The lonely student’s likely response is pretty predictable: excitement, and possibly even what former U.S. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, an attractive potential partner comes along who not only shows interest in taking the lonely student out but may also be willing to foot the bill.

My answer to the China question has often gone something like this: Imagine a university student who has gone through several years of college without any prospect of a romantic date. What was most interesting about them was something shared that almost always went unasked, and that is something we will come to. Although this book has little to do with contemporary geopolitics, one interviewer after another has asked me: Is Russia’s growing presence in Africa good or bad for the continent?Īs dully predictable as both of these questions quickly became for me, neither was especially hard to answer.

In recent weeks, as I have spoken to European journalists about a new book of mine now being published in translation on that continent, this kind of stark and insistent question has been brought up to date with another Western rival in mind. In the place of nuance, Western reporters and the curious readers I encountered in many audiences demanded that I boil everything I knew down to an insistent binary: Was China’s involvement on the continent good or bad for Africa? A question that was crude in its simplicity trailed me for years in the wake of a book that I wrote about Chinese migration to Africa.

Battlefield of the mind 2006