Navigating U.S.-China Rivalry: Africa’s Strategic Response in the Trump Era
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Hello and welcome to another edition of the China in Africa podcast, a proud member of the Seneca Podcast Network. I'm Eric Olander, and as always, I'm joined by CGSP's managing editor, Kobus van Staden, from beautiful Cape Town, South Africa. A very good afternoon to you, Kobus. Good

Good afternoon.

Quote, for Asia, the U.S. in the last 60 years since President John F. Kennedy's inaugural speech, that one form of tyranny, colonial control, will not be replaced by an iron tyranny that was the moral legitimacy in which the U.S. presence was in our region. And here's the important part. U.S. has now willy-nilly, the image has changed from liberator to great disruptor to a landlord-servant.

seeking rent. That is from the Singapore Defense Minister, Kobus. And the reason why that's so important is because Singapore is probably one of the U.S.'s most steadfast partners here in Asia. It's a country that is absolutely vital for the United States' security presence in Asia. It buys a lot of weapons. And it's just quite remarkable. We've been talking over the past several weeks about what's happening between the U.S. and your country in South Africa. And then I also want to bring you up to speed on a Bloomberg report

story that crossed today that said that funding for the libido corridor has now been impacted by the closure or the temporary closure, so the White House says, it looks pretty permanent to me, of the U.S. Agency for International Development. USAID was funding a lot of the feasibility studies for the libido corridor. And for those of you who

don't recall what the Lubito corridor is. Remember last year, President Joe Biden went to Angola and really touted up this railway that was going to bring critical minerals from Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo through Angola to the port of Lubito on the Atlantic coast of Africa. This was supposed to be a signature project for the Partnership for Global Infrastructure Investment. The

That, if you're keeping score at home, was the latest effort by the United States to counter China's Belt and Road Initiative. Now Bloomberg is telling us that the US participation in the Lobito Corridor may run into problems. But there was an interesting detail, Kobus, in the Bloomberg reporting. The US had made it sound like the Lobito Corridor was a US project. Yet in the Bloomberg reporting, and this is something that our own Jeronima has been talking about for a long time,

The U.S. is actually just one partner among many. So there is a possibility that the Lobito Corridor still goes on just fine without the Americans. But I think the message being sent to African governments, Kobus, is one that the United States is becoming an increasingly unreliable partner on the continent. You know, USAID became so sophisticated, I think, not only USAID itself, but also all of the kind of attendant different other kind of tools of this, you know,

how can I say, kind of targeted form of investment, like the Millennium Challenge Corporation. And so all of these different institutions became so sophisticated and they became so kind of integrated in all of these different kind of aspects of these high level, multi-modal kind of projects that now that the funding is being yanked, it's like, it's very interesting to see

kind of like in a way that level of sophistication is now turning into a liability because it ends up, the US ends up being blamed for all of these different other kinds of projects falling apart, even if they weren't the only author of the project. You know, so in the case of Libido, I think what's going to be very interesting is to see

whether there'll be bigger European involvement going forward, and then the role of the Chinese. Because as we've been pointing out for a long time, obviously there are Chinese entities involved, even though the Lubitsch Accord itself was framed as an anti-China initiative. So whether this opens the door for more Chinese involvement, it's all up in the air.

And don't forget that the huge global commodities trading power, Trafigura, is also a big player in the libido corridor. So a lot of actors in that. That's just a story that we think you should keep an eye on. And it's going to be an interesting barometer of where the impact of the changes in the U.S. are playing out in the global U.S.-China competition. So

The big takeaway from this is that there are a number of unanticipated consequences of what's happening in Washington and again, how that impacts the broader U.S.-China competition. And so that's what we're going to focus on today. I know we've been talking about this a lot over the past few weeks, but it is the story of the moment. There's just no way to get around it. And today we want to step back from what's happening in Africa specifically to focus more on the broader U.S.-China competition so that folks in the global south can start to better understand how to position themselves vis-a-vis

both the Chinese and the Americans. And there's an absolutely essential podcast that we have been listening to, and it came out last year in the first season. And we are thrilled to have Jane Perlez, who is the host of the U.S. vs. China Face-Off. And it's eight episodes that are released weekly, and it's

Season two has just dropped. And once again, if you're not familiar with Jane's background, she is one of the legends in the China reporting business. She's a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. She's reported for the New York Times from Asia, Africa, the Mideast, all over the world. And most importantly, for our purposes today, she was the Beijing bureau chief up until 2019. Good morning, Jane, and welcome back to the show. It's great to see you again.

Great to see you, Eric and Corbis, and very good to be here. Well, it's wonderful to have you. Congratulations on the second season starting now, and it's just been a lot of fun to listen to the first couple of episodes as they've made their way out, and we are thinking about this a lot now, given everything that's happened. It must be a difficult challenge for you now to produce this kind of show, given how much things have changed, but I think I want to start our conversation right now talking about where you left off at the end of

of the first season and where you started at the second season of the show, and how much, in your estimation, has the situation between the U.S. and China changed, especially under the Trump administration? Well, in a way, you could say it's turned on its head, but on the other hand, you could say we're not quite sure where it's going to go. Trump seems to be against, I think, some expectations. He seems to want to be a friend of China because he wants to be a friend of every word of crap there is on the planet.

And China, for its part, under Xi Jinping, is sort of playing a waiting game, which I think Minxin Pei, the guest on our first episode, outlines very well. Our first episode dropped last week, and Minxin, who is at McKenna Claremont College in California, talks about how Xi Jinping is very strong at home and can do what he wants, and it's quite impetuous. But on the foreign stage, he's playing a waiting game to see China

what is going to happen. And in a way, Xi was given a big gift in the last few days when the United States has totally aliened itself from Europe

Europeans are beginning to talk about the United States as an adversary, as an enemy. Extraordinary change. Incredible. Well, you just heard that from the Singaporean defense minister. It's effectively the same thing. I mean, it's really amazing. Closer to home. Amazing. I mean, absolutely amazing. So that gives sea big openings in both places. I mean, the Chinese for a long time have been wanting to separate Europe from the United States. And Trump just gave it to them just like that. Period. Period.

And in Asia, I think it's just going to be very interesting to see how quickly, I shouldn't say this because it's very old fashioned, but it'll be very interesting to see how countries in Asia topple like the old domino theory from the Vietnam War. Of course, it's completely different. But how long will it take for Asian countries to totally swivel towards China rather than just hedging their bets?

When you mentioned this, you know, this swivel towards China, how do you see Chinese global ambition? If we move beyond simply wanting to increase influence, like if we talk about like what that kind of formalized increased influence would actually look like, particularly like within its immediate neighborhood and further afield, like, you know, like what kind of models of large scale formalized international influence should we be thinking about?

I'm not sure that I can answer about the formalized influence, but I do think that China would like to dislodge the United States as the prime power in Asia, which I think thinking people in Washington and New York understand and are concerned about because the United States has been that power for the last 70 years or so, and China is working very hard to displace it. And the way things are going, maybe it'll come to them quicker than they thought

Do you see that happening beyond Asia, or is it their focus is displacing the United States only in the Western Pacific? Because when you talk to people in Washington, they're worried about a more global view. Well, I think that's kind of part of the Washington freakout. I don't think that China at this point wants to become the world power and displace the United States. I may turn out to be wrong. I mean, I don't think they want that.

immediately. Their prime goal is to be the prime power in Asia, which they think it's their turn. They were that many, many years ago, and it should come back to them. And I think they probably see an increasingly fertile field.

You know, for me, just from the outside, and I think this is something that I was actually thinking a lot in listening to the first season of your series, was that there's a strong argument to be made within the US. If we look at domestic United States politics, you know, obviously a lot of jobs were lost to China. A lot of, you know, a lot of working class people feel a lot less safe, like economically, because of the explosion in manufacturing in China. But at the same time, American companies like Apple, for example, in your episode, they

very rich from the fact that China was absorbing a lot of kind of negative externalities, like particularly environmentally and labor-wise, into this kind of deal, which ended up, you know, which would end up being kind of like, on short end, that thing that's always on the side of Apple boxes, you know, designed in Cupertino and made in China. So, you know, I guess it's a bit of a vague question, but like, is there an appreciation, do you think, in the US for

both sides of that bargain. Isn't it realistic to also acknowledge that the US also gained a lot from this relationship? Or is that politically impossible to say? Look, I think the extraordinary thing is, I think if you have done a poll, and I'm sure that Apple does this every year to see what the curve looks like, I would guess that

90% of the American Apple owners, iPhone owners in the United States do not know their phone was made in China. Do they care? They go to the store, they buy it, they don't care where it's made. Does it matter where it's made? Well, the politicians make it sound as though it

matters that goods are made in China, but I don't think that it transfers to the Apple iPhone. So in a way, Tim Cook's very lucky. But I think that one of the reasons that Tim Cook is being quite supportive of Trump, which I have a sense is probably not his personal politics.

But if he decided to speak out against Trump, he'd get tariffs placed on every single one of those iPhones coming into the country. So there's that level of concern. And then in Washington, I think that being...

Anti-China is just good politics at the moment. I think it just doesn't really matter too much for what reasons, whether it's because we've lost a lot of manufacturing or whether it's because China is being aggressive in the South China Sea or whether China is conducting incredible hacking operations into the American infrastructure and American telecoms. I mean, there are a whole array of things that the politicians can use.

So it puts China in a pretty bad place here. The last Trump administration started...

similar to this one in terms of the approach on China. Remember that Trump went to Beijing and he was treated to this incredible tour of the Forbidden City. And then later, Xi Jinping went to Mar-a-Lago and we had that beautiful chocolate cake. And there was a lot of this optimism that this relationship was going to go somewhere. Remember, Trump wanted this mega trade deal. The Chinese may have miscalculated by

kind of ignoring the Americans on that and how important it was. And then what ended up happening was the last two or three years, especially going into COVID, it turned absolutely toxic. We're in a situation now where we're back in that honeymoon period. Trump saved TikTok, at least temporarily right now. He has changed some of the language about Taiwan and there's a little bit of back and forth on this. He's said, you know, really indicated that Xinjiang and human rights isn't going to be his priority.

And he's really sent a lot of signals to China that at least right now he wants to do a deal and he wants to try something. Do you expect that we will follow a similar pattern, that we will start with this honeymoon, invariably the two agendas of these two countries, and you call them in your first episode the two strongmen, you know, going to the mat. Will they eventually turn back into a conflictual relationship as it happened the first time?

I think it's inevitable, but I think before the inevitable happens, there will be some pretty amazing optics. I mean, what's your bet? On May 9th, I think it is, which is Victory Day in Moscow, Xi Jinping has been invited to join Putin by Putin.

Is Putin going to invite Trump and will Trump accept? Are the three of them going to be up there on the balcony? Well, remember, Trump said he wanted that. He wants a three-way dialogue with them. Well, there's a dialogue. You can have a dialogue, but the optics of the three of them being up on the reviewing stand in Moscow is just mind-blowing. Just mind-blowing. At this point, all bets are off, right? I mean, we couldn't have anticipated anything. I mean, we really can't anticipate what's going to happen. But the way I look at it is...

These two are in trajectories that are just going in two totally different directions.

And the people around each of the leaders are very hawkish. And I just can't see them, even if Trump and Xi do want to reach a deal, the political infrastructure around them is set up in such a way that it makes it very difficult for that to be sustainable. Well, in some ways also, I think for Trump, I mean, he seems to be a one word guy, that tariffs are his policy in every direction. And sometimes you think that he plans to fund the government of the United States if there's a government left. Right.

With tariffs. I mean, it's very hard to see what his other policies are. For the moment, the Defense Department is quite quiet. You know, there was this incident just a couple of days ago between a Filipino aircraft and Chinese aircraft over one of the islands very close to the Philippines, and I think they became... We had another one this week, by the way. There was

two in one week now. Nine feet apart from each other. What would have happened if they'd actually hit each other? And one of the aircraft, by the way, the Philippines aircraft, had journalists, Western journalists had associated press and others on board. Can you imagine if they landed on Chinese territory? They were too far away from Chinese territory, but still. Very hairy things going on in the South China Sea where the PLA is not pulling back and the Americans are not pulling back. And my bet is

Sooner or later, we're going to have a revisit of 2001 when the American spy plane was hit by a Chinese fighter jet and 26 American military personnel were taken, essentially taken hostage on Hainan Island. Now, that resolved because

Because tensions were not so high. China was not so developed. And I might add, the United States had a very good diplomat, a very good ambassador in Beijing, and he knew what he was doing. So everybody managed to get out of that. Not going to happen next time.

You know, one of the interesting things to me about Trump is that, you know, while he is very combative in behavior frequently, he tends to not be very militarist or hasn't he hasn't been so far. Do you think he has the appetite for that kind of military engagement? And do you think he may be pushed into it?

I find it hard to believe he'd even be pushed into it. I mean, his personal history is he got out of the Vietnam War with some kind of minor injury. I mean, sometimes I think he's a coward. I shouldn't say it, but he just, he clearly doesn't like military warfare, which to me is actually quite a good thing. And he clearly said he doesn't want to have a fight over Taiwan. He's kind of dismissed as Taiwan as this, you know, here's a yellow Sharpie and here's my resolute desk.

The yellow sharpie is Taiwan and the resolute desk is China. And, you know, he does understand, I think, that Taiwan is just 100 miles less from the Chinese coast. It would be very, very difficult for the American military to win. Maybe he's even been told that all the war games at the Pentagon and other places show that the Americans could not win in Taiwan. Maybe he knows all that.

So if there's any aspect that's a positive about his being in government and being the president, maybe that's it. I tend to think that war is the ultimate determiner of winners and losers. And his biggest thing is he hates losers. And I think his biggest fear is that if he gets into a war or a major conflict and doesn't win, he will go down in history as a loser.

So he just wants to stay away from that type of verdict if he can at all costs. So he'll engage in military actions that are basically one way, launching missiles into Syria, launching missiles into Iran, where there's no counter-strike and there's no verdict that can be kind of taken away from it on that. I agree with you. I absolutely agree with you. You are somebody who has traveled the world. You've reported around the world. You've been covering China. You do think about China in a global perspective. Let's pull back the focus from your show between U.S. and China and look at...

at the situation more globally, what do you think people in other parts of the world, including Africa, should take away from this US-China competition? What is the lesson that they should be looking at right now? As you talked about with Professor Pei, these two strong men going at each other, what do we focus on? It's very hard for people to kind of, you know, there's so much going on.

What do they look at? Well, I think in Africa, you know, that was my first foreign assignment. I was based in Nairobi and I covered Ethiopia and Sudan and the terrible famine in Somalia in the 90s. And I think about that a lot in the last week as USAID goes down the tubes.

And in some respects, I agree with the Trump people. I don't like the way they've gone about it. But USID to me was not the glorious institution that is being portrayed in the press at the moment. I mean, you probably know. Why not? Why not? Tell us. We've all had our experiences, but I'm just curious what your assessment is. Well.

Well, for example, I don't know if it ever changed, but when I was covering, even when I was in Pakistan in the 2000s, everything that was acquired by USAID in country was actually bought from the United States. They were incredibly cheap Japanese utes in Khartoum, for example, which you could pick up for a couple of thousand dollars. No, no, no, no. We had to

buy the most expensive American vehicles from Detroit. Huge amount of money, took ages to come, didn't have enough, etc. The bureaucracy back in Washington was unbelievable. I mean, I sound like

I sound like one of the people who are in favor of crucifying USAID, which I'm not. No, but this was Kobus's point. 75-80% of what USAID spent was on U.S. stakeholders. Only about 20-25% went to the countries in need. Right. So in Africa, I think that the United States has not done very well for itself.

The Chinese haven't done so well either. I mean, Belt and Road hasn't turned out to be the miracle that they advertised. I mean, they have their own faults. They imported thousands, hundreds of, I don't know how many, but X thousands of Chinese workers for every project. You know, BRI did not turn out to be what it could have been. It's a boost for local economies. So both sides have a lot of faults. But I would say that the United States...

under Trump is going to lose a lot in Africa. I haven't been there in a while, but that's just my gut sense. What do you think, Kovacs? I think the US's image is suffering at the moment, not necessarily because of the USAID thing alone,

but simply because, you know, they're moving so kind of like 180 degrees on the dial, you know, kind of this. So, you know, it's very difficult at the moment to say, I think for anyone to say, this is what the US's position is. And then I think in South Africa specifically, there were a lot of different issues to pick a fight with South Africa about. The fact that they ended up going with this kind of

you know, white genocide, kind of like Fox News narrative that they ended up focusing on. That, I think, flipped the narrative a lot because that is essentially what some of the stakeholders were saying was that, well, the presumptive possible ambassador to South Africa was saying that essentially post-apartheid reconstruction is seen as a form of DEI,

and they're now done with it. They're kind of tired of it, which post-apartheid reconstruction is the raison d'etre of contemporary South Africa. You know, kind of like you're picking a fight there with the very essence of who South Africa is. So it is some things that South Africa can't change, right? Kind of simply because of its realities. So I think that is a complicated thing. I was wondering what you made of the pressure on Panama to quote-unquote leave the Belt and Road Initiative.

You know, leaving the Belt and Road Initiative isn't really a thing. You know, one can not renew if, you know, but in terms of there's very few countries actually except for Italy who formally withdraws, you know, and then if they do, it's usually an optics game. So, you know, I was wondering, you know, what kind of, whether you see that kind of pressure like increasing on global South countries?

You mean United States pressure on these countries to withdraw from... Yeah, to leave the BRI, yes. Of course they'll do that. But like you, I'm not quite sure if that's going to... It's not going to matter a whole lot except hurt the United States image and, you know, maybe some roads won't get built. I mean, you don't have to be a member of BRI to get whatever the infrastructure was, right? I mean...

Do you? I mean... No, sign the loans on the dotted line. It helps, but it's not a requirement. You don't have to. It helps, but you don't have to. Yeah. It's more, more,

more image, as you say, rather than reality. But if the United States keeps pressuring that, I don't think it can do much good for it. But on the ground, I think it's probably a win for China, of course. So I want to close our discussion looking at the show a little bit. There are eight episodes. We talked about the two strongmen in episode one. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about some of the other topics

that you're going to cover this season and why you chose those as the tentpoles of the U.S.-China relationship. Well, I should start out perhaps by saying that, you know, we really try to appeal to people who are very curious about China but don't know a lot and want to know more. So you have a very distinguished, huge audience and a very distinguished audience of people who know a lot about China, I think, in some cases. I think that we try to go for people who are curious

curious. And so for that reason, we've chosen a wide range of subjects. So we have Hollywood in China, for example, which isn't out yet. And we will rapidly update tomorrow because of the huge success of a Chinese movie over Chinese New Year. They did $1.4 billion in two weeks in the box office for this movie, The Ujah.

about a Chinese mythological figure many centuries ago. I mean, incredible, $1.4 billion. How can Hollywood compete with that? They can't. But we have a great discussion with Peter Law, who is an American movie producer and lived in Beijing for 30 years and started out in the 90s counting around big reels of film for Spicy Love Soup, his first Chinese movie, and ended up making The Great Wall in 2016, which was...

not such a huge success as they expected because they learned the hard way that Chinese audiences and American audiences, when it comes right down to it, have different tastes at this period. Although we start out the movie with a Titanic and what a great smash hit that was because Jiang Zemin said, everybody, you must go and see this great love story. Of course, it had the class struggle, so that helped a lot.

As well as Hollywood, we have AI, of course, and we really talked to a great person on that. Karen Howe is our AI person, and TikTok person is Louise Matakis, who was with Wired. And so we go through the whole litany of the TikTok saga. Will or will it not be sold? Will the algorithm come with it? If it is sold, how much will it be paid for? And is TikTok such a lethal national security threat as advertised in Washington?

I suspect it isn't. I suspect that Meta and Google and others have done a very good lobbying job in Washington to make sure that TikTok gets as much trouble as possible. We have EVs with Michael Dunn. The EV revolution got started in China, and Michael is perhaps the world's expert on Chinese EVs.

He was a former executive of GM. He was in China for a while and then Indonesia. And I guess he's one of the GM executives who saw the light and saw what was coming. And then to close it all out, we're having how the world has totally changed to the end of the 1945 era. The era that followed 1945 is over. And we're going to discuss with Ivo Daldor, former NATO ambassador, what's coming down the pike.

Yeah, that feels very relevant for what we're talking about today. The show is Face Off, the US versus China. You can get it anywhere you get your podcasts, on Spotify and Apple, everywhere. I just cannot recommend it enough. And you go back and listen to season one, it's just as interesting, even though the times have changed.

And then as Jane pointed out, it's really meant for a very broad audience. So if you're new to China Studies and China Watching, and because of the times we're in, everybody should know a little bit about what's going on in China and the US-China relationship more broadly, 'cause it's evolving. This is a must listen show. Jane Perlez is the host.

And we're just thrilled to have you back again. And hopefully when you produce season three, you'll be back to join us again. And just congratulations again on the show. And we wish you the best of luck. Eric and Kobus, thank you very much. Great honor. Really a lot of fun to be with you. And I'm in awe of what you do and what you produce and how much you produce. And I love the addition of YouTube. Thanks a lot. Kobus, I can hear some of our listeners saying, why did the China in Africa podcast...

- Focus on another podcast about the US-China face-off and the tensions in the US-China relationship. And I think what we're seeing play out in South Africa reveals why this US-China dynamic is so important. And if you don't understand the details of the US-China dynamic, you're not going to understand the way both

The U.S. is responding in places like Africa, but also the Chinese as well. This is an interconnected matrix that we have to look at. So it's not just that a show like ours only focuses on things that are happening in Africa, because these events that are happening in Washington and Beijing and even in Singapore have an impact in how these two countries respond.

are responding to the different events. And again, what's happening in the libido quarter is a good example of the third order, fourth order effect of some of these decisions that are happening. And so I want to put that out there because I think a lot of people might have been confused at this point as to why we're doing this, but we feel this is very important to have a very

big picture view of what's happening. Yeah, absolutely. So in our work, we always have to make the call about whether something is China, global South enough for us to cover, right? And that frequently, you know, it's different for, we have different approaches to it, but, you know, kind of for me frequently,

For example, reporting on Taiwan, like Taiwan-China relations, I tend to not deal with it because it's not global south enough in my world. That's right. It doesn't have an impact out of it. Exactly. But one of the effects, I think, is that the changes that are happening at the moment are so large that they end up, even if they only involve disputes between global north actors, the fallout ends up involving the global south. So, for example, the current split that's happening between the United States and Europe will have very significant implications for Africa.

not necessarily only negative, you know, implications, just like a lot of things that people assumed were solid, solid parts of the landscape have now suddenly shifted. So the landscape looks different and the kind of options open to African policymakers are different. Some good ones have disappeared and some new ones are emerging. So in that sense, one has to sometimes step back and take these big kind of like do this kind of big mapping work.

with a kind of a global self lens, you know, on at the same time. You know, what concerns me a little bit about the situation in many African capitals is the lack of robust China expertise that's feeding knowledge into the policymaking process. And the reason why this is frustrating and disappointing is that there's not enough is because this is not a human resource, actually, that many African countries are short of.

In fact, there's an abundance of some fantastic China scholars in Africa who have beautiful language skills, who spent decades in China, or they've graduated from Chinese universities. Remember, up until the pandemic, 60,000 young people went to China to study every year. And after the pandemic, we haven't been getting the same kind of numbers, but I think an educated guess is back up into the high tens of thousands, that the numbers are quite robust.

And there isn't yet a system in place to take this talent when it comes back home again. Because remember that after they graduate in China, China does not have the equivalent of what we have in the United States of an F1 program, which gives you one year of practical training. The moment you get your diploma, you are on a clock to get out of the country. So they have to go home or they have to find a job, but they can't stay in China without a job. And so the talent is there, but

But yet the policymaking in the think tank and the scholarship and the ideas bubbling up into the system, as far as I can see, are not making it there. This is concerning in part because countries now have to know exactly what they want, not only from China, but also from the United States.

from Europe, from Japan, from ASEAN countries. They really have to be much more sophisticated in their diplomacy and their foreign policy, because if you are not, you're going to be left unprepared for the storms that come your way, as we've seen in Panama, Colombia, Canada, so many of these countries who did not anticipate getting hit by the Americans. And at the same time, again, China is going through profound changes right now.

now. And this is why Jane's show is so important, is because to understand what's happening in China is so critical. What you used to do at the South African Institute of International Affairs and what continues to be done at SIA is so critical. And I think and I wish there was more of that.

Yeah, I think so. I think a lot of these changes are in a way more shocking, I think, to global North actors, right? I think it's a real shocking thing for Canadians to be treated the way that Colombia is treated, right? It's not so shocking for Colombia to be treated the way Colombia is treated because they've been around as a global South country for a while, right? Kind of they've seen many things.

So I think what is important is to map these changes from a Global South perspective. Because if you don't, your perspective ends up being clouded by just the kind of dismay that's dominating Europe. And with it, then, this kind of tunnel vision. You know, like Europe, at the best of times, I mean, bless them, but at the best of times, they don't care very much about the Global South. And at this moment, they care zero about the Global South.

South, right? Because they care about themselves, and with good reason. So in that sense, to actually map how the shifts in the US-Europe relationship is changing stuff for the global South, one needs analysis from a global South perspective. But in order to do that, you need the knowledge of the entire system. And you need particularly the knowledge of the US-China interaction as it's evolved over years. And I think that's one of the reasons why Jane's show is so irreplaceable.

Well, to that end, we at the China Global South Project are going to try to help fill that void. We're going to be launching non-resident fellows program very soon, where we're going to provide funding to scholars, analysts, and journalists, and

you know, thought leaders, activists from Global South countries to do exactly this, to write and to think and to put ideas out into the discourse about how different countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Central Asia should deal with the moment that we're in today.

And I'm really excited that we're gonna have that opportunity to do that. And again, to your point, it's gonna center voices from these regions and de-center the voices from the US and Europe where that traditionally dominate this discourse, what you've called and what Tuvia Gehring in Israel calls discourse power. He has that newsletter, which is always very interesting.

So I think it's gonna be really important for us to be able to contribute to that. But one of the things I'm hoping that these fellows are going to be able to look at and to think about is these competing interests that the United States has in Africa. Because you hear on the one hand that competing against China, particularly for critical resources,

is the justification for the United States, at least as Trump has put forward, to conquer Greenland. Okay? Like, okay. Greenland. Why Greenland? Because they've got rare earth. This has come up in the discussions about Ukraine. Whether or not there is critical resources and rare earths in Ukraine, I'm not entirely sure, but that is a narrative that is now popping up.

And yet they are sabotaging the relationship with South Africa that is a critical supplier of critical resources. And they want to compete against the Chinese. And so on the one hand, they are enacting all of these measures like undermining the libido corridor with the closure of USAID, challenging South Africa on any number of issues. And at the other hand, they also say they want to compete directly with China on these critical resource competitions. So I'm

struggling to figure out which is the more important priority. And I'm hoping that our fellows or future fellows will be able to help provide some insight into that. But I just wanted to get your take on that apparent contradiction. There may not be a contradiction, but it seems like to me there is one.

Yeah, I also tend to think that. But I think one of the factors may be that critical minerals is only one of the issues that's really consuming them. And so it's an important one, and it's particularly a kind of a headlining one.

At the moment, we're in a moment where if you want to grab people's attention, you put critical minerals in the headline. But there's also a bunch of other issues, I think, playing out. And one of these issues is the late end of the window of a Western unipolar influence. As Jane was saying, this post-1945 order, that window is coming to an end. And that post-1945 order

shaped what we think of as power, right? It's kind of a shape that we think of as international power. The US itself, our image of power was shaped by the US and to a certain extent built around peculiarities of the US. So this for me is one of the reasons why it makes no sense to talk about China replacing the US. Like, you know, kind of it was like a lot of talk the last two weeks of like the BRI replacing USAID, which means

makes no sense. You know, they're not the same thing. They don't have the same approach to power. Chinese power is going to look different from American power. But so far, we can only think of power as American.

And I think that is why it's really important, I think, for African countries particularly, because they were in such a kind of a traumatized kind of position in relation to Western power more broadly for so long. And they were so kind of like stuck to Western power for so long. They have to rethink power itself, right, kind of in order to be agile enough to deal with what Saudi Arabian power is going to look like, or like UAE, or like Turkey, like all of these, plus China, because China itself is so unreadable frequently.

You know, so in that sense, I think we're in this kind of moment where we have to do really kind of big thinking. Because as we say, like a lot of things that seem part of the landscape are busy kind of melting into air. So the question is kind of where does it leave us? Like, you know, kind of what does the landscape actually look like then? You know, one of the things I wrote about today in the newsletter is that away from the noise of Donald Trump and everything that's happening in Washington, what's

Lots of big things are still happening under the surface that a lot of people are now no longer paying attention to. And let me bring up three examples, two from out here in Asia and one related to Africa. A couple weeks ago, China and Indonesia renewed a currency swap agreement that allows them to trade in RMB.

Now, Nigeria and China have a similar agreement, and the Nigeria-China one is $2 billion. The China-Indonesia one is $56 billion. That is just on an order of magnitude so much larger. I mean, it's just amazing the scale. $56 billion.

And a lot of that is in critical minerals for nickel and things like that. So that was very interesting. This week in Vietnam, the rubber stamp parliament passed a $8 billion, $8.4 billion to be precise, approval to build a new railway between Vietnam and China. Very, very important.

in that. And the other thing I want to bring your attention to is something that happened earlier in February in Hunan province. And once again, here we are talking about Hunan province. Hunan province is the most important province in the China-Africa space. It's in central China. It's where so much of the innovation about policymaking comes out of. And the

The Commerce and the Finance Ministries of the provincial government in Hunan province passed an 11-point plan to boost trade with Africa. It includes building warehouses and cold chain supplies, supply lines between the Hunan and African countries. It talked about subsidizing Chinese companies to participate in African trade expos. It talked to, I mean, there was just so many different points on it. And

Again, I find this interesting. It's not a huge scale. It's not a huge story. Never even cracked into the international media. This was only in the Chinese media. But it continues to show that there's policy and trade innovation and fresh ideas coming from places like Hunan that we are not seeing coming from any subnational stakeholder in the U.S. or Europe or even Japan or anywhere else. This innovation, this excitement to do business and trade is coming from a place like Hunan.

And I think that deserves an enormous amount of attention right now, because as the geopolitics become so just overwhelming, it's really important that we keep focus on these things below the tide that are also, you know, happening. And this Hunan, this 11-point program to boost trade, I think that's exactly what Africans want. They said, we want to do business, we want trade. And this is what it looks like. So congratulations and kudos to the

people in Hunan for once again kind of owning it. Just, you know, I don't want to go on too long on this, but to refresh everybody, Hunan was the first to build a cacao exchange. Hunan built an air bridge, a direct air links between Changsha and Addis Ababa that Ethiopian Airlines serves. During the pandemic, they brought over refrigerated cacao

vaccines through there. There's a big e-commerce hub that is outbound in Changsha and inbound at Bole International Airport. They have a very robust academic exchanges in agriculture. This was one of the first places where the African green lanes, these were the expedited approvals for African commodities to be exported into China. They happened in Changsha first.

It's also the home of the Africa-China Trade Expo that happens, I think, every year or every other year. But there is a lot of enthusiasm for engagement with Africa in Hunan, and that is still happening even amidst all this other stuff. Yeah, absolutely. I think what we also, as part of this kind of bigger landscape, I would point to two other things. One is that a while ago, like I think late last year,

There was an announcement that the Saudi state oil company is planning to invest in China, like $50 billion into China, you know, on all kinds of like petrochemical initiatives. It was fascinating to see that kind of the announcement of funding flowing from the Middle East into China rather than the other way around, which we've also seen a lot of.

And then on the back of that, there's kind of this very strongly, like, and I mean, we cover this on a daily basis and almost like almost weekly, there's announcements of huge deals, like between different Middle Eastern countries and China, like particularly around like renewable energy, like a lot. On top of all of that, there's the announcement this week that Malaysia is going to be hosting a joint summit between the Gulf Cooperation Council and ASEAN and China.

in Kuala Lumpur. So it's bringing together Southeast Asia and the Middle East in Kuala Lumpur with China. You know, as Africa is kind of facing this, the kind of suspension of different kind of US cooperation, it's impossible to not see this development in contrast and to just see how this kind of economic polarity is in the Indian Ocean Asia now, you know, kind of for Africa. Like more and more, like it makes sense

All of the stuff that Africa needs or wants to buy, wants to sell, increasingly all of that is lying eastwards. And it's such a fascinating kind of thing to see happening, even as on the Washington side things are blowing up left and right.

Yeah. A couple of weeks ago, we also had, I think, one of the first ASEAN-South African coordination meetings. ASEAN is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. South Africa is an observer state. I am hoping that we will see more African countries join South Africa to become an observer to ASEAN and to get more engaged in this part of the world. It's a market of $600 or $700.

million people. It's an up-and-coming market. There's a lot of parallels between Southeast Asia and Africa in terms of development and the diversity of these populations that are here. And these are great markets to sell lots of products in agriculture and lots of exports and lots of energy. All of this is needed here. And it diversifies the trade portfolio for a country like Kenya to not only be selling to China, but also to Japan, to South Korea, and then further south here in Southeast Asian countries. So fascinating discussion. Again, a little bit pulling back and

I keep apologizing every show. I don't want to make every show about Donald Trump and US-China, but it is hard to escape it right now. And things are just changing so fast that we keep finding ourselves back there again.

We will eventually move on from that. And I know some people are getting a little tired of it, but it's so complicated. It's changing so fast. The stakes are so high as both Kobus and Jane pointed out. We are at the end of an era of history. The post-war American-led order is done. It's over now. We just don't know what comes next. And part of what we're trying to do is figure it out with you.

And it's not an easy thing and it's not something we're going to figure out together in the next six, nine, 10, 12 months. It might take us years to figure out what's going to happen and what comes into place. But the conversations start here doing this kind of thing. So let's leave it there, Kobus. Thank you so much for your time and your insights today. As always, if you would like to join our conversation, check us out, chinaglobalsouth.com. And if you'd like to get

daily newsletters. You want to follow the news feed that we're updating every day. Get our research, our data visualization, special podcasts, special videos, all these great things that come with the subscription, including podcast transcripts. We've got a new AI tool that's coming out soon. We've got a new trade tracker that's going to have AI enhancements on it as well to monitor Chinese trade around the world. So many cool things are coming down the line. All of that comes with a subscription, chinaglobalsouth.com slash

subscribe. And if you are a teacher or a student, email me eric at chinaglobalsouth.com and I will send you the links for half-off discounts. That'll do it for this edition of the show. So for Cobus Finstaden in Cape Town, I'm Eric Olander. Thank you so much for listening.

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