China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa by Howard French (review)

Journalist Howard French presents a fascinating, fifteen-country African travelogue and quick study of twenty-first-century Afro-Sino socioeconomic relations. Cold war geopolitics left an opening for the world’s largest economy to enter into soft power relations with Africa. French presents readers with the good, the bad, and the ugly. Is China’s engagement a form of neocolonialism? Will the country’s rapacious appetite for natural resources leave the continent bereft and debt-ridden, or will African countries be able to leverage this new engagement and investment for the future? Sadly, gangster capitalism abounds on the continent with this new source of revenue, but so too does hope and emerging African democracies’ push for more transparency and accountability. What is also clear is that whatever Beijing’s rhetoric and policy may be, it will be the relationships on the ground in Africa with those one million and growing Chinese immigrants that will determine the future of Afro-Sino socioeconomic relations.