Xia Huang

Ambassador of China to Niger

Place of Birth: Hebei Province

Xia Huang’s short tenure as Ambassador to Niger has been anything but uneventful. Since his arrival in Niamey in November 2009, Xia has contended with a coup that overthrew President Mamadou Tandja and strikes over working conditions at the Chinese-operated Société des Mines d’Azelik uranium mine – quite a burden for an untested diplomat. The military coup on 18 February hardly interrupted the tide of Chinese investment. While the West condemned the coup, Xia moved quickly to strike cordial relations with the military junta. Chinese interests escaped disruption and Xia lashed out at the ‘campaign of attacks and slander’ that attended China’s absence of censure of the coup.

Worried by statements from the Conseil Suprême pour la Restauration de la Démocratie junta that it would cancel contracts signed by previous regimes, Beijing’s top Africa diplomat, Liu Guijin, met the CSRD on 25 May. Previously, Beijing had heaped praise on President Tandja and had worked with his son Ousmane in his role as a diplomatic representative of Niamey in China, but Liu insisted that he was ‘very happy’ to see the work and institutions of the CSRD since February.

Xia was born in Hebei Province in 1962 and joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1985, when he graduated from China Foreign Affairs University and joined the Foreign Ministry. He was dispatched for postgraduate studies to Belgium, where he read law at the Université de Liège and European studies at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He returned to Beijing in 1987 to work in the Foreign Ministry’s Translation Office and rose to Deputy-Director. His foreign postings were as Third Secretary in Gabon (1990-93) and Counsellor to the embassy in France (2002-07).