Introduction: Four countries' scholars trying Afro-centric Methodology in Zambia together

The publication of the Whitepaper of China's African Policy in January 2006, and the successful convention of the first China-Africa Summit in Beijing in November with the unprecedented scale in term of the participation and its special enthusiastic atmosphere, have stimulated the close watch to China-Africa relation since then, and it probably have become one of the most popular topics in the whole International relation arena. However, while the cooperation unfolding in more and more directions, lots of misunderstandings and misperceptions also have emerged towards China's intentions in Africa, such as the speculations on China's land grab in Africa. Likewise, as India also geared her diplomacy towards Africa since 2003, and myths on India's presence in Africa also have ascended.

Oxfam Hong Kong（OHK）, with its consistent vision of empowering people to create a future that is secure, just, and free from poverty, started to pay attention to the emerging markets' new cooperation with Africa at this point, especially China's engagement; and what makes it different has been the“bottom-up”approach as usual to look at the positive impacts on the disadvantaged people, and to disseminate among the policy level these“good practices”collected from the grass-root level. This approach obviously is very much shared by Peking University Centre for African Studies（PKUCAS）, as we also have been insisting on reflecting current China-African Relations based on our first- hand resource collected on the ground and solid objective findings with concrete inspirations and guidance on how to push China-African cooperationfurther while conquering the roughness in the beginning. The col laboration between OHK and PKUCAS started in 2012 from a small project to translate a report already commissioned by Oxfam in Zambia, namely Assessment of the Status of the Zambia's Agriculture SectorDevelopment Framework and Its Impacts and Contribution to Improvement of Small Scale Producers' Livelihoods. After publishing both the English and Chinese versions into a book's form in 2014, we received lots of very positive feedbacks from different stakeholders, such as Chinese farms that are planning or have done investment in Zambia, or Mr. Bao, the Director of Chinese Agricultural Demonstration Centre in Lusaka about the utility for him to understand better the way forward of the centre.

With all these encouragement, Oxfam colleagues, coordinated by Mr. Kevin Mei（Jiayong）, and my team decided that we should push things further by carrying on deep research on both China and other Emerging powers'involvement in African agriculture sector given the importance of it for African long-term development. Due to what we had known about Zambia's good conditions of carrying on Agriculturaldevelopment and its attractiveness to foreign direct investment, we decided to take Zambia as a pilot country. On one hand, we all as Chinese nationals had a pressure to respond to the discourse of China's land grad in the international media; on the other hand, we hope this empirical research could serve for a thorough understanding of the differences of players from China（and other emerging powers）and those from traditional powers.

After many rounds of discussions of methodologies within and without, our team, composed by Kevin, me myself and my MA student Wan Ru, started our field journey to Zambia in September of 2013. Thanks to Kevin's Oxfam colleagues based in different countries, scholars from India, UK, South Africa also arrived to join us. And Oxfam country team in Zambia had been kindly arranging our accommodations, meetings with relevant organizations, etc. Africanists coming from different countries normally feel close as we all share an“Africa Complex”which may not be understood by experts of other geo-areas. To take poverty alleviation and sustainable de velopment as benchmark is easily a common ground for us and it always goes without saying. This is an obvious Afro-centrism and we agreed among our team members that instead of looking at any particular country's intervention in Zambia's agriculture which might end up in trapping ourselves in boasting this or that country's modality, we would like to look in depth at a group of countries in comparative perspective, and at Zambia's own long-term development to understand its structural problems, its own needs as well as the challenges ahead. Methodologically, this is to provide both a horizontal axis of African own development and a vertical axis of external involvements to understand the three-dimensioned space that Chinese and other emerging players are entering. With this panorama picture we will be able to reach a reasonable evaluation of these new players' approach as well as their contribution, and also a balanced understanding on the new international competition on Africa stimulated by new Emerging markets.

In two weeks' time, members of this“multinational force”lived together in a cozy guesthouse in beautiful Lusaka, using breakfast time to recap the previous day's job and discuss and provoke one another. After this gathering together time, we would take our wheels again to visit more farms from our respective four countries. Otherwise, we would all join Oxfam colleagues to visit stakeholders of Zambia, such as Zambia Development Agency; then it would be time for us to share beautiful scenery as well as the time of chatting together. Personally, I never ever had experience like this to conduct field work with a group of colleagues in Africa, and neither thereafter. It is so unique not only because of the collective but also separate investigation experience, but also the way we carried the job together in a shared temporal as well as geographic space, and methodologically we developed this common approach which requested dialogue“as deep as skin texture”among us and constant reflections on possibilities or impossibilities. For any scholar used to the normal“individually solitary approach”, this made a very different experience, which might be not possible if it was not supported by Oxfam with staff members locating different parts of the world and its members helped to identify a group of international colleagues to work together, which was so innovative in term of methods and manners of working. It is also hard to imagine the possibility without Kevin, as coordinator of all different staff members of Oxfam bringing people from four countries and worked so harmoniously and complementarily for two weeks. I also believe for certain that in future all of us would always remember the yard of the guesthouse brimming with fragrance of blue jacaranda and silk trees, together with the beautiful memories of those many formal and informal workshops we had inside and spoken and unspoken ideas and imaginations for African development purpose……

Jessica Chu, candidate of SOAS, London University, back to the time of this research kindly took the job to write the general report on behalf of all the team members; Ms. Wan Ru, helped to translate the English version into Chinese. Prof. Aparajitao Biswas and her colleague Prof. Ajay Dubey from India offered the country case report based on field work carried, and Ms. Ma Jie helped with this part to be translated into Chinese. I, assisted by Mr. Liu Jun, took the liberty to compile the two great reports into one book's form with all the editing, proof-reading and refining work. I have to properly mention some great names that have contributed to the publication of this book finally, Ms. Jia Lijie, Ms. Li Mengyao, Ms. Cai Rui, Kevin from OHK. Without all of your generous help, this is not possible, and specifically, it is your idealist working manner that has constantly pushed us forward to work for people on the ground. Last but not the least, Ms. Gao Mingxiu, from the Social Sciences Academic Press, has been so encouraging and so tolerant to our delay and finally make this book come out.

We decide that we put our findings on China's investment in Zambia in another book that we are editing and hopefully it will also come out soon. Thank you in advance for your critical feedback.

Liu Haifang