传统政治地理学多以自然地理环境与国际政治经济活动的关系作为核心话题，往往忽略了社会文化等人文因素对政治经济活动的影响。加之已有的国际地缘政治研究又倾向于西方国家的话语霸权，大多忽视了来自非西方国家的地缘政治和地缘经济理念。本项目拟从批判地缘政治和中国地缘政治融合的视角，用话语分析、nvivo分析、民族志和心理学的研究方法，以“中非合作”作为切入点，深入探讨坦桑尼亚对中非合作的地缘政治和地缘经济话语。除了以非洲国家的视角分析之外，项目还将从中国对“中非合作”的自我建构的角度，对比分析坦桑尼亚地缘政治和地缘经济话语与中国地缘政治和地缘经济话语之间的差异和矛盾。研究不仅从理论意义上丰富了中国地缘政治和批判地缘政治、提供了非西方地缘政治理论化的依据和可能性，而且在实践层面为中国规避中非交流及其在国际政治经济舞台上因为误解和文化差异所带来的阻力、进一步制定和完善“中非合作”相关政策提供了决策依据。

The traditional political geography research has always focused on the classical geopolitical issue, underlining relations between physical geography and international political and economic activities as the core research topic, while this type of political geography research seems to have ignored the social and cultural context, in particular the social and cultural difference between various states or regions, in taking shape of human political and economic activities. Moreover, the existing literature in critical geopolitics seem to have been trapped in the western hegemony which has absolutely neglected the geopolitical and geo-economic voice from non-western states. Therefore, this study aims to expand its analysis through the perspective of the fusion of critical geopolitics and Chinese geopolitics. On this basis, this project will be based on the frameworks and methodologies of critical geopolitics and non-western geopolitics, using methods of discourse analysis, nvivo analysis, ethnography, and psychological analysis to expand upon the analysis of how African states develop their geopolitical and geo-economic imaginations of China. Most specifically, this study will investigate how Tanzania constructs their geopolitical and geo-economic imaginations of China through the lens of examining China’s increasing role in ‘China-Africa cooperation’, which are possibly based on its various social, political, and cultural context in Africa. In the meantime, this project will study on China’s self-construction of ‘China-Africa cooperation’ as a comparative case study. This project, on the one hand, provides the foundation and possibility for the theorization of the non-western geopolitics from the lens of building geopolitical theory; on the other hand, this project can strongly serve for the drafting and ameliorating of China’s geopolitical and geo-economic strategies (e.g. the ‘China-Africa cooperation’) from the practical perspective, in particular from the lens of avoiding bias and conflicts in China-Africa communications.