Chinese leaders consider China’s role in Africa’s rising middle class as one of the top 10 news stories of 2013, according to a ForeignPolicy.com report.

A 2013 foreign affairs retrospective published on the website of the People’s
Daily — the ruling Communist Party’s paper of record — invited readers to vote for the top 10 world news stories for 2013, asking readers to select the 10 best
from a “meager” list of 13 People’s Daily stories published over the past year, the report said.

The online vote was “a slight nod to quasi-democratic crowd-sourcing,” said David Wertime, author of the ForeignPolicy.com report.

“Divining the thoughts and motives of China’s leadership is a famously abstruse exercise even for Chinese citizens, who are often left to parse bland
quotes or keep their ears peeled for rumor,” Wertime said. “But one reliable, albeit indirect indication of the Zeitgeist of Chinese officialdom comes by way of (the) retrospective.”

Together, the stories form a clear narrative about the Chinese Communist Party’s view of the world — self-congratulations for continuing economic reforms coming out of Beijing, a good measure of Schadenfreude about troubles in the U.S., and continued efforts to befriend Africa, ForeignPolicy.com reports.

China pledged $20 billion to Africa in infrastructure and agriculture loans, the report said. The paper listed as a top story the fact that in May, African Development Bank President Donald Kaberuka announced that average per capita gross domestic product for the continent had exceeded $1,000. This “symbolic event” showcased the “development potential” of Africa, rooted, the newspaper said, in “the discovery of rich oil reserves, natural gas, and other resources.”

The newspaper also nominated the Sept. 21 terrorist attack on Nairobi’s Westgate mall as a top story, saying it was a signal that “behind the ‘rise of Africa’ there is social inequality, corruption, high unemployment.”

China’s economic ties with Africa, the article concluded, have become “an important factor” driving the continent’s growth.”

Of the 13 top story choices offered, five focused on Asia, four on the Middle East, two on the U.S., and two on Africa. Only two stories were explicitly China-centric and reflected “a predictably rose-tinted view of the party,” the report said.

The story voted No. 1 in 2013 described a “comprehensive blueprint to deepen reforms” in China. The other China-centric story reminded readers that the “Chinese Dream,” a still-vague phrase popularized by President Xi Jinping to sketch the country’s new direction, involves “everybody winning” by “integrating China’s renaissance with the world’s progress.”

By contrast, the People’s Daily selections on the U.S. paint a picture of a paranoid nation in decline. The second-most significant story of 2013, according to voting results,
covered former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s bombshell revelation about widespread NSA wiretaps, which Chinese media frequently call “PRISM-gate,” referring to one NSA project’s code name. PRISM-gate garnered a nomination because it had a “serious effect” on the “public trust in the U.S. government,” the report said.

The U.S. federal government shutdown Oct. 1 to Oct. 16 also featured. People’s Daily said it was an expression of “worsening political polarization,” not to mention the “intensification of structural conflicts in U.S. society.”

Japan, “China’s other rival — and wartime enemy,” got a nomination over its government’s “frequent backsliding on the historical question of the Diaoyu Islands,”according to the report. This “rightward move” has prompted “international society to increase its vigilance.” The newspaper didn’t explain what that means, but it may refer to China’s surprise announcement in late November of an “air defense identification zone” that included those very same islands.

So what’s ahead for 14? The People’s Daily stuck to predicting domestic matters like the direction of economic development, employment figures, and real estate prices. If the Communist Party knows where its “frayed relations with the U.S. will go, or how China’s territorial dispute with Japan will play out in the East China Sea,” Wertime said, it’s not telling.