Who is in Charge? State Power and Agency in Sino-African Relation

Recently, much has been written about the role of African agency in the continent’s emergent relationship with China. Some scholars have argued that previous writing on the subject of Sino-African relations presented an unbalanced picture in which an all-powerful China subjugated weak African states, thereby replicating previous Orientalist tropes about Africa. More recent scholarship by Corkin, Mohan, and others, however, has focused on the significant power of African political elites in shaping
the nature of relations with China. This Article seeks to conceptualize the nature of the power relations between China and African states by examining concepts deployed in these scholarly debates. We then test these concepts through case studies of Angola and Zambia— two of the African states with which China has been most engaged and two major commodity exporter monoeconomies.