ABSTRACT
China’s new Africa policy since 2000 has sparked many debates and notably one on competing development models, opposing Western governance conditionality and the Chinese non-interference principle. It has also galvanised African policymakers to underline the new political and economic opportunities of a new era of South-South co-operation driven by the dynamism of East Asia in the global economy. Until the fi nancial crisis hit, many African economies could translate these new dynamics into accelerated growth notably due to high earnings from commodities and oil. China poses as a leader of the developing countries’ quest for a new global order: that is, a less US/Western-dominated one (Shelton and Paruk 2009). South-South cooperation between China and Africa is an important part of this quest, as postulated by the Chinese White Paper on Africa (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the PRC, 2006) and the Forum for China-Africa Co-operation (FOCAC) declarations. Few voices in this debate have questioned the underlying assumption of China’s Africa policy as an expression of traditional SouthSouth co-operation and an emerging alternative model of development and governance to the established Northern one.1 Instead, analysts have focused on one of its elements, namely non-interference as a realpolitik dilemma for China (Bates et al. 2007, Berger and Wissenbach 2007, Wissenbach 2008).
