The Africa Forum in Beijing this month was the most prestigious and security-tight event since the 50th-anniversary of the People's Republic of China was celebrated in 1999. Roads and enterprises were shut and masses of police officers flooded the streets, as leaders from 48 African nations came to town. Beijing had traffic-free streets and blue skies.
Beijing hosted arguably the largest assembly of African heads of state and ministers ever witnessed outside of a UN General Assembly session. This event has repackaged China's diplomatic image.
The slogan of the Africa Forum was 'peace, friendship, co-operation and development'. These buzzwords of development stem from China's emphasis on social harmony - President Hu Jintao's self-proclaimed new ideology. Cynics dismissed it as a mere smokescreen for China's trade and resource-security interests.
Reality is usually somewhere in the middle. China's mega-export economy relies on producing goods cheaply. So it needs to secure markets for its exports, along with access to resources.
Meanwhile, Africa has become a basket case of failed international aid lending programmes. Its economies have been sidelined by the developed countries of the west, and its peoples' living conditions are largely ignored.
By playing the trade-and-resources card, Beijing is stepping into a void - a continent forgotten and ignored by the west. So, in hosting this conference, China could be re-positioning itself as the central player of a new kind of non-aligned movement. The Africa Forum can be seen as a retro-Bandung Conference - the 1955 meeting in Indonesia that gave rise to the original non-aligned movement.