At last week's Munich Security Conference, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi touted his country's 5% economic growth last year as a "benefit to the world" thanks to all of the trade it does with countries around the world.

While countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, among other regions, are no doubt selling more raw materials to China, critics contend, though, that this trade pattern isn't healthy and mostly in China's favor.

This week, Eric, Cobus, and Géraud debate whether Chinese trade is helping or hurting developing countries and whether China's role as the world's manufacturer is also the primary reason why poor countries remain stuck at the bottom of the industrial value chain.

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When Donald Trump criticized Panama for its management of the canal that he claimed had fallen under Chinese control, many people at first thought this was just another round of Trump's usual bluster. But since his election last November, the President has been relentless in pressuring the government in Panama City and shows no signs of backing down until all Chinese entities have been expelled from the canal zone.

Alonso Illueca, an associate law professor at the Universidad Santa María La Antigua and a specialist in China-Panama relations, joins Eric & Cobus from Panama City to discuss the escalating crisis and why the government doesn't have a lot of options to push back against the U.S.

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On Monday, January 20, Donald Trump will take the oath of office and return to power as president of the United States. Trump is promising to overhaul U.S. foreign and commercial policy in what many experts believe will mark the start of a very tumultuous period — not just for the United States but also for countries around the world.

Sarah Shidore, director of the Global South program at the Quincy Institute in Washington, D.C. joins Eric & Cobus to discuss the impact of the coming Trump presidency on developing countries and how he expects China to respond.

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China is deeply unpopular in the U.S., UK, Japan, and most other wealthy countries, and given the politics in those regions, there's no indication that's going to change anytime soon. It's a very different story, though, in large parts of developing Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Middle East where public opinion surveys reveal generally favorable views of the Chinese.

A new "poll of polls" by the Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI) on global public opinion about China reveals a lot more nuance about how people in the Global South feel about their countries' ties with China than what is framed in the mainstream media narratives.

Andrew Chubb, a senior fellow at ASPI, led the project and joins Eric & Cobus to discuss what the data tells us about the diversity of views on China across the Global South.

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2024 will be remembered as a seminal year in China-Africa relations with a rebound of Chinese lending to the continent and renewed diplomatic engagement in the run-up to the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation summit that took place in Beijing.

Africa also emerged again as a centerpiece in the U.S.-China duel as leaders from both major powers visited the continent in 2024.

And while stakeholders in the U.S. and Europe struggle to get their businesses to see the opportunities available in Africa, Chinese firms have no such concerns as they expanded their presence this year in the mining, telecom, and automotive sectors.

In this year-end double episode, Eric, Cobus, & Géraud share their top three China-Africa stories of 2024 and provide a forecast for what to expect in the year ahead.

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A few months ago, China looked like it had all its Mideast diplomacy figured out. Israel and the U.S. were taking heavy hits in the court of global public opinion over the devastation caused by the war in Gaza.

Each harrowing image of Palestinian civilians enduring unimaginable suffering steadily undermined U.S. and Israeli claims that their war against Hamas was justified. Beijing eagerly criticized Washington’s hypocrisy in championing universal human rights—except when it came to Israel, the U.S. military, and other selective American interests.

But now that Israel has decapitated Hamas' leadership in Gaza and Hezbollah's in Lebanon, and with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad now exiled to Russia, the geopolitical landscape in the region looks very different.

Tuvia Gering, a longtime China-Israel analyst and a cyber threat intelligence analyst at the Tel Aviv-based cyber security start-up Planet Nine, joins Eric & CGSP Middle East Editor Jony Essa to discuss how China's position in the region is seen from Israel.

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Tensions between China and the Philippines over territorial disputes in the South China Sea flared anew in December after another confrontation at sea. Soon after two vessels collided near the contested Scarborough Shoal, representatives from both sides took to the airwaves to blame the other for the latest incident.

Both Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Philippines counterpart Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. have made it clear they will not concede even a single inch of territory they claim rightfully belongs to their countries.

Don McLain Gill, a Manila-based lecturer at De La Salle University, joins Eric to discuss why the situation going into the new year will remain very tense.

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India's External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar told the lower house of parliament last week that "some improvement" had been made in resolving the ongoing border dispute with China. But he also cautioned that a lot more work has to be done and that it will take years to "reset" relations with Beijing.

The two sides have pulled back their military forces from seven points along their contested boundary in the Himalayas, so they're no longer in close proximity to one another, but those troops are nonetheless still stationed there and haven't yet been redeployed.

Daniel Balazs, a research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, is a specialist in Sino-Indian relations and joins Eric to discuss what's motivating the two countries to negotiate a border settlement.

JOIN THE DISCUSSION:
X: @ChinaGSProject | @eric_olander | @stadenesque

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FOLLOW CGSP IN FRENCH AND ARABIC:
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JOIN US ON PATREON!
Become a CGSP Patreon member and get all sorts of cool stuff, including our Week in Review report, an invitation to join monthly Zoom calls with Eric & Cobus, and even an awesome new CGSP Podcast mug! www.patreon.com/chinaglobalsouth