Cowries and Rice

Cowries and Rice

Podcast by Winslow Robertson

Episodes

September 18, 2016 35 mins
The Illegal ivory trade, is a quite contentious issues in Africa-China relations. There are merely and estimated 470,000 elephants remaining on the African continent today, a sharp decline from 1.2 million in 1981. Poaching of elephants for their ivory is a key driver of this crisis, with about 20-30 thousand elephants each year killed. Data from the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species or CITES shows that China ...
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The G20 Summit, an international forum for governments and central bank leaders of the world's 20 largest economies, is being held for the first time in China on September 4 and 5. Since China is the host and assumes the mantle of the G20 presidency, its government has an active role in crafting the Summit agenda. The theme of the Summit focuses on three core concepts "innovation, integration, and inclusion" and the areas of priori...
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China’s complicated relationship with wildlife trade does the country no favors in regard to its international standing, despite a slow and steady attempt by the country to improve its regulatory environment in regards to ivory, rhino horn, and more. While much of the world frets over what the Chinese government is doing, there is a startling lack of attention on the role of Chinese individuals in helping combat illegal wildlife. C...
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At the 4th Chinese in Africa/Africans in China Conference, held in Nairobi, Cowries and Rice and the Sino Africa Centre for Excellence Foundation found time to interview one of the greatest Chinese diplomats who helped shape the China-Africa relationship - Amb. Shu Zhan, China's former ambassador to Eritrea and Rwanda and unsung architect behind the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC). If you ever wanted to know about the arc...
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At the 4th Chinese in Africa/Africans in China Conference, held in Nairobi, Kenya, Cowries and Rice teamed up with the China Africa Project and the Sino Africa Centre of Excellence Foundation to produce a rare triple-podcast looking at the role of media in knowledge production in the Sino-Africa relationship.
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Technology transfer is one of the most potentially beneficial aspects of the China-Africa relationship, but how many training centers, visits to China, etc. actually deliver on that promise? June Sun, who is a MPhil candidate at University of Oxford's Oxford Department of International Development (ODID) where she studies international development joins us to discuss that topic. She recently authored a Policy Brief on that subject ...
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More and more Africans in China are sharing their experiences with the outside world on their own terms. Blogs, videos, songs, etc. are springing up all over the internet to give testimony to their experiences. We are fortunate to have on the pod Shubila Ruth Kikoko, who is pursing a PhD Strategic and Risk Management at Wuhan University of Technology whose memoir "Incubated in China" will be released in August of 2016. This book ch...
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The Sixth Forum on China-Africa Cooperation was held in Johannesburg in December of last year. which resulted in China pledging $60 billion in mostly loans and export credits to the countries of Africa. On July 29, delegations from 51 African countries met in Beijing for the Coordinators' Meeting on the Implementation of the Follow-up Actions of the Johannesburg Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (or FOCAC). Having a f...
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The Sicomines deal is one of China's largest "minerals for infrastructure" deals in Africa as well as one of its least understood. China Exim Bank extended $6 billion worth of credit to a Chinese consortium, called Sicomines, that would have mineral rights to Katanga province in the Democratic Republic of Congo. However, the deal was initially worth $9 billion and required a renegotiation as the International Monetary Fund argued t...
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In this episode, we go back to a topic we have previously discussed at Cowries and Rice yet one that we judge timely and important enough to revisit: Sustainable development. Both sustainable development and developing sustainably seem to be important slogans for China - Africa relations and reflect Chinese policy priorities. In order to further look into questions of the impact of development on the environment and Corporate Socia...
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March 24, 2016 41 mins
This pod is an excuse to speak with Lily Kuo, who we have been following for quite some time. There is a good chance that, if you are listening to this podcast, you have had the pleasure of reading Ms. Kuo's brilliant reporting, whether on Chinese hackers in Kenya or Zimbabwean elephants headed for China. She is one of the few journalists in the world with a China-Africa beat. Ms. Kuo covers East Africa and China in Africa from Nai...
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March 10, 2016 50 mins
Today's episode is going to focus on the Golden relations between Ghana and China, specifically around mining. To discuss this topic, we are inviting Prof. Yang Jiao on the pod. Prof. Jiao earned his doctorate in cultural anthropology from the University of Florida where he worked on the topic of mining. He is currently a visiting assistant professor at the University of Miami in Ohio where he teaches anthropology and continues to ...
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A lot of China-Africa research is done through onsite interview, but what are the strengths of limitations of that kind of research - that is to say, how do people on the ground produce the knowledge they share with researchers and scholars? To help us answer that question, we have invited on the pod Derek Sheridan, a PhD Candidate at the Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs at Brown University. Mr. Sheridan' dissert...
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February 20, 2016 43 mins
ALERT: This is a Mandarin-language episode. To celebrate the Chinese New Year of the fire monkey, Cowries and Rice brings to you a a very special edition of the pod. Host Yiting Wang asks five Chinese guests to share with the listeners how they spent their New Year’s Eve and Day as well as their new year plans in their respective African countries, all in Mandarin. First on the pod are: Sun Chuyi from China Minmetals Inc. in Johan...
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If you are an individual African entrepreneur, what sort of organizations are available to you to help navigate the Africa-China relationship? There are a number of friendship societies, often initiated by ex-diplomats, and trade associations, but today we wanted to highlight a young and dynamic non-profit involved in in this field: the Sino Africa Centre of Excellence (SACE) Foundation. Based in Nairobi, Kenya, they aim to to faci...
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If you are listening to this podcast, there is a good chance that you have heard of Prof. Deborah Brautigam and her research - "The Dragon's Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa" published in 2010 by the Oxford University Press is, for a lot of young scholars, the gateway by which they became interested in Africa-China affairs. However, not nearly as many people are aware of Prof. Brautigam's research center, the Johns Hopkins S...
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President Xi Jinping's first overseas trip of 2016 was to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Iran. Between January 19th to the 24th, Xi visited each country and signed dozens of agreements worth billions, although as is always the case with China-Africa numbers, those amounts should be taken with a grain of salt. Still, it was deft diplomacy to visit both Saudi Arabia and Iran in the same trip, considering they are mortal enemies. In additio...
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What is the role of the African entrepreneur on the African continent in the Sino-Africa relationship? To answer that question first-hand, hosts Winslow Robertson and Lina Benabdallah have invited Norbert Haguma on the pod. Haguma is: CEO of the AfrOrient Group, a one stop solution for any Asia-Africa project which was established in Hong Kong in 2009 and moved to Kigali in 2015; as well as Vice President of the Rwanda Diaspora Glo...
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Hosts Winslow Robertson, Lina Benabdallah, and Yiting Wang look at the lives of Chinese wholesalers in Uganda with Dr. Ward Warmerdam, who received his PhD from the international Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in the Hague and is an economic researcher at Profundo. Most recently, he has been working on Chinese wholesalers in Kampala, but his research broadly focuses on China’s engagement with Africa, the lessons from China’s own...
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Over the past few months, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in China has put out two phenomenal Sino-Africa reports: the 2015 Report on the Sustainable Development of Chinese Enterprises Overseas, co-authored by the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation under the Ministry of Commerce and the Research Center of the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration under the Commission of the S...
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