China Returns to Africa ― A Rising Power and a Continent Embrace

The geopolitical landscape of contemporary China-Africa relations has provoked wide media interest. After being conspicuously overlooked during the G8?s purported 'Year of Africa', the topic generated wider debate in the build-up to the China-Africa Summit in Beijing in 2006. Despite this, China's deepening re-engagement with the African continent has been relatively neglected in academic and development policy circles. In particular, the concrete ways in which different Chinese actors are operating in different parts of Africa, their political dynamics and implications for African development as well as Western views of this phenomenon, have yet be explored in depth."China Returns to Africa" responds to this need by addressing the key issues in contemporary China-Africa relations. Taking its cue from the widely touted 'Chinese Scramble for Africa' and the accompanying claim of a 'new Chinese imperialism', the book moves beyond narrow media-driven concerns to offer one of the first far-ranging surveys of China's return to Africa, examining what this new relationship holds for diplomacy, trade and development.

Chris Alden is reader in International Relations at the LSE.

Daniel Large is a researcher at SOAS, University of London.

Ricardo Soares de Oliveira is University Lecturer in Comparative Politics, University of Oxford, fellow of St Peter’s College, Oxford, and fellow of the Global Public Policy Institute, Berlin. He is the author of Oil and Politics in the Gulf of Guinea and co-editor of China Returns to Africa, both of which are published by Hurst.