In May 2019 Basel’s Radio X scheduled freelance journalist Samuel Schlaefli’s multiphase reportage on Chinese presence in Ethiopia, after he spent weeks talking with people in and around Addis Ababa.
The station noted that Ethiopia had taken on the order of $13.7 billion in Chinese loans between 2000 and 2017, second only to Angola in that reckoning, and asked whether the money meant needed infrastructure or a deeper debt and dependency trap.
Schlaefli’s audio walked listeners through a fast-changing capital that critics called a skeleton city of cranes and unfinished promise, between poverty and future talk.
Kept as China–Horn archive, the German-language radio file is a dated European documentary companion to loan tallies and industrial-park debates from the same years.
Sources: Radio X