The Africa–China engagement: Contemporary developments and directions for future research

The Africa–China engagement continues to attract attention from scholars and the media, and is increasingly characterized by controversy and conjecture. This special issue sought to re-examine the engagement against this backdrop, to provide a forum where some important aspects of this engagement might be debated with reference to contemporary research, and to identify some possible avenues for further research. This introductory article thus seeks to reframe the debate with a view to interrogating conventional wisdom and to identify possible new directions for further research. It also provides a short summary of the two papers that follow.