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Special issue on ‘Africa and China: Emerging patterns of engagement’

On 16–17 November 2017, the Africa–Asia Initiative at Harvard University, a consortium of eight institutions and programmes with a focus on Africa–Asia collaborations, held a twoday conference at the Harvard Center Shanghai in China. With the theme ‘Africa–Asia Connections: Bridging Past, Present, and Future’, the conference brought together academic researchers, policymakers, and individuals from the private sector for stimulating discussions on Africa’s engagement with India, Japan, and China through the lenses of migration, trade, and aid; and environment, infrastructure, and industry. The three papers in this special issue were first presented at the 2017 conference and provide a window onto some of the discussions at the conference, this one with a focus on ‘Africa and China: Emerging Patterns of Engagement.’ In 2009 China emerged as Africa’s leading trading partner and also surpassed the World Bank as Africa’s top lender. While this may have caught some by surprise, Austin Strange in his contribution points out that this marked seven decades of China’s engagement with Africa. China’s phenomenal rise to become the second largest economy in the world after the United States intersected with the ‘Africa Rising’ story between 2002 and 2013, when six of the world’s fastest growing economies were in Africa – Angola, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Chad, Mozambique, and Rwanda. Africa’s rise was driven by a global commodity boom, especially demand from China and India for oil and other commodities, and net resources inflows in the post-HIPC era. The slump in the commodity boom in 2014 with the slowing down of economic growth in Asia and Europe, aggravated by developments such as Brexit and America’s trade wars under the Trump government, have underscored the long-standing desire for African economies to diversify from commodity exports and to deepen South-South trade, which now accounts for over 50% of African trade, and intra-Africa trade. The signing of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement by 27 member countries of the African Union in Kigali in March 2018, and now by all 55 African countries, has given substance to the last-stated objective and positioned what would be the world’s largest free trade area by number of participating countries when