Conclusion

Since the turn of the century, China has become a major player in Africa’s development. This study has shown that Sino-African relations are a defining relationship for both China and Africa, particularly in the development of contemporary Chinese foreign policy. This is so for China because Africa provides the stage on which China can develop the skills it needs to operate as a major power; meanwhile, for Africa, the relationship is defining because China’s actions on the continent have reshaped and continue to reshape Africa’s trading patterns and the overall structure of Africa’s interactions with the rest of the globe. This study has demonstrated that a number of Chinese foreign-policy actors have been active in Africa since the early 2000s and are affecting every aspect of Africa’s development. This study is an examination of China’s foreign policy towards Africa, both under Hu Jintao’s and Xi Jinping’s leadership, and is part of the broader field of Sino-African relations research. The study has identified two major gaps in the Sino-African relations research: First, a failure of the research to deal with the concept of an overall coherent Chinese grand strategy towards and second, a failure of the research to deal with China’s domestic politics and their effects on Sino-African relations. The study employs three theoretical concepts to fill these gaps in Sino-African relations research: The first is the institutional idea of path dependency, which is used to illustrate the formation of China’s foreign-policy process, a multiactor system where numerous actors—each with its own institutional environment—compete within that system in order to increase their bureaucratic turf. The second theoretical concept is Allison’s bureaucratic politics model, which ‘views governmental action as the result of pluralistic conflict and consensus-building between individual bureaucrats’ (Ostrom, 1977, p. 238). This theory is used to explain the conflict or counterproductive actions within the Chinese foreign-policy process in the formulation and implementation of China’s Africa policy. The third theoretical concept uses the Gramscian understanding of hegemony to explain how the Chinese foreign-policy process functions and affects Sino-African relations. The Gramscian understanding of hegemony outlines that the hegemonic elites are able to control society through their control of the political discourse. It is this dominant political discourse that provides the structural imperatives necessary for the Chinese foreign-policy process to function.