Written by an expert on education for development in sub-Saharan Africa, China's Aid and Soft Power in Africa is a very timely and valuable addition not only to the scholarship on human resource development in Africa but also to the fast-growing literature on Sino-African relations, which, despite the magnitude and speed of its development, still sorely lacks empirically grounded studies.

The book analyses critical aspects (modalities and motivations) of China's support for human resource development in Africa. King takes into consideration official discourses and real practices in an attempt to explain how concepts as disparate as aid, cooperation and soft power are articulated and how they can – if at all – co-exist in the context of education and training exchanges. King presents a very detailed comparative analysis of primary sources and then sets it against extensive fieldwork findings focusing on five main issues: higher education partnerships (chapter two); African students in China (chapter three); Chinese enterprise and capacity development (chapter four); China and traditional donors (chapter five); and soft power (chapter six). The red thread is an ultimate comparison between traditional donors' modus operandi that is geared towards “poverty reduction” whereby “the rich help the poor, as a charity” (p. 4) and China's own view of aid, one that evolved out of South–South cooperation and is aimed at helping African nations to “embark step by step on the road of self-reliance and independent economic development” (p. 4, quoting from the PRC ministry of foreign affairs publication Premier Zhou Enlai's Three Tours of Asian and African Countries, Beijing, 2000).

Through the analysis and comparison of documents old and new – starting from the 1954 Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence to the last FOCAC 2012 Declaration and Action Plan, through the 1964 Eight Principles of Foreign Aid, the 2006 China's African Policy and the 2011 China's Foreign Aid White Paper – King uses a historical lens to reflect upon key concepts and contextualize continuity and change in China's foreign policy towards Africa. As he highlights continuity in China's discourse – rooted in the realm of equality while rejecting the hierarchical donor–recipient model – King suggests that “the shift from ‘cooperation’ to ‘aid’ [in policy documents] reflects a sense of moving from being ‘first among equals’ in the non-aligned states and in the earlier period of opening up, to being now an emergent superpower” (p. 7). Indeed, despite the discourse on China and Africa reciprocally learning from each other, the author notes that there are asymmetries in both quantitative and qualitative terms, examples being the unbalanced numbers of Chinese teachers going to Africa and African teachers going to China, as well as the learning from China's, rather than Africans', best practice. This notwithstanding, King argues that “win–win economic, cultural or educational cooperation does not depend on precisely equal activities within the education sector but rather on a shared appreciation that the other party is an equal, and that there is mutuality across the range of both economic and social cooperation” (p. 101).

Because of this fundamental difference between Western and Chinese discourses, King argues, the concept of soft power, born and adapted to the West and as far from the world of South–South cooperation as it can be, ought to be contextualized if it is to be of any help in explaining China's behaviour towards Africa. In an attempt not to use “that old favourite, soft power ‘with Chinese characteristics’,” King suggests that “we might make a distinction between what we might call “soft soft power – […] the use of soft power ‘to win the trust, love and support from people in other parts of the world’ [quoting Ma Yue], and hard soft power, when there is a powerful public relations or propaganda dimension of promotion, and especially when this is political propaganda” (p. 207) to then conclude that the discourse about notions such as friendship and mutuality with other developing countries “falls within the soft, soft power ambit.”

King achieves the stated goal of providing a detailed account of the Chinese and the Western approaches, highlighting how the former is more quantitatively oriented while the latter is more qualitatively so. This focus on the quantification of targets rather than the focus on the human engagement (p. 60) is particularly interesting. The author suggests that “The ‘number game’ puts China under great pressure to continue to increase the long- and short-term training awards, almost as if the mere numbers correspond to ‘development’” (pp. 205–06). However, the book could have looked at China's own experience with “numbers and development” to then reflect on whether it is the lessons from that very experience that are being exported to Africa and with what aims.

Another aspect that the book could have looked into with more analytical complexity is “Africa.” The author selected three major case studies: Ethiopia, South Africa and Kenya, while acknowledging that China has diplomatic relations with 50 states on the continent. The three cases, selected “to reflect a variety of different regions and colonial and non-colonial histories,” and deliberately chosen “not to be those where China had already made major investments in natural resources such as oil; aid-for-trade may be different in those countries” (pp. 20–21), are used in an analysis that seems more complementary than comparative – drawing more often from the Kenyan case than from the others. This is problematic for a book whose title broadly refers to Africa as it leads the reader to doubt whether the examples show the peculiarity of a country-specific system or can be generalized.

Moreover, after such a controlled critique of the concept of soft power and after the characterization of a Chinese version of it, the author might have acknowledged that China's conception is not that different from the West's in at least one aspect: its dependence upon hard power in whatever form it takes (such as natural resources extraction, infrastructure building). This relationship between China's hard and soft powers – not particularly developed in the book – is in my opinion key to understanding how Africans perceive China and how China makes use of these perceptions.

King provides a much-needed survey of the field by thoroughly reviewing a complex body of literature and presenting original data from extensive fieldwork. He also marks out areas for future research that were not fully explored in the book – often due to constraints in data transparency and collection. The book is definitely a very comprehensive guide for non-experts and an essential book for China–Africa scholars as well as experts in the human resources development field.