For nearly six decades, China-Africa education co-operation has made great progress laying a stronger foundation for a better partnership between the partners and, to some extent, the promotion of African capacity-building. Nonetheless, considering the cultural domination of the West in the world and a cultural crisis that both China and African countries are encountering, technique-oriented Sino-African education co-operation should be accompanied with a stronger co-operation on humanistic education, so as to meet the needs of cultural diversification in a global age. This article argues that it is just the time for China and Africa to address the need of pursuing their closer humanistic education co-operation to counterbalance the Western cultural hegemony and promote diversification of cultures in the world, although in this bi-lateral co-operation Western culture should never be a targeted enemy. 31

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In recent two decades, China's economic involvement in Africa was accused of colonialist actions by many Western observers. However, most of these accusations have no basis. In this article, after comprehensively exploring China's trading and investing relations with Africa based on data and case studies, it argues that China's engagement in Africa in recent decades has nothing to do with neocolonialism. On the contrary, China's engagement not simply facilitates Africa's independency from the West and also promotes a fledging new world order in Africa based on win-win and equal sovereignty. Due to the emergence of new order, the South-South cooperation is increasingly expectable.

China’s diplomacy has become increasingly multi-layered, as provinces and cities step up efforts to expand their networks and involvement in foreign affairs. This article aims to provide a general picture about how Chinese provinces feature in the overall Chinese foreign policy system. Specifically, the article uses two cases to illustrate how such a multi-layered diplomatic system functions to meet the interests of the national and local governments. The first case discusses the role of Yunnan province in the Greater Mekong Sub-region (GMS) Economic Cooperation. Yunnan’s involvement in GMS as a local actor demonstrates how cross-border cooperation has served local developmental interest as well as China’s national foreign policy goals. It also gave rise to a new form in China’s multi-layered diplomacy, namely multi-layered multilateral diplomacy. The second case is the engagement of China’s provinces in Africa. The article identifies Chinese provinces’ roles in Africa as traders, investors, aid providers and intergovernmental actors. The article also discusses how foreign countries and China itself should cope with China’s new multi-layered engagement in international affairs.

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