China‟s Peace Efforts in Africa since the End of the Cold War

Africa‟s post-Cold War relationship with China has created a polemical binary. Its critics dismiss it as nothing but an accretion in Africa‟s asymmetric, neocolonialist relationship with developed countries. They give the economic aspect of it a disproportionately large amount of attention, with the result that their argument mostly terminates at the point where it tries to implicate China‟s appetite for raw materials and overseas markets in the so-called „Second Scramble for Africa‟. On the other hand, its proponents describe it as symbiotic and as critical to the efforts to leverage the continent‟s bargaining power in the international economic system. This paper seeks to cure the defects in the critics‟ argument by drawing attention to China‟s peace efforts on the continent since the end of the Cold War. It suggests the expansion of those efforts. Secondary sources and the historical method are used