Christina Seyfried. African Bargaining Power with China: Foreign Investment and Rising Influence. New York: Routledge, 2023. xi + 233 pp. $144. Hardback. ISBN: 9781032312491.

This well-designed study brings a debate from economics about the relative power of weak economies into the political economy subfield of political science.The author makes a compelling case that African countries have bargaining power with China, but many fail to use that power to their development advantage.Given their convictions about dependency theory, many Africanists interested in development will be skeptical.If Seyfried is right in her argument, however, there are significant policy implications.Moreover, the study reinforces the idea that African interlocutors have real agency in dealing with outsiders, engaging another contemporary debate.The debate that Seyfried brings from economics into political economy is one about the relative advantages of weak economies in attracting foreign investment and deploying the benefits of these investments in the interest of growth and development.Nearly all development experts, and a great many African policymakers, Seyfried claims, are wedded to the "Weak Bargaining Power Narrative."This narrative says that African economies are unfavorable venues for foreign investment due to their low return potential, political instability, corruption, poor infrastructure, and low human capital, inter alia.Rejecting this nearconsensus, Seyfried embraces the "Power of Weak Economies" theory.According to this theory, investors find emerging markets attractive due to the "market access, cheap unskilled labor, and natural resources" that they offer (29).Taking a detour, Seyfried argues that these factors made China itself an attractive market for foreign investors, starting in the early 1980s.And indeed, Western foreign investors did pour capital into China beginning at that time.Seyfried argues that China used its bargaining power as an "attractive" investment market to negotiate good deals with these outside investors.In turn, China used the fruits of these investments-human and physical capital formation-as a key element of its overall development strategy.Seyfried defines bargaining power as "the relative structural attractiveness of a market to the investor" (11, my emphasis).The structures she references include "economic factor endowments," such as market size, infrastructure, and so on (39).By this definition, all African states have some bargaining power, but some more than others.The first question this raises for Seyfried is whether there is any relationship between bargaining power (defined this way) and the "deal quality" that African partners get, as we would expect.In Chapter Three, using precise definitions, she shows that (structural) bargaining power and deal