A thrilling, hugely revealing account of China’s burgeoning presence in Africa-a developing empire currently shaping, and reshaping, the future of thousands of people.

A prizewinning foreign correspondent and former New York Times bureau key in Shanghai and in West and Central Africa, Howard People from france is uniquely positioned to tell the story of China in Africa. Through meticulous on-the-ground reporting-conducted in Mandarin, French, and Portuguese, among additional languages-French crafts about China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Creating a New Empire in Africa a split investigation of amazing depth and breadth as he engages not only with policy-shaping moguls and diplomats, but also with the normal women and men navigating the street-level realities of co-operation, prejudice, corruption, and chance forged by this seismic geopolitical development. With incisiveness and empathy, French reveals the individual face of China’s financial, political, and individual presence over the African continent-and in doing so reveals what is at stake for everybody involved.

We meet a broad spectral range of China’s dogged emigrant population, from those singlehandedly reshaping African infrastructure, commerce, as well as environment (a self-made tycoon who harnessed Zambia’s now-booming copper trade; a timber business owner established to harvest the entirety of Liberia’s old-growth redwoods), to those just hardly scraping by (a sibling set running small businesses despite total illiteracy; a karaoke pub owner-cum-brothel madam), still persuaded that Africa affords them better opportunities than their homeland. And we encounter an similarly panoramic selection of African replies: a citizens’ backlash in Senegal against a “Trojan horse” Chinese building task (a tower complicated to be constructed over a much loved soccer field, which local people thought would result in overbearing Chinese language pressure on their overall economy); a Zambian politics applicant who, having protested China’s intrusiveness through the previous election and dropped, now turns accommodating; the ascendant middle income of an industrial boomtown; African mine employees bitterly condemning their international employers, citing insufficient safety safety measures and wages a portion of their immigrant counterparts’.

French’s nuanced portraits reveal the paradigms forming around this new world order, from the all-too-familiar echoes of colonial ambition-exploitation of resources and labor; cut-rate infrastructure tasks; dubious treaties-to fresh frontiers of cultural and economic exchange, where dichotomies of suspicion and trust, assimilation and isolation, idealism and disillusionment are in dynamic flux.

Component intrepid travelogue, part cultural census, part industrial and political expose, French’s keenly observed account ultimately offers a brand new perspective within the most pressing unknowns of modern Sino-African relations: as to why China is building the incursions it really is, just how extensive its cultural and economic inroads are, what Africa’s part in the equation is, and just what the ramifications for both parties-and the watching world-will be in the foreseeable future.