ABSTRACT
The link between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Africa in the contemporary period traces its essential roots to three things: the crisis in China’s international relations after the Tiananmen Square incident in June 1989; the expansion of Chinese trade in the 1990s; and the desire to take advantage of numerical support in the United Nations (UN) granted by African states, in part to prevent hostile votes against China vis-à-vis its human rights record and to ensure that Taiwan remains an unrecognized international outcast (see Taylor 1998a). Prior to this period, Africa’s importance in Beijing’s foreign policy had declined during the 1980s as China’s Socialist Modernization project called for massive foreign investment and technology deemed unavailable from Africa (Lin 1989).
