Reportage and Essay

Ukraine Exposed the True Danger of Chinese Censorship

APRIL 11, 2022, 3:21 PM

In the post-communist afterword of Roadside Picnic, the famous 1972 Soviet-era science fiction novel by brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Boris goes to great lengths to detail the absurd limits imposed on the siblings’ work by their country’s obsessive censors.

Don’t Write Off Democracy in Africa Just Yet

The 1980s are usually recalled as a decade of one-party rule in Africa, and beyond that, of the receding tide of civilian-led government in the face of military takeovers in one country after another.

Having covered the phenomenon while working as a freelance journalist based in West Africa for a little more than the first half of that decade, I recall my excitement when I returned as a reporter for The New York Times at the start of the 1990s, which are often remembered for quite the opposite: the rebirth of democratic politics on the continent. ...

Africa’s Economic Impasse Is the Central Challenge of the 21st Century

Anyone with even a sketchy understanding of the Cold War knows that it was a time not only of intense direct competition between the reigning superpowers, but also of grand schemes by both the U.S. and USSR for integrating their allies and clients into adversarial blocs, as well as for poaching the partners of the rival power—especially in the developing world—into their own camp.

Throughout much of this era, the West regarded professions of neutrality among poorer countries with skepticism or even outright hostility. Beginning with the Eisenhower administration, the view took hold in Washington that non-alignment was just a pose, and that those who declared it had already begun an ineluctable drift into Moscow’s clutches.

China’s Engagement With Africa Has a Cold War Parallel

In 1956, then-Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev executed a sharp but largely forgotten reorientation in his country’s foreign policy. During the long decades under Josef Stalin, with the exception of its support for communist China, Moscow had focused almost all of its energy abroad in buttressing client states in Eastern Europe. But with one major speech, Khrushchev announced that the era of investing only in Russia’s “near abroad” was finished.

Nazarbayev’s Fate in Kazakhstan Is a Cautionary Tale for Putin and Xi

More even than most crises, the events unfolding in Kazakhstan in recent days can be read in myriad ways. On one level, it clearly appears to have resulted in yet another opportunity for Russian President Vladimir Putin to claw back control over domains lost by the Kremlin following the demise of the Soviet Union.

Moscow has been able to accomplish this by falsely pretending the unrest that it helped put down in its Central Asian neighbor was yet another example of what it calls a “color revolution,” meaning an insidious destabilization plot supported by the West.

France’s Troubles in West Africa Go Well Beyond a Failed Counter-Insurgency

In mid-December, with little forewarning, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that he would soon be visiting Mali, a country in West Africa’s Sahel region that, along with several others there, has been afflicted with rising communal violence in recent years. …

Omicron Will Test China’s ‘Zero COVID’ Pandemic Strategy

Last weekend, the number of new symptomatic COVID-19 cases in China hit a peak not seen since the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. The spike was seen as significant enough to warrant locking down Xi’an, a city of more than 13 million people.

Here, as a writer, I feel a little ill-equipped to flesh out this news without some kind of dramatic accompaniment, so please imagine a drumroll. The reported new high for daily symptomatic cases in this country of 1.4 billion people was all of 164.

Africa Is Central to the Modern World’s Future—and Its Past

No regular reader of my columns at World Politics Review can be surprised by now that I believe the future of Africa is one of the most important as well as one of the most neglected questions facing humankind.

Africa is so routinely marginalized from the concerns of global affairs that even among otherwise well-informed people, most are unaware that it is the continent where almost all the action is taking place in terms of worldwide demographic growth. So it bears repeating here what I have written before: Africa’s population, which at the outset of my own career was about 800 million people and is currently estimated at 1.2 billion, is projected to rise to 2 billion people by the middle of this century. Naturally, the further into the future one projects, the more uncertain such things become, but by this century’s end, Africa could potentially have as many as 4.5 billion people, according to the United Nations, making it more populous than two Chinas and an India combined. ...

Op-Ed: As Confederate statues fall, build monuments to Black heroes at risk of being forgotten

On the night of Jan. 8, 1811, a mixed-race man named Charles Deslondes led a group of people in an attack on a plantation owner in lower Louisiana that became the largest uprising of enslaved people in American history, and the first that required the intervention of the U.S. Army.

Built on the bodies of slaves: how Africa was erased from the history of the modern world

The creation of the modern, interconnected world is generally credited to European pioneers. But Africa was the wellspring for almost everything they achieved – and African lives were the terrible cost

Op-Ed: The West owes a centuries-old debt to Haiti

The treatment of Haitian refugees at the U.S. border last month — some chased by horseback agents, others huddled by the thousands under a bridge — is tragic. For reasons that are less obvious, it is also ironic. Although Americans’ centuries-long debt to the Haitian people is untaught in our schools and unacknowledged in our public discourse, the indomitable spirit of the Haitian people created the United States we know today.

Enemies of Progress

France’s obsession with retaining influence over its former West African colonies has led to brutal dictatorships in Burkina Faso and Chad.

Haiti’s Crisis Is Familiar. Its History, Less So

During my first reporting trip to Haiti, in January 1988, on my very first day in the country, I rode 50 miles from the capital, Port-au-Prince, to St. Marc, a coastal city to the north, to write about the atmosphere in the provinces on the eve of national elections.

At a roadblock just shy of St. Marc, armed remnants of the feared militia of the country’s former dictatorship, the Tonton Macoutes, were burning vehicles and extorting money from passengers in broad daylight. One of the militiamen warned me that if they allowed me to pass, I would not be permitted back through the roadblock again to return to the capital before the next day’s vote. I took my chances and interviewed people in St. Marc, getting back on the road in time to send my story to New York by the deadline. The driver I had hired was roughed up when we were stopped a second time, but we made it.

Africa’s ‘Demographic Dividend’ Won’t Pay Off Without Purpose and Policy

For anyone interested in understanding the global economy of the recent past or in projecting the shape of things to come in world affairs in the near future, there are few fundamentals that condition the lives of nations more powerfully than population dynamics.

The past 50 years have served up this lesson repeatedly, most recently with the rise of China. Riding on the back of a dramatic bulge in the number of freshly educated young people who teemed onto the workshop floors of the innumerable industries that were just then being thrown together, China turned itself into the so-called factory of the world.

Trump’s Attacks on the WHO Over the Coronavirus Are a Gift to China

As a teenager, I watched in confusion as my father, a successful chest surgeon who specialized in infant care, went back to school to gain an advanced degree in public health. This required easing himself out of a job that had always impressed me with its heroics, often literally saving a life or two each week. When my father patiently explained the rationale, I gradually came to not only accept it but admire it, for its logic and even nobility. No matter how hard he worked, in the operating room he could only help a few people each week. But in public health, he could contribute to improving the lives of large numbers of people for years and years.

Trump Is Playacting at Leadership as the Coronavirus Surges in the U.S.

With the rapid growth of coronavirus infections in recent days, and likely for the foreseeable future, the United States finds itself in a grave predicament entirely of its own making. No amount of finger-pointing toward China about its lack of transparency early in the outbreak, or the time lost before Beijing finally alerted others about the nature of its epidemic—although both true—can change this harsh reality.

The Many Ominous Signs About the Shambolic U.S. Response to Coronavirus

These are humbling times to be American, or at least they should be. They are humbling times to be an American journalist, too, especially one of my generation, who spent a career spanning the 1980s to the end of the aughts traveling the wide world as a foreign correspondent.

Amid China’s Coronavirus Lockdown, ‘People Don’t Believe in Government Anymore’

When Xi Jinping convened a teleconference meeting Sunday of 170,000 government and Communist Party officials around China to discuss the ongoing coronavirus outbreak, his message was both grim and resolute. China, he said, was facing “a crisis and a big test” with “the fastest spread” and “the widest scope” of any epidemic that has struck his country since the Communist Party took over in 1949. There had been, the Chinese leader admitted, “obvious shortcomings in the response.” But after saying that officials had to “learn lessons” from their mistakes, Xi nonetheless went on to boast that the emergency response had ultimately proven the “outstanding superiority of the leadership of the Communist Party of China and of socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

How Third-Worldism Can Be Reimagined Today

Not so long ago, nations of what was once called the Third World commonly looked to each other as prospective allies and partners, even extending their diplomatic ties across the oceans in order to advance their shared interests and protect themselves amid the dangers and complexities of the Cold War.

Why Africa’s Future Will Determine the Rest of the World’s

If climate change is the most important matter of common concern around the world, what comes second? Perhaps nothing close. But by my lights, the usual looming questions—about the fate of American power and influence, Brexit, the related viability of the European Union, and the many uncertainties surrounding the rise of China—seem almost parochial in comparison to one that gets immeasurably less international attention: the future of employment in Africa, where unprecedented demographic transitions are underway.

Africa’s Lost Kingdoms

There is a broad strain in Western thought that has long treated Africa as existing outside of history and progress; it ranges from some of our most famous thinkers to the entertainment that generations of children have grown up with. There are Disney cartoons that depict barely clothed African cannibals merrily stewing their victims in giant pots suspended above pit fires.

Notes from Underground

In a speech he gave after his release from prison in 1990, Nelson Mandela described the triumph of the South African anti-apartheid struggle he had done so much to lead. “We won peace standing on our feet, not kneeling on our knees,” he proclaimed with evident pride.

China’s Quest to End Its Century of Shame

SHANGHAI — At an ocean research center on Hainan Island off China’s southern coast, officials routinely usher visitors into a darkened screening room to watch a lavishly produced People’s Liberation Army video about China’s ambitions to reassert itself as a great maritime power. The New York Times

China’s Dangerous Game

The country's intensifying efforts to redraw maritime borders have its neighbors, and the U.S., fearing war. But does the aggression reflect a government growing in power—or one facing a crisis of legitimacy? The Atlantic

How Africa's New Urban Centers Are Shifting Its Old Colonial Boundaries

The continent's booming new economic zones are outstripping the ability of weak central governments to retain their hold on them. The Atlantic

Upwardly Mobile

How one Hong Kong high-rise became the centre of the global cellphone trade The Caravan

E. O. Wilson’s Theory of Everything

At 82, the famed biologist E. O. Wilson arrived in Mozambique last summer with a modest agenda—save a ravaged park; identify its many undiscovered species; create a virtual textbook that will revolutionize the teaching of biology. Wilson’s newest theory is more ambitious still. It could transform our understanding of human nature—and provide hope for our stewardship of the planet. The Atlantic

The Next Empire

All across Africa, new tracks are being laid, highways built, ports deepened, commercial contracts signed—all on an unprecedented scale, and led by China, whose appetite for commodities seems insatiable. Do China’s grand designs promise the transformation, at last, of a star-crossed continent? Or merely its exploitation? The Atlantic

Kagame’s Hidden War in the Congo

The New York Review of Books