This is a book that attempts to come to grips with a very important subject: the multifaceted Sino-Ethiopian relationship, and by implication, China’s wider engagement with Africa in general and the Horn of Africa in particular. The author is a well-known Ethiopiast, with two solid volumes already published: State and Economic Development in Africa: The Case of Ethiopia (Palgrave, 2017) and Political Power and Ethnic Federalism: The Struggle for Democracy in Ethiopia (University Press of America, 2002). Like many who come to the study of China in Africa, Tesfaye’s inquiries began, quite literally, on the ground—as a witness to the startling China-led transformation in roads and infrastructure when he was teaching a seminar in Addis Ababa. And, indeed, anyone who sojourns in Africa, however briefly, is bound to remark on the increasingly visible Chinese presence everywhere one goes, ranging from the Chinese signs on the smallest mom-and-pop shop at the most remote rural crossroads to the biggest and glitziest of statement buildings—the Chinese-built headquarters of the African Union in Addis Ababa. Once one is startled by the sheer omnipresence of Chinese activity in Africa (in this case, Ethiopia), a number of empirical and policy questions immediately arise: What are the key elements of China’s “coming to” Africa? Who are the main actors, and what are their core interests? Is China’s burgeoning involvement with Africa/Ethiopia on balance a good thing? And from an African perspective, how might it be made a still better thing?

Drawing on a substantial secondary literature on China and Africa as well as “primary sources from the archives of the Investment Commission, the Ministry of Trade, and the Ministry of Finance and Economic Cooperation and interviews of officials in the above institutions” (p. 15), China in Ethiopia presents an overview of the bilateral relationship between China and Ethiopia that attempts to answer these very important questions. It is structured in five substantive chapters: a general historical review of China-Ethiopia relations (chapter 1), contemporary China-Ethiopia relations (chapter 2), China-Ethiopia economic relations (chapter 3), China and Ethiopia as strategic partners (chapter 4), and long-term perspectives (chapter 5). Although these chapter headings make eminent sense as a table of contents—despite the book’s opening statement that “China’s interest in Ethiopia is not based on economics … it is mainly political” (p. 1), perhaps unsurprisingly for a scholar whose last monograph was on the political economy of Ethiopia and whose access in Ethiopia was largely in the central state’s economic bodies—a good deal of what Tesfaye presents in one way or another revolves around China-Ethiopia economic relations. China in Ethiopia is strong in its presentation, and it is a generally positive assessment of the China-Ethiopia economic relationship. Although this could be laid out a bit more clearly, Tesfaye suggests in chapter 1 (p. 29), chapter 2 (p. 33; pp. 43–49), chapter 4 (p. 77), chapter 5 (p. 93, 95), and the conclusion (p. 117) that Ethiopia considers China to be a positive model of development and one that should be emulated. China, for its part, is heavily involved with Ethiopia despite the latter’s current lack of natural resources such as minerals or oil, for reasons of both economics (Ethiopia is a destination for excess capital, investment, and an eventual major source of meat and leather products as well as an eventual market for Chinese products) and security (Ethiopia is a stable and hinge player in the Horn of Africa, with knock-on effects on the Red Sea portion of China’s BRI and increasing presence in the approach to Suez). Consequently, in Tesfaye’s view, the China-Ethiopia bilateral relationship is—despite a large and growing Ethiopian deficit in trade—characterized by structural synergies as well as nicely complementary economic and developmental interests.

China in Ethiopia is the first full volume devoted to explicating this particular, and particularly important, relationship in a wider literature on China and Africa. Consequently, it will be a core point of reference for those working on either Ethiopian politics or the China-Africa relationship in East Africa. It presents a wealth of useful information. At the same time, one wishes that a stronger editorial hand had been at work. Some of what is presented either repeats or appears to be in contradiction to previous statements. For example, if China’s interest in Ethiopia is “mainly political” (p. 1), then why does the volume devote so many pages to questions of China’s investment in Ethiopia and go on to state that “Contemporary China’s foreign assistance is driven by three major factors. These are first, economic …” (p. 79)? There is a similar expositional disconnect in Tesfaye’s general characterization of China and Ethiopia as unitary actors with comprehensible “interests” (be they economic or strategic) for the majority of the work followed by a sudden shift to a recognition that “China’s engagement in Ethiopia … is multivariate … as a result of the state being disaggregated into a multiplicity of provincial relations and central state agencies, and tensions arising between commercial and political interests” (p. 76). Similarly, a unitary-state Ethiopia that is presumed to be stable (p. 89) at present turns out to be anything but: ethnic tensions amid a federal structure and the current bid of the ruling party to further centralize power (pp. 110–111) suggest that Ethiopia and China are anything but unitary actors. But how this multiplicity of interests and actors in disaggregated states might confound the presumption of a unitary state and either intersect or work at cross-purposes is not even hinted at. And finally, although the way in which Tesfaye integrates an enormous secondary literature into his analysis is laudable, one might have hoped for much more in the way of citations of both the interviews and archives that he states form the core of the book.

One learns a great deal from China in Ethiopia, and this will be an undoubted first port of call for anyone who needs to get a quick overview of the dynamics of China and Ethiopia. At the same time, there seems to be a set of opportunities missed: in the reading, one wishes for a more consistently articulated, more analytically integrated, and better referenced set of arguments.