Joshua Kurlantzick writes:

As Ian Taylor notes in China and Africa, the People’s Republic has had substantial relations with sub-Saharan Africa since at least the early 1950s. Back then, Beijing chose allies for ideological reasons. For a time, it supported the African National Congress in its struggle against apartheid rule. It funded leftist rebels in Congo, and used the Chinese Embassy in Tanzania to propagate socialism to the many liberation movements. After the end of the Cultural Revolution, China retreated from the world . . . The sports stadiums and railways China had built across Africa in the 1950s and 1960s rusted and warped. But in the past five years, China has re-emerged as a force in Africa, and may soon be the most important foreign power on the continent.

(LRB 5 July 2007)

Routledge | hardback 233 pp. |ISBN: 9780415397407