ABSTRACT
As global food prices skyrocketed in 2007 and 2008, researchers began to document a spate of media stories about large land grabs in Africa. Many of these stories featured Chinese companies, or, more commonly, just ‘China’, as central players in land acquisitions. The belief that the Chinese have been aggressively seeking large areas of land in Africa – to grow food to ship back to the People’s Republic of China, or for commercial biofuel production – has solidified into a widely accepted, unquestioned ‘fact’.
