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TURNING HEADS: Singapore’s whole-of-nation climate change movement a.k.a.
“Singapore Green Plan 2030.” Of course, it’s easier to pull it off when the nation’s land mass is smaller than New York City.
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Perhaps no other topic agitates the contemporary strategic imagination more than the implications of China’s rise not just for the future of the ruling regime in Beijing but also for Africa, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific. But in the recent past, nervous apprehension (mixed with considerable excitement) about Chinese President Xi Jinping’s ambitions has given way to another sentiment, that China may be inching toward overreach both economic as well as geopolitical as public opinion across many Western democracies coalesces into China skepticism, if not outright antagonism.
In a recent book, “How China Loses: The Pushback Against Chinese Global Ambitions” (Oxford University Press, 2021) Luke Patey presents a tour d’horizon of China’s expanding global footprint as well as growing backlash against Beijing’s grand schemes and geostrategic jostling across continents. Drawing on research and travel across Africa, South America, and parts of the Asia-Pacifi
Ever since former New York Times journalist Howard French’s must-read,
China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa was published in 2014, there’s been a lot of curiosity and increased awareness in the West about the rising presence of Chinese laborers across the continent.
For ordinary Africans it’s a daily reality and at times a source of local labor tensions in many countries with high unemployment rates as they see thousands of Chinese workers and managers leading dozens of government-commissioned infrastructure projects in their cities and beyond.
But while French’s “million” number might have been an informed estimate, the China Africa Research Initiative (CARI), a project at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, has been keeping track of the official data going back to 2005. These official numbers will likely not include the hundreds of Chinese migrants who stay on in a country after the infrastruct