A rapid assessment of the German China Strategy for Africa subject matter experts

On July 13, the German Federal Foreign Office (German: Auswärtiges Amt) released its long-awaited China Strategy (German: China-Strategie der Bundesregierung). The document should be of interest to Africa subject matter experts for a couple of reasons. First, it reiterates the importance of broadening and deepening Africa economic relations, especially at the European Union-level. Second, it declares an interest in specialized dialogues with China on Africa affairs. Third, it identifies the Horn of Africa as a sub-region of particular concern in China relations.

In the field of computational linguistics, there are quite a few specialized tools that can be used to rapidly extract the common thematic elements in a written text based on the word frequency structure distribution. One of these tools is QuitaUp developed at the Czech National Corpus and University of Ostrava. This tool can be used to rapidly extract common thematic elements based on their Thematic Concentration values. Applying this method to the China Strategy results in the below output:

Table 1: Rank of theme words in the China Strategy (Official English Translation) of the German Federal Foreign Office*

On the eve of the BRICS Summit in South Africa, this output should be of interest to Africa subject matter experts. It suggests that there is an intense focus on issues related to the European Union (Rank: 4), cooperation (Rank: 7), security (Rank: 12), partners (Rank: 14), and economics (Rank: 14) in the new strategy. And these word choices align well with what European subject matter experts have observed as the emergent “cooperation with security” approach of the Scholz Administration to Germany-China relations.

Michael Walsh is an Adjunct Fellow of the Center for African Studies at Howard University. He formerly served as a visiting researcher at the Universität der Bundeswehr München.

* Note: The number of tokens measured was 17,965. There is a risk that this could result in text length dependence effects. So, the rapid output should be viewed with caution.

Acknowledgements:
Howard on Africa in Brief is published by the Center for African Studies at Howard University. Contributors include prominent scholars, policy makers, Howard faculty, alumni and graduate students. Our papers provide open access to research and make a global contribution to understanding Africa-related issues. The views, positions, and conclusions expressed in this publication are solely those of the author(s).