Over the past three decades, Africa–China relations have drawn sustained attention from scholars, policy analysts, and public commentators. Directly tied to the rise of China as a major global power and China’s intensive economic engagement with Africa, and vice versa, at the beginning of the new millennium, a multidisciplinary field conventionally called China-Africa Studies has emerged in America and Western Europe (Huang Reference Huang2024a, 134). Until very recently, much of the discourse about the Sino-African relationship was structured by a familiar polarization. On one side were interpretations that cast China’s growing footprint on the continent as a new iteration of colonial domination, a contemporary analogue to earlier European projects of conquest and extraction (Michel and Beuret Reference Michel and Beuret2009; Alden Reference Alden2007; Mohan and Power Reference Mohan and Power2008; French Reference French2014). On the other side were accounts that took seriously China’s own language of “win–win” partnership, locating Sino-African cooperation within a longer genealogy of South–South solidarity and anti-imperialist affiliation, often traced back to the 1955 Bandung Conference (Brautigam Reference Brautigam2009; Lee Reference Lee2017; Large Reference Large2021; Strauss Reference Strauss2009). While these debates have generated important insights, they have also tended to reproduce an analytic narrowing. They privilege political economy, markets, and strategic calculation. As a result, the scholarship was often marked by an economic overdetermination that obscures other registers through which Africa–China ties are produced, imagined, and contested. This limitation does not diminish the importance of material relations. It instead underscores the need for approaches capable of illuminating dimensions that are not reducible to trade figures, loan agreements, or geopolitical competition.
Awareness of these analytic limitations motivated the Yale Africa–China Symposium, organized by the Yale Council on African Studies and hosted by Eduardo Mondlane University in March 2024 in Maputo, Mozambique. The symposium sought to recalibrate prevailing conversations by foregrounding the humanistic and cultural dimensions that have remained marginal within economistic accounts of the Sino-African relationship. Among our preoccupations was what becomes visible when culture is treated not as a decorative supplement to political economy, but as a constitutive arena in which Africa–China relations acquire meaning and shape social life. How might attention to cultural production—literature, visual art, music, film, popular performance, and other expressive forms—reorient our understanding of China’s presence in Africa, and of the expanding African presence in Chinese urban spaces? What analytic possibilities emerge when we take aesthetics and symbolism as serious archives of encounter, rather than as peripheral reflections of “real” economic forces? What can a focus on people, mobility, and everyday interaction reveal about the lived texture of Africa–China connections, including their intimacies, misunderstandings, and forms of distance? These questions also invite broader reflection on the stakes of South–South relations in the contemporary world. They compel renewed attention to the politics of race and racialization in Sino-African encounters. They raise questions about the potentials and the limits of Afro-Asian networks when approached through cultural and humanistic lenses. And they suggest that, if Africa–China relations are to be understood as more than a story of strategy and exchange, scholarship must attend to the symbolic and social worlds through which the relationship is experienced, interpreted, and made consequential.
The articles published here grew out of the papers presented at the symposium in Maputo. They all reinforce one of our major objectives, that is, to move beyond polarized frameworks without minimizing the asymmetries that structure the relationship between China and Africa. We recognize that Africa–China relations are undoubtedly marked by unevenness and hierarchy. But they are not reducible to unilateral imposition. They are negotiated across multiple arenas. They are shaped by contestation. And they are mediated by actors whose practices frequently produce unintended consequences. Migration provides one of the most vivid illustrations of this complexity. More than one million Chinese migrants have lived and worked across Africa, ranging from investors and small-scale entrepreneurs to construction workers and technical specialists embedded in major infrastructural projects (French Reference French2014). At the same time, thousands of Africans (entrepreneurs, traders, students, and religious actors) have established diasporic worlds in Chinese cities such as Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong (Bodamo Reference Bodomo2012). These communities illuminate the afterlives of historical connections and the ways economic transformation is lived through mobility, aspiration, cultural encounter, and the negotiation of belonging. They also disrupt simplified narratives that reduce Africa–China ties to state-to-state relations or to a limited set of economic transactions.
It is understandable that earlier research on Africa–China relations gravitated toward geostrategic concerns and economic linkages. The rapid intensification of trade, investment, and diplomatic engagement demanded analytic attention, and much of that attention was framed through questions of rivalry, influence, and the implications of China’s presence in Africa for Western powers (Snow Reference Snow1988; Taylor Reference Taylor2006; Shinn and Eisenman Reference Shinn and Eisenman2012; Cemiloglu Reference Cemiloglu2015). Such concerns remain significant, not least in an international environment marked by renewed great-power competition. Yet to remain confined to those frameworks is to overlook the dense social and cultural textures through which these relations are made, contested, and lived. The central wager of this special issue is that Africa–China relations cannot be adequately grasped through economic and macro-level analysis alone, nor through purely state-centric categories of explanation. A more robust account requires both historical depth, ethnographic attentiveness, and cultural and literary analysis. It demands attention to infrastructures, institutions, and economic patterns, but also to everyday encounters, cultural production, forms of moral judgment, and the social imaginaries that accompany and reshape political-economic transformation. Across the articles assembled here, large-scale processes are consistently approached through their cultural foundations. The volume thus insists that geopolitical shifts and intimate cultural interactions are not separate analytic registers but mutually constitutive dimensions of the same historical field. As Vivian Chenxue Lu and Mingwei Huang put it in their essay in this forum, “the production and presentation of political-economic data is itself a process of cultural production of Africa-China relationality.”
The articles also accomplish another of our aims: to move beyond narrowly delimited national or regional frames and instead to engage the multiplicity of networks, discourses, tensions, transnational circulations, and imaginaries through which Africa’s relationship with China has been shaped. This entails, first, refusing the temptation to treat either “Africa” or “China” as coherent, singular actors. It entails, second, taking seriously the internal heterogeneity of institutions, motivations, political, and cultural projects on both sides. And it requires, finally, a commitment to scale: to the movement between diplomatic platforms and labor sites, between official rhetoric and informal economies, between ideological pronouncements and lived experience. Such an approach is especially important because the Africa–China relationship is often narrated through simplifications—through binaries of solidarity versus exploitation, partnership versus neocolonialism, opportunity versus threat—that obscure its complexity and historicity. In attending to the everyday and ordinary, such as the workings of race in online commentaries on mixed-race athletes in China or the distribution of agency between African and Chinese actors operating a Shaolin temple in Zambia, we bring much-needed textured and micro histories to the study of the entanglements of Africa and China (Shi; Li, this forum).
Our contributions call attention to conceptual and methodological questions raised about the field (Lu and Huang; Cheng, this forum). A decade ago, China–Africa studies was still regarded by some scholars as an incipient or even questionable field (Monson and Rupp Reference Monson and Rupp2013, 22). Despite rapid growth, critics often dismissed it as overly descriptive, preoccupied with fact-finding, or trapped in rhetorical debate (Lee Reference Lee2013). Foundational questions proliferated. What does it mean to isolate relations between a continent and a country in a profoundly interconnected world? Which methodological and conceptual resources are adequate for capturing such complexity, especially when neither “China” nor “Africa” denote singular entities but heterogeneous and multilayered realities? At what scale should analysis begin—macro or micro, national or regional, communal or individual? How should scholarship address questions of race, migration, language, intermarriage, identity, modes of self-fashioning, or the shifting boundaries between isolation and integration? And to what extent can conceptual tools developed for the study of Africa–Europe or China–Europe relations illuminate Africa–China encounters without reproducing Eurocentric assumptions?
To be sure, many of these questions have been taken up in previous scholarship, if not conclusively then at least generatively. The field has moved beyond its earliest phase of curiosity about novelty and volume. It has diversified in method and widened in analytic scope. Scholars have increasingly displaced state-centric accounts with approaches that disaggregate “China” and “Africa” into multiple institutions, actors, and intentions. Macro-level analyses of trade, resource extraction, and diplomatic posturing have been complemented—and often challenged—by micro-level explorations of the historical, social, and cultural dimensions of encounter. Julia Strauss and Martha Saavedra played a key role in this methodological shift, urging analysts to move beyond monolithic representations by foregrounding internal diversity and misunderstanding, and by attending to the friction between official rhetoric and pragmatic adjustment (Strauss and Saavedra Reference Strauss and Saavedra2009). Ching Kwan Lee likewise called for greater theoretical ambition and comparative rigor, arguing that the field must draw on rich conceptual resources—imperialism, hegemony, development sociology—while embracing ethnographic depth and sustained attention to local contexts (Lee Reference Lee2013).
Building on such interventions, Jamie Monson and Stephanie Rupp argued for historically informed, ethnographically grounded research that places communities and individuals at the center of analysis, both to capture African agency and to illuminate the reciprocal, mutually transformative character of Africa–China relations (Monson and Rupp Reference Monson and Rupp2013). Helen Siu and Mike McGovern (Reference Siu and McGovern2017) extended this argument by challenging presentist accounts and insisting upon a longer horizon of interconnectivity, tracing premodern circulations of goods, knowledge, and cultural practice that destabilize simplistic depictions of recent “arrival.” Their work demonstrates that macro-level dynamics are always mediated through local worlds, where African actors negotiate the influx of Chinese capital and commodities through adaptation, strategic appropriation, contestation, and resistance. Markets for Chinese textiles, motorbikes, and consumer goods thus become ethnographic windows into what they describe as a “contested democratization” of space and opportunity, where new avenues of mobility coexist with intensified differentiation (Siu and McGovern Reference Siu and McGovern2017).
These methodological shifts, however, have not fully displaced what Christopher Lee (Reference Lee2021) calls “old frameworks and colonial motifs.” In “Decolonizing China–Africa Relations: Toward a New Ethos of Afro-Asianism,” Lee offers a forceful critique of presentist and racialized narratives that continue to structure both scholarship and public discourse. He calls for a decolonial revision, one that moves beyond transaction-centered accounts and reclaims a revitalized ethos of Afro-Asianism. Such an ethos would contest Eurocentric binaries, foreground shared struggles against exploitation, affirm economic justice and human rights, and embrace a plural understanding of “African-ness” that acknowledges the presence of African Chinese communities and the long, multiracial histories that have shaped the continent.
These critiques have also prompted reflection on naming. Some scholars now propose shifting from “China–Africa” to “Africa–China,” not as a cosmetic reversal but as an analytic gesture aimed at decentering China and reaffirming Africa’s agency within the relationship. The gesture cannot undo structural asymmetry. But it can recalibrate the field’s intellectual orientation and challenge the geopolitics of knowledge production that has too often positioned Chinese actors as primary and African actors as reactive.
Derek Sheridan’s work on race provides an especially compelling illustration of what such a recalibration makes possible. Sheridan (Reference Sheridan2024) examines how debates on anti-Black racism within Africa–China relations are shaped by Western and Chinese epistemic frameworks, often cycling between condemnation and contextualization in ways that externalize racism from Chinese history or reduce it to individual intent. He proposes the concept of “South–South racialization” to capture how Chinese and Africans racialize one another within a triangular global order structured by Western power. This framework helps illuminate the paradoxical position of Chinese migrants who may enjoy economic privilege while remaining politically vulnerable, and it clarifies how the discourse of heiren should be understood not as a static ideology but as a relational construct that nonetheless resonates with global forms of anti-Black racism. More recently, Mingwei Huang (Reference Huang2024b) has explored the racial question in relation to Chinese capitalist expansion in South Africa. Her ethnographic analysis of Johannesburg’s so-called “Chinese Century” demonstrates that the proliferation of China Malls along the old gold-mining belt should be understood less as a radical break with South Africa’s past than as a reactivation of its enduring racial capitalist logics. Rather than signaling a deracialized moment of globalization, Chinese investment is shown to operate through—and in many ways intensify—the afterlives of colonial extractive political economy, reproducing racialized divisions of labor and the precarity of migrant life. Huang thus offers a powerful account of what might be called “racial capitalism with Chinese characteristics,” demonstrating how new circuits of capital accumulation remain deeply entangled with historically sedimented hierarchies, and how racial differentiation continues to provide an adaptable infrastructure for exploitation in the contemporary global economy.
If the field has grown more sophisticated, it has also become more empirically grounded and ethically attentive to contradiction. Polemical debates about whether China represents benevolent development partnership or new neocolonial domination have increasingly given way to work that foregrounds ambivalence and multiplicity (Bao and Mutibwa Reference Bao and Mutibwa2025). We now have a much richer understanding of the many arenas where Africa–China relations unfold: diplomatic circles and business forums, construction sites and labor regimes, migrant networks and commercial hubs, cultural consumption and literary production, religious life and community building, racial othering and transnational citizenship. The most generative scholarship has shown that relations viewed from above—framed through celebratory discourse of South–South cooperation—often acquire profoundly different meanings when approached from below (Bodomo Reference Bodomo2012; Yoon Reference Yoon2009; Castillo Reference Castillo2021; Yoon Reference Yoon2023).
Miriam Driessen’s (Reference Driessen2019) ethnographic study of Chinese construction workers in Ethiopia offers one striking example. Her work unsettles assumptions of Chinese omnipotence by foregrounding lived experience, revealing an unexpected disjunction between developmental aspiration and quotidian frustration. The “tastes of bitterness” that Chinese expatriates articulate emerge from their perceptions of Ethiopian “ingratitude,” labor discipline, and local obstruction, but also from their own pragmatic motivations for overseas work, shaped by social pressures and aspirations for security and mobility. Crucially, Driessen demonstrates that Chinese authority is routinely contested. Ethiopian actors exert significant agency, through subtle transgressions, collective action, and the interventions of civic and legal authorities. The consistent rulings of wereda courts in favor of Ethiopian workers frequently disrupt Chinese managerial prerogatives and compel contractual adjustments. Driessen’s analysis of the idiom of “eating bitterness” is particularly illuminating, revealing how Chinese self-understandings of sacrifice and virtue intersect with managerial philosophies that reproduce racial hierarchy, often through narratives of Ethiopian indolence that justify expatriate privilege.
Anita Plummer’s study of labor relations in Chinese-funded infrastructure projects in Kenya provides a parallel corrective to macro-level generalization. Her work highlights how everyday interactions and local resistance shape larger political-economic agendas, linking Kenya’s Vision 2030 to China’s Belt and Road Initiative while demonstrating that development cooperation is never merely technocratic. Plummer argues that where governance is opaque and participatory mechanisms are weak, Kenyan communities mobilize “counter-channels” of interpretation (rumor, gossip, and digital media) to construct meaning and articulate grievances about labor practices and inequality. These narratives illuminate anxieties over youth unemployment, alleged prison labor, discriminatory hiring, and perceived neocolonial hierarchy, and they underscore the persistent demand for accountability within Sino-Kenyan partnerships (Plummer Reference Plummer2023).
From the other side of the relationship, African migrants in China confront a social landscape that frequently strains the language of Global South solidarity. Many are traders from West Africa, students, or religious entrepreneurs who develop strategies of resilience and normative subversion to survive within hostile environments. Heidi Haugen’s study of Nigerian Pentecostal communities in Guangzhou reveals how religious infrastructures can simultaneously support migrant life and intensify isolation. Churches offer crucial social and spiritual resources under conditions of marginalization, yet their mission theology often encourages seclusion and mistrust of the host society. Unregistered religious institutions operate in ways that mirror the precarious legal status of their congregants, producing an “alternative geography” in which migrants imagine themselves as central protagonists of global evangelization and Guangzhou as a providential space of prosperity. But this meaning-making can also impede integration and erode the possibility of sustained interethnic conviviality (Haugen Reference Haugen2013).
Taken together, these studies point to a larger conclusion. Africa–China relations cannot be understood through binaries. They are shaped by asymmetry, but also by negotiation. They involve extraction, but also aspiration. They are saturated with ideology, but also deeply conditioned by everyday life. As this special issue demonstrates, the most productive scholarship in the field moves across scale, linking state diplomacy to daily practice, macroeconomic patterns to local social worlds, and sweeping ideological projects to the lived realities of workers, migrants, and communities. The articles assembled here invite readers to consider more poignantly the cultural dynamics that have risen out of old and recent interactions between Africa and China, be it the cultural production of economic processes or the perceptions of Chinese counterfeit goods in Mozambique (Lu and Huang; von Pezold, this forum). By foregrounding humanistic inquiry, historical depth, and ethnographic attentiveness, the issue advances a more conceptually supple and empirically grounded understanding of Africa–China connections, one that takes seriously race, mobility, and cultural production as constitutive forces rather than secondary effects. Our contributors are also mindful of positionality and the need for reflexivity in the study of Sino-Africa relations while not losing track of the need to displace Western paradigms and state power mechanisms for a robust accounting of the field (Cheng; Yuan, this forum). In doing so, the essays gathered here not only reframe what is at stake in Sino-African engagement today, but also clarify why the cultural dimensions of these encounters remain indispensable to any future scholarship on Afro-Asian relations.
Building on the questions that animated the Maputo conference, Vivian Chenxue Lu and Mingwei Huang’s article promotes “Africa-China as Method” for a textured account of culture in Africa-China studies. Beginning their essay, “The Orienting Work of ‘Culture’ and Africa-China as Method,” with Xheng He, the Chinese explorer who reached the East African coast in the early fifteenth century, Lu and Huang critique the marginalization of culture in the overdetermined economic-political arena of Africa-China relations while underscoring the inextricability of cultural narratives from any aspect of Africa-China engagements. Advancing their argument for “Africa-China as method,” they reject the reproduction of Cold War-era area studies, calling instead for a cultural approach “attentive to how social differences such as race, nation, and gender are mobilized, and the historical specificity of these categories.” Such an approach will interpret even “political-economic data” as “a process of cultural production of Africa-China relationality,” while being mindful of the asymmetries and contingencies of knowledge formations and geopolitical calculations.
The question of method also drives Ying Cheng’s piece on “Reflexivity as Method, or Reading Africa from China.” Cheng’s article delineates reflexivity as a method for Africa-China entanglements, a method that “emphasizes critical reflection on one’s own positionality, research processes, and the broader conditions shaping knowledge production.” The primary archive for Cheng’s piece is Chinese artist Pu Yingwei’s engagement with Kenya’s dam infrastructure and the discussion of Dahomey, Mati Diop’s film on the repatriation of Benin artifacts, in a Chinese classroom. Cheng argues that reflexivity allows the Chinese artist and students to engage rigorously with African knowledge systems while reflecting on their own positionality, thereby “fostering alternative frameworks for engaging with Africa and Asia as mutually referential sites of critique, introspection, and situated actions.” Making a case for a form of epistemic affinity that works through—rather than elide—difference and inequality, Cheng upholds cultural productions as potent technologies for transformative encounters in Africa–China relations and pressing the pedagogical implications of Sino-African contact.
Mozambique provides the scene of transformative encounter for Africa and China and for the meeting of economics and culture in Johanna von Pezold’s “Counterfeits as Social Goods: The Ethics of Chinese Fashion in Mozambique.” Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with traders and consumers of Chinese fashion goods in Mozambique, von Pezold shows that her interlocutors are disinterested in the legality of the Chinese-made brand items. For them, “it is ethically right to supply and purchase functional, adequate-quality, and aesthetically pleasing counterfeits.” Ethics here focuses on quality and access, showing the importance of seeing “economic and legal reasonings as intimately entangled with and mutually shaped by ethical considerations.” Von Pezold depicts her study participants mobilizing hierarchies of quality and value as they foreground affordability as critical to accessing dignity and world-belonging through fashion. Complicating dominant narratives of global intellectual property governance and of Africa-China studies, von Pezold’s article intervenes in these fields of study.
Whereas the economic zone is the location of culture for von Pezold’s essay, Hangwei Li turns to the sphere of religion in “Shaolin Without Borders: Assemblage, Adaptation and the Politics of Culture in China–Zambia Relations.” She challenges the tendency to interpret Chinese cultural and religious engagements abroad as simply forms of soft power with her Zambian case study. Informed by scholarship on assemblage thinking and with data supplied by interviews and fieldwork observation, Li shows a context of distributed agency, “where Chinese Buddhist traditions intersect with Zambian cultural and religious landscapes, deeply rooted in Christian faith, diverse cultural traditions, and norms,” and where African practitioners are cultural agents. Foregrounding the affective and interpersonal encounter between Chinese and African actors, that results in the Africanization of Shaolin in Zambia, Li delineates a grounded, relational practice that is emblematic of admirable South–South collaboration.
With a similar commitment to intellectual analytics besides soft power, Wang Yuan theorizes another form of South–South collaboration in “Triangular System in Chinese Studies of African Literature.” The jumping-off point for Yuan’s article is the overdetermination of Western paradigms in Chinese understandings of African literature, a situation that the author designates with his notion of “triangular system.” Moving through four stages of periodization of Chinese study of African literature, Yuan “underscores the need to reframe Chinese literary studies of Africa as more than a response to Western paradigms or a tool of national soft power, but a decolonial and solidaristic practice rooted in mutual respect and multilingual exchange.” The resulting epistemological practice, neither beholden to Western influence nor Chinese state power, demands a deeper engagement of African intellectual traditions, fieldwork, and language learning in Africa, and a reappraisal of Chinese literary institutions and critical practices.
Flair Donglai Shi demonstrates such a critical, intellectual practice in his article on athletes with mixed Chinese and African/Black heritage. In “‘Hope for the Nation’: An Analysis of Online Media Discourses on Figures of Mixed Chinese and Black/African Heritage (Zhongfeihunxue) in Chinese Sports,” the author identifies the limits of Western theorizations of race for the Chinese context as he highlights the racism underpinning the perception of these athletes in China. Focusing on digital commentaries on the athletes and informed by an interdisciplinary practice that brings together cultural studies, media studies, critical race studies, and Africa-China studies, Shi argues that the concept of zhongfeihunxue collocates both the positive framing of the mixed-race public figures as “hope for the nation” and negatively, as a problem of national identity. As the author puts it, narrative constructions of these athletes are “subtended by thin lines between aspiration and disappointment, praise and blame, popularity and scandalousness, and strategic racial inclusion and racist exclusion.” Yet these athletes are not mere passive victims of racial stereotyping; they have also deployed their racial dynamics to their advantage with the affordances of media technologies.
In foregrounding culture as a constitutive dimension of Africa–China relations, this forum seeks not to displace political economy, but to provincialize its explanatory dominance. The contributions gathered here demonstrate that the relationship cannot be reduced to the logics of trade, extraction, or geopolitics alone. Rather, it unfolds through a dense field of meanings, practices, and encounters in which race, mobility, ethics, religion, aesthetics, and everyday life are central. By moving across scales, linking macro-level transformations to intimate social worlds, these essays reveal Africa–China relations as simultaneously structured and contingent, asymmetrical and negotiated, global and deeply local. What emerges is a call for a more capacious analytic framework, one that takes seriously the cultural production of relationality and recognizes Afro-Asian engagements as sites of ongoing reinterpretation, contestation, and possibility.
