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GPPi fellow convenes conference on "Chinese scramble for Africa"

On July 12 – 13, Ricardo Soares De Oliveira, a fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge and also a GPPi fellow, co-convened a conference on “ ​‘A Chinese Scramble?’ The Politics of Contemporary China-Africa Relations.” The conference was held at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. It was organized in cooperation with Daniel Large (PhD Candidate, SOAS) and Christopher Alden (Senior Lecturer in International Relations, LSE, and Research Associate at the University of Pretoria).

The conference examined China’s deepening, multi-faceted engagement with the African continent. While the new geopolitical landscape of China-Africa relations has provoked wide media interest, there has been a relative neglect of the subject area in the academic context. This follows a longer pattern: academic literature on post-colonial African politics is marked by a paucity of research on China in Africa. With some exceptions, the literature on socialist China’s foreign relations similarly does not engage Chinese-African relations in any great depth, the continent mostly subsumed as a subset of the ​‘Third World’. Expanding China-Africa relations over the past decade and the implications of these for a number of different government, business, IGO and NGO policy areas (including international relations, political economy and development), make this general lack of attention both conspicuous and surprising.

The purpose of the conference was to fill this gap by examining contemporary China-Africa relations. Taking as a starting point the ubiquitous but problematic notion of a ​“Chinese scramble for Africa”, it investigated different strands of China’s post-socialist relations with Africa. By combining insights from specialists in Africa and Chinese politics and foreign relations, and bridging these hitherto largely separate areas of study, it produced an analytically rich and empirically grounded assessment of contemporary China-Africa relations and scenarios for how these might develop.

Papers focused on the following themes:

  • Relations in international, regional and domestic contexts
  • Political and economic aspects
  • African country case-studies

Speakers included:

  • He Wenping (Institute of West Asian and African Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)
  • Bates Gill and Chin-Hao Huang (CSIS)
  • Nicolas Pinaud (OECD)
  • Daniel Large (SOAS)
  • Elisabeth Hsu (Oxford University)