Issue 376, 13 September, 2018

Article length: 642 words

African leaders line up to acknowledge China’s status

It is a measure of its rise to prominence that China is the prism through which other nations now define their relations with Africa. This is the product of decades of energetic diplomacy and China’s willingness to provide unprecedented levels of finance, infrastructure development, contracting and small business engagement. This dominant position was richly underlined by the 3-4 September Forum on China-Africa Co-operation, which drew African leaders to Beijing in numbers the continent’s other commercial partners can only dream of.