I just finished reading an astounding series of articles on China's enormous push into Africa. The series appears in the business magazine Fast Company, so it's tilted toward the economics of Chinese investment in Africa. Specifically, it examines China's effort to acquire the African resources (wood, petroleum, iron, other minerals) necessary for Chinese industrialization - and, as the series author, Richard Behar, points out, for American consumerism.
The six pieces in the series all include the requisite statistics and analysis, but the series is also studded with excellent, terrible, and illustrative anecdotes, such as the plight of the impoverished Mozambican loggers who, having worked three months for a Chinese company in the wilds of their home country, discover that the company's managers have left without paying them. There could be more of this kind of storytelling in the series, but Behar uses what is there to convey the colossal scale - both horrible and wonderful - of the invention of "ChinAfrica." For my taste, he does too little to connect China's engagement with Africa to its precedents, American-led neoliberal investment in Africa (among other places) and, of course, the European powers' brutal colonialization of the continent, which ended just about one African lifetime ago. Perhaps he's saving that for his book.
A bit from the first piece, just to entice you to click through to the whole series:
There are already more Chinese living in Nigeria than there were Britons during the height of the empire. From state-owned and state-linked corporations to small entrepreneurs, the Chinese are cutting a swath across the continent. As many as 1 million Chinese citizens are circulating here.