To help its passengers shorten their time, Beijing Subway screens endless video clips. Most of them are rather boring commercials, some promote the Chinese dream (the latest catch phrase of Chinese politics). Sometimes even people, who are interested in the so-called new Asian-African interactions, can find something interesting in the videos.

The first international conference of Frankfurt’s research programme Africa’s Asian Options (AFRASO) on African-Asian interactions took place in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, from March 11th – March 13th 2014. The conference was jointly organized by the Africa-Asia Development University Network (AADUN) and the Centre for Civilization Dialogue at University of Malaya in cooperation with AFRASO, which is based at Goethe University, Frankfurt.

At the University of Nottingham, PhD students in the School of Contemporary Chinese Studies (Tracey Fallon) and the School of Politics and International Relations (Phil Roberts and Jon Marshall) organized a postgraduate conference on Rising Powers in the Global Political Economy on 5-6 July 2013.

The conference “Imagining Globality: China’s Global Projects in Culture," held at the China Institute of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, dealt with a number of projects which China uses globally to engage with the world through culture.

The AFRASO-Lecture Series started on the 7th of May 2013 with the first session on “Working and Living Together: Realities of Life for Africans in Asia and Asians in Africa”. This session gave some insight into the everyday life perspectives of the thousands of Africans and Asian...