This article focuses on China's growing engagement with Africa – a subject that has not been given due attention in African studies. Following a review of the various shifts and continuities in Sin...

China and Africa Building a Strategic Partnership

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.

Harmony and Discord in China's Africa Strategy: Some Implications for Foreign Policy

Race poses a challenge to the ruling Communist Party of China. Contemporary news reports about China’s relationship with various African states warn of a reestablishment of 19th century colonial relations, with China standing in the shoes of England or France. When indictments of neo-colonialism are promoted, China recalls a historical brotherhood with African states under the banner of Third World solidarity. This paper attempts to shed light on both sides of this argument, demonstrating that for China, the issue of race in foreign relations poses both a question of motives and a problem of national identity.

Race: China’s Question and Problem

Secessionism versus territorial unity : centre-periphery relations in the Democratic Republic of Congo (1960-2006)

The current international attention devoted to contemporary Chinese-financed and constructed development in Africa has tended to obscure complex and multivalent histories of the relationships between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and numerous African nations; and many of these histories date back decades. The ideological origins behind socialist China’s engagement with Africa, and the geopolitical dynamics that continue to propel them forward, trace back to the time of Chairman Mao Zedong, who first coined the term ‘intermediate zone’ in 1946 to position the vast expanse of contested territories and undecided loyalties existing between the ideological poles of the Soviet Union and the United States after World War II. Nine years later (1955), at the first Non-Aligned Movement conference held in Bandung, Indonesia, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai declared that ever since modern times most of the countries of Asia and Africa in varying degrees have been subjected to colonial plunder and oppression, and have thus been forced to remain in a stagnant state of poverty and backwardness […]. We need to develop our countries independently with no outside interference and in accordance with the will of the people.

Non-Aligned Architecture: China’s Designs on and in Ghana and Guinea, 1955-92

they simply fail to support the statement in the text (p. 114, n. 91). Brown's acceptance at its face value of Kitchener's proposed 'frontier line granting large concessions to France' (p. 128) suggests an imperfect acquaintance with that line's whereabouts. Brown is not concerned with Marchand's operations in Africa; and his book, unlike Dr Marc Michel's La Mission Marchand i8g5~i8gg (Paris/The Hague, 1972), is in no sense a contribution to African studies. As a contribution to French history, it does not succeed in throwing any important new light on the interaction between foreign and domestic politics; and in its discussion of the origins and development of the Marchand Mission it does not approach the thoroughness and rigour of Michel's work. It does however draw attention to certain rather elusive aspects of this development which are perhaps overhastily dismissed by Michel, who for all his thoroughness is a little apt to treat as non-existent any nuance of policy which is not explicitly spelled out in the documentary evidence. Had Brown made a more disciplined use of 'the classic tools of the historian', a confrontation between his work and Michel's might have been very illuminating. As it is, the most that Brown can do is to give some assistance in identifying certain points where further discussion and analysis might prove profitable.

Martin Bailey

Papers

China's Policy in Africa China' Policy in Africa 1958–1971. By Alaba Ogunsanwo. London: Cambridge University Press, 1974. Pp. 310. £6.50.