Amongst the burgeoning literature on increased Chinese engagement in Africa, this book/journal special issue stands out as an important new contribution. It brings some of the world's leading scholars in this area together with new scholars, to examine issues ranging from foreign policy, economics, labour and agriculture, to representations of Africa in Hong Kong soap opera, amongst others. One of the flaws in much of the recent literature is that it has largely been based, with some exceptions, on secondary materials; however, almost all of the chapters in this book are based on primary research. In some cases this research is impressionistic and many of the chapters end with a call for further research, but they nonetheless represent a step forward.

Many of the contributors note the need to disaggregate ‘China’ and ‘Africa’, rather than assuming them to be unitary actors. This has also been called for by other authors, but this volume actually delivers through a series of case studies, which highlight different types of engagements by a multiplicity of actors. The editors frame these important contributions and make the point, for example, that China's business dealings in Africa are conditioned as much by inexperience as by presuppositions about the right way to operate. While the contributors detail the ‘soft power’ advantages that China brings to its African encounter, they also highlight ways in which Chinese actors, like those from the West, can misunderstand local contexts and ‘get it wrong’ by, for example, underestimating the amount of fallow time needed in much African agriculture.

The book also breaks new ground by explicitly linking China's engagement to broader patterns of globalisation and development, with Alden and Hughes noting for example that Beijing's Africa policy has effectively eroded the division between domestic and foreign policy. More engagement with work on the broader ‘internationalisation of the state’ might however have been helpful to think through the theoretical implications of this insight.

The book is packed with interesting insights and facts: for example, there are only seventy personnel in China's foreign aid division. However, while the authors demolish many myths and misperceptions about China, in places they overstep. For example, Jiang argues that as China only accounts for 7% of the global oil trade it could not have driven the oil price spike in 2008. This does not take into account though that China has in recent years been responsible for 40% of the growth in global oil demand, and the oil price has now doubled again after recent lows.

While there is no space to do justice to the importance of this book in a short review, one of the main things this reviewer took from it was a much better understanding of how the policy system in China actually works and how it plays out concretely on the ground in Africa. Another notable contribution is to show the agency of Africans, for example in bargaining for better wages on the Zambian Copperbelt. It is certainly a book which anyone doing research in this area should read.