Episode 74 - Following up on FOCAC with Tang Xiaoyang

Cowries and Rice

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 follow-up meeting to discuss the particulars of FOCAC implementation is a step common to all FOCAC meetings. In order to talk about this step we have invited back on the pod Dr. Tang Xiaoyang, Deputy Director of the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy and an associate professor in the Department of International Relations at Tsinghua University. He is the author of the book China-Africa Economic Diplomacy (2014). Prior to Tsinghua, Dr. Tang work for the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, DC. He also worked as a consultant for the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development. He also has coauthored a number of publications with Prof. Deborah Brautigam of the SAIS China-Africa Research Initiative, most recently “‘Going Global in Groups’: Structural Transformation and China’s Special Economic Zones Overseas,” World Development.