ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a theoretically informed alternative research framework for approaching and understanding China’s relations with Africa within the political economy of global transformations. It argues for the importance of appreciating China’s domestic political economy, role in other developing regions and in the global political economy at large. Chinese foreign direct investment and overseas development assistance is best studied in a comparative-regional perspective. This chapter unpacks China’s role and actions in Africa in connection with the rise and fall of the China boom, offering a comparison of how different regions in the world respond to the active overtures of Chinese state and private actors, and considering the intersection between China’s geopolitical ambitions and economic goals.
