This article examines the challenges faced by Beijing in managing this increasingly complex relationship, reflecting upon the structural factors that encourage harmony and introduce discord in China–Africa ties. It examines how various policy solutions being considered by China, ranging from increasing participants in the policy-making process to tentative engagement with international development regimes, may still not address the most difficult issues involving adverse reactions to the Chinese presence from African civil societies and political opposition groups. In particular the lack of a strong civil society inside China inhibits the ability of its policy makers to draw on the expertise of the kind of independent pressure groups and NGOs that are available to traditional donor/investor states. The article concludes by asking how the Chinese system can make up for these weaknesses without moving further towards the existing models and practices of the developed countries.

China's rapidly expanding role in Africa as an energy and resource extractor reveals much of the dynamics and complexities of its growing ties with the continent. Rather than studying the subject in the framework of bilateral interactions, as most existing literature does, this article explores the impact of China's domestic development process on the behaviour of Chinese foreign policy and business operations in Africa. Based on the author's extensive field research in Africa and China, the article argues that much of what the Chinese government, Chinese companies and individual entrepreneurs are doing today in Africa is an externalization of China's own modernization experiences in the past three decades. China's interactions with African countries are reflective of its own development contradictions, and major patterns of Chinese behavour in Africa can be attributed to complex motivations and objectives of the actors involved.

China has developed a more consequential role in Sudan over the past two decades, during which it has become bound up in the combination of enduring violent internal instability and protracted external adversity that has characterized the politics of the central state since the 1989 Islamist revolution. Two inter-related political trajectories of China's Sudan engagement are examined here. The first concerns Beijing's relations with the ruling National Congress party in incorporating China into its domestic politics and foreign relations amidst war in Darfur, to which Beijing has responded through a more engaged political role. The second confronts the practical limitations of China's sovereignty doctrine and exclusive reliance upon relations with the central state. Following the peace agreement of 2005 that ended the North–South war, and motivated by political imperatives linked to investment protection concerns, China has developed new relations with the semi-autonomous Government of Southern Sudan, thus seeking to position itself to navigate Sudan's uncertain political future.

The literature on Chinese economic engagement with Africa reflects widely-held views that Chinese investment is strategic, politically motivated and therefore more stable and long-term than “Western” foreign capital. In contrast this article argues that various factors underpinning the governance of Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in fact serve to promote short-term strategies. It contributes to the literature by empirically exploring this proposition through a case study of a Chinese SOE operating in Zambia's mining sector, and by examining two sets of corporate governance characteristics of Chinese SOEs: investors' relationships with the Chinese state, and firm-level strategy, structure and norms. The article finds that these governance characteristics lead to short-term strategies, including excessive cost-cutting and segregated management practices. These short-term strategies reduce the incentives as well as ability of investors to address local environmental and social concerns, thus questioning the contribution of Chinese investment to Africa's long-term development.

This article examines one of the pre-eminent logics of global capital flow – the pursuit of flexible labour regimes – as a window to explore the interaction between Chinese investments and African communities. It analyses the respective “politics of casualization” in the Chambishi mine on the Zambian Copperbelt and the Tanzania–China Friendship Mill in the port city of Dar es Salaam. Both Zambian and Tanzanian workers have witnessed and resisted precipitous “informalization” of employment since the Chinese assumed full or majority ownership in the late 1990s. Wildcat strikes were staged by workers in both cases. Nevertheless, Zambian copper miners, but not Tanzanian textile workers, seem to have successfully halted this tendency of casualization. After several years of struggle, in 2007 they signed new collective agreements with the Chinese management, who agreed gradually to convert all casual and contract jobs into “permanent” pensionable ones. By explaining the divergent outcomes of these two cases of labour resistance, I hope to identify the major factors shaping the encounter between Chinese managers and African workers.

In the last five years China has dramatically increased its presence in Africa. Despite its abundant natural resources, the notoriety of its political regime and its close relationship with Beijing, Equatorial Guinea is a glaring omission in the China–Africa literature. This article intends to fulfil that gap by analysing the bilateral relationship between Beijing and Malabo at both the official and the social levels to assess its impact on the development of Equatorial Guinea. As bad governance is the main obstacle for the development of Equatorial Guinea, the article compares the role played by Chinese companies and government in reinforcing Obiang's authoritarian regime with that played by their Western counterparts. It concludes that Chinese extractive firms play a marginal role in the financial extraversion that strongly links the Obiang regimen with US oil companies. Conversely, the Chinese government offers Obiang more extensive and stable support than Western governments to the extent that most of the undeniable developmental potential of Chinese co-operation is wasted through clientelist networks.

Agriculture is a rapidly growing arena for China's economic engagement in Africa. Drawing on new field research in East and West Africa, and in Beijing and Baoding, China, as well as earlier archival research, this article investigates the dimensions of China's agricultural engagement, placing it in historical perspective. It traces the changes and continuities in China's policies in rural Africa since the 1960s, as Chinese policies moved from fraternal socialism to amicable capitalism. Beginning in the 1980s, the emphasis on aid as mutual benefit began to blur the lines between aid, south–south co-operation and investment. Today, Beijing has established at least 14 new agro-technical demonstration stations using an unusual public–private model that policy makers hope will assist sustainability. At the same time, a stirring of interest among land-scarce Chinese farmers and investors in developing farms in sub-Saharan Africa evokes a mix of anticipation and unease.

The first Chinese migrants came to the Namibian border boom town Oshikango in 1999. Today, there are over 100 shops which sell Chinese goods to Angolan traders in that town of only around 10,000 inhabitants. This article describes their way of doing business and the economic interactions between migrants and the host society. By reacting to the host society's reaction to them, Chinese shopkeepers in Namibia are gradually developing into a migrant society with a distinct social structure. In an increasingly hostile political climate, Chinese entrepreneurs are faced with stronger regulation. This has not had the intended effect of pushing shopkeepers into manufacturing. Instead, it has sharpened social stratification among migrants, with traders better connected to Namibian authorities using their connections as an additional resource. In an optimistic view, the alliance between successful Chinese and Namibian actors could be the germ for a spill-over of Chinese entrepreneurial success; in a pessimistic view, it will create additional rents for some Namibians and give migrants the leverage to evade regulations.

Scholars and the international media often allude to a putative “African view” of Africa–China links, constructed from anecdotal evidence. Using random sample and university-based surveys, we elaborate the first empirically based study of what Africans think of their relationships with China. We reach three conclusions. First, African views are not nearly as negative as Western media make out, but are variegated and complex. Second, the survey results are at variance with the dominant Western media representation that only African ruling elites are positive about these links. Third, we find that the dominant variation in African perspectives is by country, compared with variations such as age, education and gender. The differences among countries in attitudes towards China are primarily a function of the extent to which national politicians have elected to raise the “Chinese problem” and, secondarily, the extent of Western media influence in African states.

Several studies have looked at “Africa” in the Western imagery, and explored how it is constructed for Americans through popular media. This article offers a preliminary query into whether Chinese popular media functions in a similar way by examining a 2004 Hong Kong-produced soap opera that uses a medical humanitarian mission in Kenya to advance its plot and central themes. While many tropes regarding Africa found in Western media are repeated, there is a conscious effort in this production to embody a more enlightened approach. Nevertheless, the core relationship is marked by humanitarianism, and necessarily one embodying unequal power relations. The soap opera thus avoids critical questions of development, globalization or even post-colonial solidarity, and instead rests more on older, safer paradigms of modernization. Still, an analysis of the drama reveals contradictions and unresolved tensions in which the relationship with Africa parallels Hong Kong's relationship with mainland China. This study posits that popular culture can offer unique insights into understanding dynamics affecting the evolving relationship between China and Africa.

China's official rhetoric on its relations with Africa is important; it frames, legitimates and renders comprehensible its foreign policy in this ever-important area of the world. This article explores the following puzzle: why China's rhetoric on its involvement with Africa has retained substantial continuities with the Maoist past, when virtually every other aspect of Maoism has been officially repudiated. Despite the burgeoning layers of complexity in China's increasing involvement in Africa, a set of surprisingly long-lived principles of non-interference, mutuality, friendship, non-conditional aid and analogous suffering at the hands of imperialism from the early 1960s to the present continue to be propagated. Newer notions of complementarity and international division of labour are beginning to come in, but the older rhetoric still dominates official discourse, at least in part because it continues to appeal to domestic Chinese audiences.