Sino-African Relations Research

Over the past few decades, the literature examining the Sino-African relationship has expanded. Much of the pre-2000s material looks at China’s role in Africa during the Cold War. Most of these studies portray China’s activities in Africa as part of its overall attempt to compete against the United States and the Soviet Union for hegemony in the developing world. However, other works, such as Snow (1988), highlight a much more complex relationship between the two entities and present the strong historical ties between China and Africa dating back to the Han dynasty. These earlier works argued that Sino-African relations surpassed geostrategic Cold War thinking and that the relationship was built on shared cultural and historical experiences of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These works show how China’s activities in Africa were closely interlinked with African societies and economies, and how the relationship withstood the end of the Cold War. The turn of the twenty-first century saw a surge of new literature dealing with Sino-African relations.