Xu Fei's four-wheel drive splutters in low gear, straining to make headway on what passes for a road in Lusaka, Zambia.
Guan Tingzhong believes the secret of business success in Africa is making friends first.
Relations between China and Zambia are growing in leaps and bounds, just as the friendship between China and Africa is flourishing. China's growing involvement in the continent has sparked reactions in many parts of the world that can only be described as perplexing.
Zambia was the first developing country in southern Africa to establish diplomatic relations with China. Over the years, these good relations have included increasing economic and trade ties. The country's pillar industry, mining, has become the world's fourth-largest copper exporter and the second-largest cobalt exporter.
A bottle of water stands on the desk in an office in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. The water is so clear that it is barely imaginable that a short while ago it was running through a river into which flows all the waste water from a local tannery.
China remained the leading investor and proponent of renewable energy in 2013, even as global investment fell sharply, according to a report.
The UN's most senior environmental official says China's efforts at tackling its own industrial cleanup have passed "a turning point", and thinks the transfer of that know-how to Africa will now be vital to the continent's future sustainable growth.
Human society is challenged by overpopulation, unbalanced development, the depletion of resources and environmental degradation, even as the creation of unprecedented material wealth, begun in the Industrial Revolution, continues.
The environment takes center stage at a landmark meeting in Nairobi, home of the United Nations Environment Programme, for five days from June 23.
Fifteen years ago, social scientists began trying to decipher the burst of energy in China-Africa relations, and since then there has been no sign of a let up in interest in the subject. In fact, China-Africa relations now continue to attract so much interest that they probably hog much more intellectual firepower than, say, Africa-US, Africa-Japan or Africa-India studies.
China-Africa think tanks and centers, in and out of educational institutions, have grown fast in the past decade, spawning not just an expansive body of knowledge on China-Africa relations but also experts across a diversity of disciplines.
One of the research organizations helping to deliver new directions in China-Africa social sciences is the Social Science Research Council in New York.
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