Africa-China Relations: Partnership, Peonage or Pawnage?

This book examines Africa-China interactions, which over the last two decades have deepened across a range of areas notably politics, economics, trade, diplomacy, culture, construction, security, and ICT. The setting up of the Forum on China-Africa Co-operation (FOCAC) in 2000 has provided the main institutional and organizational ballast for Africa-China interactions. This book seeks to critically (re)examine, extend and add to the literature by taking a fresh look at Africa-China entanglements in the light of emergent and new realities in the international political economy such as the impact of COVID 19 on national economies and indeed the global economy , rising debt defaults in Africa and elsewhere, the Russo-Ukrainian War, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) race, the re-emergence of big power rivalry, and the Belt and Road Initiative. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in particular must be seen as an added layer of the mode and concerns of Africa-China relations which is specifically the matter of infrastructure. The BRI seems to have triggered as well an emergent strident courting of Africa by its hitherto uninterested traditional and older partners, the EU and the US, in an attempt to respond to and counteract China’s growing presence and influence on the continent. This book should be of interest to scholars of international relations, Africa-Asia studies, researchers, policymakers, activists and indeed the curious non-specialist reader.