How is the China-Africa agricultural relationship conceptualized and realized at the intersections of large-scale socio-political, environmental, and economic processes? The goal of this dissertation is to disentangle some pieces of this structure by means of several qualitative and quantitative modeling approaches. Chapter 1 discusses a novel application of topic modeling to China-Africa academic literature, in two languages. Chapter 2 investigates the potential of the telecoupling framework to tease out the effects of Chinese investment on agricultural development in Africa, despite the fact that almost no Chinese investment goes directly to the agricultural sector. Chapter 3 presents multi-criteria decision modeling as one method to predict where direct Chinese investment in African agriculture might occur. This work presents multiple applications of methodologies underutilized in the study of China-Africa agricultural systems. The models used in this dissertation also explicitly state their data inputs and assumptions about the behavior of the system under study. In doing so, they both reinforce that more data is needed to understand any long-term trends in China-Africa agricultural systems and draw attention to the specific gaps in current data. Finally, the conclusions drawn by this research push back against the idea of a singular "Chinese model" of development that can be applied to Africa and instead highlight how different facets of China-Africa agricultural systems emerge under different assumptions and vary dramatically across the continent.
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