Indonesian President-elect Prabowo Subianto will take office later this year at a critical time when regional tensions over territorial disputes in the South China Sea are surging.

And this won't be just a foreign policy challenge for the new president. Chinese ships have crossed into Indonesia's exclusive economic zone near the Nantuna Islands at the bottom tip of Beijing's controversial ten-dash line.

Managing the escalating crisis in the South China Sea is going to be a "pivotal" challenge for Prabowo, according to Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat, director of the China-Indonesia desk at the Center of Economic and Law Studies. Zulfikar joins Eric from Jakarta to discuss how he thinks Prabowo is going to handle what's becoming a very volatile situation.

Indonesia’s Role In The Burgeoning South China Sea Crisis

Officially, Mozambique bans the export of raw timber in an effort to protect what's left of the country's rapidly shrinking forests. But whatever laws are in place are largely disregarded as more than 500,000 tons of timber leave the country each year  — 90% of which goes to China, according to a new report by the Environmental Investigation Agency.

This illicit timber trade is also very lucrative, generating more than a billion dollars that helps to fund a deadly insurgency ravaging northern Mozambique.

Alexandra Bloom, a senior trade and policy analyst at EIA, joins Eric & Cobus to discuss EIA's multi-year investigation that uncovered widespread corruption and negligence at every level of the timber supply chain.

Illegal Chinese Timber Trade Fuels Insurgency in Mozambique

Research by The Donkey Sanctuary is continuing to reveal the staggering scale and demand for donkey meat and skins, and its threat to the global donkey populations and their welfare. 

In Italy alone almost 6,000 donkeys are now farmed for their milk, but this is dwarfed by the numbers in China, where millions are farmed for their skins to produce a medicinal gelatin (ejiao) that is traded as traditional Chinese medicine.

Crisis in the community: Rise in the donkey skin trade

China is embarking on an aggressive media campaign in Africa with the launch of CCTV's new broadcast operation in Nairobi, Kenya. The network says it hopes to join BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera among the major players in the international news business. Both Cobus and Eric have their doubts that Beijing is actually capable of attaining that goal given the fact that CCTV does not have a very good track record producing compelling content for an international audience.

China in Africa Podcast: China's big media push in Africa

The China Africa Project is a multimedia resource dedicated to exploring every aspect of China’s growing engagement with Africa.  Through a combination of original content and curation of third-party material from across the Internet, the CAP’s objective is purely informational.  None of the blog’s authors or producers have any vested interest in any Chinese or African position.

Indonesia’s Role In The Burgeoning South China Sea Crisis

The China-Global South Project

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