Sino-African Relations: A Review and Reconciliation of Dominant Schools of Thought

This article reviews about 100 papers on Sino-African relations published during the past five years, for the most part, to put some structure on the existing strands. The literature is classified into dominant schools of thought, namely the: neocolonial or pessimistic; balance-development or optimistic; and accommodation schools. After the classification, I reconcile the schools of thought in light of dominant themes and debates on development models, inter alia: (1) pessimists versus optimists; (2) preferences of rights in development models (economic vs. political, national vs. human, and sovereign vs. idiosyncratic); (3) the Washington Consensus (WC) versus the Beijing Model (BM); and (4) an African Consensus in both the WC and BM. Both the first and second schools have core values articulated by the New Partnership for Africa's Development. Policy implications are discussed with emphasis on: China's growing role, fighting Africa's poverty, and a more holistic conception of rights.