This volume is an excellent collection of academic essays on Sino-African relations and covers a wide range of issues, including political, economic, military and cultural ties between the two regions. It also features contributions from Western academia as well as African and Chinese researchers. By considering the history of engagement between China and Africa – with many chapters making it clear that China's current engagements with Africa can be traced back over half a century – the book helps the reader to separate fact from myth. For example, Deborah Brautigam, an expert on these matters, concludes that the aid provided by Beijing is still far below that of traditional Western players in Africa, while Harry G. Broadman's study reveals that Africa's exports to China have been significantly diversified in recent years.

This is also a collection of unconventional viewpoints. The chapter written by Stephen Brown and Chandra Lekha Sriram shows that China's legal culpability for human rights abuses in Africa is limited, and that we lack comparative studies on the role of China and other actors on these issues. In a separate chapter, Stephanie Rupp argues that Sino-African relations are neither ‘colonial’ nor ‘neocolonial’ in that China has no intention in making Africans ‘Chinamen’ (p. 77), and so the relationship can be better described as one of ‘postcolonial interdependency’ (p. 79).

Several chapters raise less-discussed issues about Sino-African relations. The pioneering research of Martyn J. Davies on the Special Economic Zones established by China in Africa is likely to open the way for further studies, even though his analysis would have been more rigorous had it been based more on fieldwork and less on media sources. Similarly, David Shinn, former US Ambassador to Ethiopia, presents a detailed analysis of military and security relations between China and Africa in historical perspective. Finally, in a chapter discussing China's political outreach to Africa, Joshua Eisenman illustrates the activities of the little-known International Department of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in Africa, concluding that ‘they support CPC development objectives’ (p. 242).

But China into Africa is not without fault. Many chapters in the book use the same references, reflecting a lack of material as well as the gap between our knowledge of Sino-African relations and their fast growing importance. Moreover, some chapters could have been better presented and included more empirical data and material. For example, the chapter by Ndubisi Obiorah, Darren Kew and Yusuf Tanko offers a quite balanced perspective on China's relations with Nigeria, but the sample they choose is obviously too small to make any valid conclusions.

Although it would have benefited from greater fieldwork, this collection makes a considerable contribution to our knowledge about the growing and increasingly complex relations between China and Africa. Overall, China into Africa represents a very interesting and useful background work, and serves as a timely reminder of the urgent need to develop an in-depth understanding of the nature of the rapid evolution of Sino-African relations.