Chinese-African relations became an issue of increasing importance leading up to the 2006 China-Africa Summit in Beijing. Nevertheless, academics and policymakers have largely neglected China's expanding relationship with Africa. Scholars have yet to explore the concrete ways in which Chinese actors operate in different parts of Africa, and developmental policy advisors have yet to take the political dynamics and implications of this involvement into consideration when forming policy.
China Returns to Africa addresses key issues in contemporary Chinese-African relations, examining the impact of this relationship in issues of diplomacy, trade, and development. Beginning with the assertion that China is engaged in a "scramble for Africa" and that we are now on the brink of a "new Chinese imperialism," the essays in this volume transcend narrow, media-driven concerns and offer one of the first far-ranging surveys of the consequences of China's investment in Africa.
Chris Alden is reader in international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His books include China in Africa, Mozambique and the Construction of the New African State, and, with Garth le Pere, South Africa's Post-Apartheid Foreign Policy. He has been a Japan Foundation fellow at the University of Tokyo, a professorial fellow at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, and a MacArthur postdoctoral fellow at Cambridge University. Daniel Large is research director of the Africa-Asia Institute at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Ricardo Soares de Oliveira is University Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the Department of Politics and International Relations, Oxford University, a fellow of St. Peter's College, Oxford, and a fellow with the Global Public Policy Institute, Berlin. He is the author of Oil and Politics in the Gulf of Guinea.