China Returns to Africa: A Rising Power and a Continent Embrace

Edited by Christopher Alden, Daniel Large, and Ricardo Soares de Oliveira

"A new Chinese invasion of Africa has taken place. . . . Anybody interested in the continent, and in the rise of Chinese power, needs to know what is going on. The editors of this hefty volume have assembled essays by twenty-four academics of a dozen nationalities, who possess exceptional knowledge of China's operations in Africa. Successive chapters address such diverse subjects as the social influence of the 750,000-strong Chinese diaspora in the continent; Chinese medicine; the history of the disastrous Tanzanian railway; and, most important, the progress of Beijing's drive to buy into oil and mineral resources the length and breadth of the continent . . . an impressive and balanced study of one of the most important developments in the modern world." — The Sunday Times

"This lively, timely and authoritative book is vital to understanding China's expanding role in the economic and political life of Africa." — John Ryle, chair of the Rift Valley Institute and Legrand Ramsey Professor of Anthropology, Bard College

"China's resurgence in Africa has to rate as one of the most striking developments of the early twenty-first century. This thorough and balanced study provides the right equipment with which to assess it." — Philip Snow, author of The Star Raft: China's Encounter with Africa

Related Subjects

• African Studies
• East Asian Studies
• International Affairs

About the Author

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.

top of page