China's Relations with Africa: A New Era of Strategic Engagement David H. Shinn and Joshua Eisenman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. xx + 484 pp. $35.00; £30.00 (pbk). ISBN 9780231210010
Year: 2024
Type: book-review
Abstract: China's Relations with Africa: A New Era of Strategic Engagement provides a thorough analysis of China's extensive and growing political and security relations with Africa.It charts China's largely successful efforts to expand its influence on the continent by cultivating networks of relationships with African officials.In so doing, China's engagement with Africa helps to position Beijing as a leader in the Global South and an alternative to Western liberal democracy.This comprehensive text on China's political and security relations with Africa is an extremely timely and important addition to the literature on China-Africa relations.Several other books have focused mainly on China's economic relations with the continent, in particular its development finance, including Axel Dreher et al.'s Banking on Beijing: The Aims and Impacts of China's Overseas Development Program (Cambridge University Press, 2022), and Deborah Bräutigam's The Dragon's Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa (Oxford University Press, 2010).In contrast, China's Relations with Africa: A New Era of Strategic Engagement acknowledges that for China, Africa is a key political and geostrategic partner, and one that is increasingly important in an era of growing Sino-US competition.The book's twelve chapters (including the introduction and conclusion) point towards two key themes.First, the increasingly expansive nature of China's political ties to Africa; and second, the fact that these ties are principally (although not exclusively) based on cultivation of personal connections between Chinese and African elites and officials.The latter theme highlights a key difference between China's political and economic relations in Africa: while economic ties are driven by both grassroots and high-level engagements, political relations take place principally at the elite level.The first substantive chapter focuses on China's bilateral diplomacy (long the core of its ties to African countries) and its global engagement through fora such as the United Nations.The second turns to China's efforts at the regional and sub-regional levels.The next chapter focuses on the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) engagement with African political parties, while subsequent chapters cover a variety of topics, including: propaganda and public opinion; security-development links; China's military activities to protect its citizens and assets overseas; security diplomacy; maritime security and naval expansion; and information technology and high-tech sectors.It concludes with several predictions, all of which point towards further deepening of China-Africa ties across multiple layers.The book is based on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, grounded in Shinn and Eisenman's many combined years of doing research on this topic.Key original data sources include hundreds of interviews and conversations with African, Chinese and third-country elites, an original survey of the security concerns of Chinese citizens in 12 countries, and an original systematic data set of meetings between African political parties and the International Department of the Central Committee of the CCP from 2002 to 2022.These data sources are combined with exhaustive reviews of official documents and scholarly literature.
Source: The China Quarterly
Author: Pippa Morgan
Institution: Duke Kunshan University
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4404727399