Contemporary debate is intensifying around China's role and ambitions in the world, with respect to Cold War-style China–US contestation in the Global South especially. Within that perspective, Dawn Murphy's valuable book, China's Rise in the Global South, has an interesting main argument: “although China does not seek to change the international distribution of territory in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, as its power grows, it increasingly builds spheres of influence in these regions and challenges the rules of the international system by constructing an alternative international order to facilitate interactions” (p. 2).

The interesting point that is little made in the literature otherwise is the nuance of the power of policy layering over time. That is, where today China may not be seeking to challenge global norms systematically with intent or otherwise, it may in parallel nonetheless be building foundations via the Middle East and Africa that enable it to do so more readily in future.

The first two of ten chapters invitingly set out why sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East were selected for comparative study and how they will be compared. China's actions over recent decades in these regions are then considered in areas of trade, investment, aid and multilateralism policy, within a six behaviour-combinations framework: 1) competitive and divergent; 2) competitive and norm neutral; 3) competitive and convergent; 4) cooperative and norm neutral; 5) competitive and convergent; and 6) cooperative and convergent. The guiding focus within that analysis is a refreshingly comprehensive list of China's interests: 1) promoting China's domestic economic development (peace and development; natural resources and markets for goods and services; economic security; regional stability); 2) seeking support in the international arena; 3) ensuring China's domestic stability; 4) advocating for developing country causes (China as a developing country; just and equitable new economic and political order); 5) safeguarding China's citizens and business abroad; and 6) protecting China's sovereignty and territorial integrity from the US.

The text is richly and densely comparative in studying China's behaviour in the two regions it relies upon most for its external energy and key minerals, and contains many useful facts and much elucidating analysis. Murphy argues that the absence of foreign aid and concessional loan provisions from China to the Middle East makes this (more than China–Africa) a relationship of relatively equal partners. This opens the door to a potential follow-on book around how this point alone develops. In this text, there could also have been an additional chapter exploring what China and the Maghreb – Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia – uniquely inform around any policy implications or complexity arising from their overlapping role in Africa and in the Middle East.

An additional point that may have much broader significance is that within China's 2015 National Security Law there are calls for the protection of strategic energy supply channels and citizens abroad (p. 252). This has important relevance in studying China's ties in these regions since “[o]ne of China's most significant interests in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa is promoting its economic development by acquiring natural resources and ensuring energy security” (p. 162). The author then links China's evacuation of its citizens from Libya in 2011 and Yemen in 2015 through the inauguration of its first overseas military base, in August 2017 in Djibouti. Not only can China's military readily conveniently seek to protect its related interests across both Africa and the Middle East, but by sitting alongside several other military powers in having such a base in Djibouti, China can proactively signal itself to be a peer security actor too.

Further, the book offers a few useful and seldom-seen tables. Table 7.1 especially, is a 13-page summary of disagreement (1991–2020) between China and the US on UN Security Council votes concerning the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa (pp. 194–201). Table 6.2 presents China's agricultural technology demonstration centres (2006–2018) – all of which are based in sub-Saharan Africa (pp. 185–186). Overall, it is a thorough and systematically researched text. For those outside of China/Africa or China/Middle East scholarship it presents a solid and reliable introduction. For those inside that scholarship area it also offers a useful review alongside new data points and perspectives.

The book concludes that in these two key regions China is competing with economic, political and foreign-aid foreign policy tools, and sometimes that competition happens inside the rules and sometimes outside. In the military sphere, however, it is argued that China tends to play consistently within global norms. At the same time, China appears to be constructing infrastructure somewhat separately across the two regions, which could provide foundations for a different pivot outside of the system in future, while concurrently helping to secure China's energy security and create new markets.

The last sentence of the book is “Misunderstanding China as a rising power could have dire consequences for global peace and security” (p. 228). To this point, it may also have been useful if Murphy had added to this impressive synopsis a greater sense of how China's behaviour has shifted incrementally over time, or otherwise. That is, are there countries, sectors or policy areas in which China is moving outside global norms faster or more often than others, and from these can a trend line forward be speculated?

It might also have been useful to hear the author's view as to whether in future this geoeconomics mixed inside-outside status quo approach by contemporary China in these two regions may later extend to the military domain, and what sort of turning points might instigate such a shift. Equally, what sort of turning points might in future instigate China to evolve these emerging relatively non-reformist foundations into an explicitly and directly more active reformist agenda.