Sino-African relations: a review and reconciliation of dominant schools of thought

We review about 100 papers on Sino-African relations published during the past 5 years for the most part, in order to put some structure on the existing strands. The literature is classified into dominant schools of thought, namely the: neocolonial or pessimistic; balance-development or optimistic and accommodation schools. After the classification, we reconcile the schools of thought in light of dominant themes and debates on development models, inter alia: (1) pessimists versus (vs) optimists; (2) preferences of rights in development models (economic vs political, national vs human & sovereign vs idiosyncratic); (3) the Washington Consensus vs the Beijing Model and; (4) an African Consensus in both the Washington Consensus and Beijing Model. Both the first and second schools have core values articulated by the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD).