest trends in U.S. foreign policy in Africa and what role China now plays in the White House's strategy.

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Chinese lending to African countries rebounded in a big way in 2023 after seven consecutive years of decline. Last year, Chinese lenders approved loans totaling $4.61 billion to African borrowers, a dramatic increase over the $922 million lent in 2022, according to Boston University's Global Development Policy Center (GDPC).

In the past, China lent billions to countries like Kenya and Nigeria to build massive infrastructure projects like ports and railways. That is no longer the case today as Chinese lending focuses on smaller, more sustainable initiatives, mainly in the energy, telecom, and logistics sectors.

Kevin Gallagher, director of the GDPC, and Diego Morro, a data analyst at GDPC, join Eric & Cobus to discuss the latest trends in Chinese development finance in Africa and a few of the surprises their research uncovered about which countries are getting the most financing.

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Africa is the only region in the world where access to electricity is actually shrinking. Prolonged drought across large swathes of the continent has severely impacted hydropower production, triggering large-scale electricity outages — most notably in Zambia.

China plays a critical role in this crisis, both as a major financier of African power infrastructure development and as one of the largest contractors that builds new facilities like the Karuma Power Station in Uganda, which came online last month.

But how these infrastructure projects unfold in different African countries depends a lot on the competence of the negotiators who sit across from the various Chinese stakeholders.

Adjekai Adjei, a PhD candidate at the University of Cape Town, joins Eric & Cobus to discuss her research that compared the outcomes for the Bui Hydropower Plant in Ghana and the Karuma facility in Uganda.

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The U.S. and China plan to spend billions of dollars refurbishing key railway lines in southern Africa that link critical resource mining hubs in Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo with ports on both sides of the continent.

For the U.S., it's the Lobito Atlantic Railway that goes from the copper belt in Zambia 1,300km west across Angola to the Atlantic Ocean. However, China is looking in the other direction: proposing to spend upwards of a billion dollars to refurbish the TAZARA railway, which also begins in Zambia and heads almost 1,900km West to the Tanzanian port of Dar es Salam on the Indian Ocean.

But building and managing these railways isn't going to be easy given the complex politics in the region. Akashambatwa Mbikusita-Lewanika, a former managing director of the TAZARA railway, and Solange Chatelard, a prominent China-Zambia scholar at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, join Eric & Géraud to discuss why Beijing and Washington face such formidable challenges in this new logistics competition.

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