Why Angola struggles to shake off its economic dependence on China

Angola has borrowed US$42.6 billion from Chinese lenders – around a third of China’s total lending to African countries between 2000 and 2019 – which it repays in the form of oil shipments. Advertisement Oil makes up 90 per cent of the country’s exports, which leaves it vulnerable whenever oil prices fall. Angola’s troubles can be traced to the deep economic crisis as a result of the downward cycle in oil prices since 2014 and Covid-19 has only exacerbated the problem. At a 2019 event organised by the US-based think…

Your Monday Briefing

Good morning. We’re covering China’s rewriting of history, the U.S. infrastructure vote and India’s weakening moral authority. Xi Jinping sets his legacy China’s top leader will most likely take center stage in a new official summation of Communist Party history. The document is likely to exalt Xi, 68, as a peer of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping before his expected re-election at a party congress late next year. The summation is sure to become the focus of an intense indoctrination campaign — in schools, culture and censorship laws — that…

With COP26, China’s Climate Policy Merits a Closer Look

“Disappointing.” “A shadow on the global climate effort.” Even before the global climate summit in Glasgow got underway last week, environmental advocates were quick to point fingers at China’s seemingly lackluster “new” climate pledge as a harbinger of a doomed outcome for the event. Since China is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, some climate watchers had hoped Beijing would make a big splash with its updated targets to fight climate change — like providing an earlier-than-2030 peak emissions year or a hard cap on coal consumption. But the…

Xi Jinping Is Rewriting China’s History

The glowing image of China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, greets visitors to museum exhibitions celebrating the country’s decades of growth. Communist Party biographers have worshipfully chronicled his rise, though he has given no hint of retiring. The party’s newest official history devotes over a quarter of its 531 pages to his nine years in power. No Chinese leader in recent times has been more fixated than Mr. Xi on history and his place in it, and as he approaches a crucial juncture in his rule, that preoccupation with the past…