BAMAKO, Mali — Lambert Coulibaly, 40, seems an unlikely proponent of the global marketplace. Employed as a maintenance worker by a hotel in the River Quarter of Mali’s capital, he spends not a little of his day sitting around and smoking. Yet Coulibaly commutes to his job each day on a Chinese-made Yamaha motorcycle. As he travels around Bamako, he is joined by tens of thousands of Malians on motorcycles and mopeds, the majority of which are also Chinese. “The Chinese motorcycles are cheaper. Plus the Japanese are more expensive,” Coulibaly said. He said his Chinese-made Yamaha cost about $620. [...]
Given the way events have been unfolding around Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian, one could understand why he might have simply wanted to go home. On Sept. 9, Chen went to his hometown in Taiwan’s Tainan County, a Democratic People’s Party (DPP) stronghold, to meet with a group of faithful supporters. The storm, meanwhile, was in the capital Taipei, more than 350 kilometers away, where tens of thousands of angry demonstrators, many dressed in red to reflect their outrage, gave Chen the thumbs-down during a sit-in outside the presidential palace. In Tainan County, Chen encountered a sit-in as well, but this [...]
Although both China and Africa were home to two of the world’s oldest civilizations, each dating back more than 6,000 years, China has only recently discovered the true value of Africa. China’s initial forays on the continent, during the 1960s and 1970s, were driven by political ideology and thus inherently limited in scope and duration. Today, the basis of the Sino-African relationship has evolved from politics to economics. “China explicitly stated that they were going to shift their focus away from ideology in 1996,” says Christopher Alden, senior lecturer in international relations at the London School of Economics. A major [...]
