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Unverified Legion of Trill member
China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi concludes his tour of Africa this weekend without making a single concrete vaccine commitment to a continent hoping a benevolent Beijing will help inoculate its population out of the global coronavirus pandemic.
Last year, as Covid-19 tore across the globe and wealthy countries began to pre-order stockpiles of vaccines for their citizens, Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged that African vaccinations were a "priority" for Beijing. His commitment followed mass donations of masks, testing kits and medical equipment to the continent by Beijing and private individuals, such as billionaire entrepreneur Jack Ma.
Now, with negative sentiment towards China hardening in Western democracies due to trade wars and human rights issues, African allies -- which have crucial voting rights at major international bodies -- have arguably become an even more vital bloc for China to keep on side with its so-called vaccine diplomacy.
China has the resources to honor Xi's pledge. Its Sinopharm vaccine has been approved for domestic use, and four other Chinese candidates are in Phase 3 clinical trials -- the last step of testing before regulatory approval is sought. Unlike some other vaccines, it doesn't require storage at an ultra-low temperature, making shipment easier in developing countries.
Millions of Chinese citizens have already been vaccinated at home and employees of state-owned enterprises in Africa were offered shots in trial phases as early as last June, enabling Chinese citizens to work safely on the continent. None of China's Phase 3 trials were conducted in sub-Saharan Africa, which would have given some countries advance access to a vaccine, despite such tests taking place in the Middle East and South America.
And while a cold chain vaccine air bridge from Shenzhen, in southern China, to Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia, has been established, and manufacturing capabilities are being set up to make Chinese shots in Cairo, Wang's trip made it no clearer when Africans can expect to receive a Chinese vaccine -- or on what terms.
"The promises concerning vaccines in Africa have been really fake. There has been no timetable, only promises," said W. Gyude Moore, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development and former Liberian minister of public works. "Today, I am not aware of any African country that's taking delivery of Chinese vaccines."
The Chinese Ministry for Foreign Affairs did not reply to CNN's requests for comment on Beijing's plans to roll out vaccines in Africa, but state media has rejected claims that vaccines will be used as a "bargaining chip to expand political influence."
A power house and a continent in need
Wang's whistle-stop tour of Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Botswana, Tanzania and the Seychelles continued a three-decade tradition of China's top diplomat making his first international trip each year to Africa.
That tradition signals Africa's diplomatic importance to China, with stops in places like the Seychelles, a sparsely populated archipelago, proving no nation is insignificant to Beijing, and serves to embarrass Western countries which typically neglect the continent but often view it as within their natural orbit of influence.
The Africa-first protocol was established in 1991, on a basis of mutual underdog brotherhood, but China has fundamentally changed since then. So much so that Wang's claims, in a video interview ahead of his trip, that China and Africa had a "shared identity of the developing world," which had both suffered "weal and woe," didn't tally with the two regions' recent history -- and very different experiences of the pandemic.
In 2020, as the world's second-largest economy, China announced it ended abject poverty, successfully contained a virus that has floored the globe's biggest superpower, the United States, and developed some of the first coronavirus vaccines.
Across Africa, countries didn't report the huge caseloads seen in India or the United States -- as of Thursday, the continent had reported fewer than 70,000 deaths, compared to the 150,000 in India and more than twice that in the US.
The nations Wang visited have particularly low reported numbers, potentially hampered by low testing. But they felt the economic impacts of the virus deeply. Many tumbled into recession and faced a mounting debt crisis, which saw Zambia become the first African nation to default on its debt in a decade. About a quarter of Zambia's $12 billion external debt was owed to China, which refused to provide debt relief.
Compounding the debt issue is another potentially worrying, and somewhat ironic, trend for African leaders: credit lines from China that once seemed almost free-flowing have been throttled in recent years, amid increasing criticism of reckless lending. According to the China Africa Research Initiative, Chinese loans to Africa dropped from $29.4 billion in 2016 to $8.9 billion in 2018.
Wang's visit also came on the back of the sharpest racial tensions between Africa and China in decades, after alleged coronavirus-related discrimination against African nationals in the city of Guangzhou sparked widespread anger across the continent last April. An extraordinary video was subsequently posted on Twitter of the Chinese ambassador to Nigeria being scolded by a Nigerian politician over the mistreatment of Africans.
the rest at:
edition.cnn.com
Last year, as Covid-19 tore across the globe and wealthy countries began to pre-order stockpiles of vaccines for their citizens, Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged that African vaccinations were a "priority" for Beijing. His commitment followed mass donations of masks, testing kits and medical equipment to the continent by Beijing and private individuals, such as billionaire entrepreneur Jack Ma.
Now, with negative sentiment towards China hardening in Western democracies due to trade wars and human rights issues, African allies -- which have crucial voting rights at major international bodies -- have arguably become an even more vital bloc for China to keep on side with its so-called vaccine diplomacy.
China has the resources to honor Xi's pledge. Its Sinopharm vaccine has been approved for domestic use, and four other Chinese candidates are in Phase 3 clinical trials -- the last step of testing before regulatory approval is sought. Unlike some other vaccines, it doesn't require storage at an ultra-low temperature, making shipment easier in developing countries.
Millions of Chinese citizens have already been vaccinated at home and employees of state-owned enterprises in Africa were offered shots in trial phases as early as last June, enabling Chinese citizens to work safely on the continent. None of China's Phase 3 trials were conducted in sub-Saharan Africa, which would have given some countries advance access to a vaccine, despite such tests taking place in the Middle East and South America.
And while a cold chain vaccine air bridge from Shenzhen, in southern China, to Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia, has been established, and manufacturing capabilities are being set up to make Chinese shots in Cairo, Wang's trip made it no clearer when Africans can expect to receive a Chinese vaccine -- or on what terms.
"The promises concerning vaccines in Africa have been really fake. There has been no timetable, only promises," said W. Gyude Moore, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development and former Liberian minister of public works. "Today, I am not aware of any African country that's taking delivery of Chinese vaccines."
The Chinese Ministry for Foreign Affairs did not reply to CNN's requests for comment on Beijing's plans to roll out vaccines in Africa, but state media has rejected claims that vaccines will be used as a "bargaining chip to expand political influence."
A power house and a continent in need
Wang's whistle-stop tour of Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Botswana, Tanzania and the Seychelles continued a three-decade tradition of China's top diplomat making his first international trip each year to Africa.
That tradition signals Africa's diplomatic importance to China, with stops in places like the Seychelles, a sparsely populated archipelago, proving no nation is insignificant to Beijing, and serves to embarrass Western countries which typically neglect the continent but often view it as within their natural orbit of influence.
The Africa-first protocol was established in 1991, on a basis of mutual underdog brotherhood, but China has fundamentally changed since then. So much so that Wang's claims, in a video interview ahead of his trip, that China and Africa had a "shared identity of the developing world," which had both suffered "weal and woe," didn't tally with the two regions' recent history -- and very different experiences of the pandemic.
In 2020, as the world's second-largest economy, China announced it ended abject poverty, successfully contained a virus that has floored the globe's biggest superpower, the United States, and developed some of the first coronavirus vaccines.
Across Africa, countries didn't report the huge caseloads seen in India or the United States -- as of Thursday, the continent had reported fewer than 70,000 deaths, compared to the 150,000 in India and more than twice that in the US.
The nations Wang visited have particularly low reported numbers, potentially hampered by low testing. But they felt the economic impacts of the virus deeply. Many tumbled into recession and faced a mounting debt crisis, which saw Zambia become the first African nation to default on its debt in a decade. About a quarter of Zambia's $12 billion external debt was owed to China, which refused to provide debt relief.
Compounding the debt issue is another potentially worrying, and somewhat ironic, trend for African leaders: credit lines from China that once seemed almost free-flowing have been throttled in recent years, amid increasing criticism of reckless lending. According to the China Africa Research Initiative, Chinese loans to Africa dropped from $29.4 billion in 2016 to $8.9 billion in 2018.
Wang's visit also came on the back of the sharpest racial tensions between Africa and China in decades, after alleged coronavirus-related discrimination against African nationals in the city of Guangzhou sparked widespread anger across the continent last April. An extraordinary video was subsequently posted on Twitter of the Chinese ambassador to Nigeria being scolded by a Nigerian politician over the mistreatment of Africans.
the rest at:
China keeps promising its African allies that coronavirus vaccines for the continent are a priority. But where are they? | CNN
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi's trip to Africa this week made it no clearer when Africans can expect to receive a Chinese vaccine -- or on what terms.
edition.cnn.com
