Never mind the lack of information reflected in these comments. The United States (like other Western countries) has funded a large variety of infrastructure projects in Zambia, and will spend over $400 million in foreign assistance there this year alone. At the level of impacting lives, as I later told Ambassador Zhou, the United States was funding daily retroviral treatment for over 300,000 Zambians, effectively warding off premature death from AIDS.

What struck me most about his remarks was the infusion of a kind of creeping hubris that I've seen on numerous stops in my research among Chinese diplomats and business executives. It allowed Zhou little space to consider Zambian perceptions of his country or of their own needs. According to this mindset, whatever China does in Africa by definition falls under the catchall rhetorical rubric of "win-win." An executive at South Africa's Standard Bank who specializes in Africa sounded similar notes a couple of weeks later over dinner in Johannesburg. Since 2007, Standard Bank has been 20 percent owned by the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China. "The Western press doesn't just get it," he fairly lectured me over dinner one night. "Zambians are doing much better than they were just a few years ago, and that's mostly down to China."

Too often, thinking on China and Africa blindly obeys an ideological divide in which the author's biases are neither concealed nor inspected. China is either the new imperial power preparing to ravage a helpless continent (and snatch it from the West), or China is a benign and misunderstood giant, a transformative actor, and by that one should read for the good. Reality is much more complex than the bashers or the boosters realize, or at least admit to themselves. But the Zambian elections should particularly give the latter contingent pause. Zambians, too, have been told that China is good for them, notably by their leaders of most of the last decade, and the least one can say in the wake of their vote is that they haven't been altogether persuaded.

Some of the reasons why are obvious, and were repeated to me over and over by Zambians in every walk of life. These range from widespread perceptions of Chinese corruption -- both in dealing with political leaders and in more routine bureaucratic matters -- to the lack of respect for labor laws and the poor working conditions in Chinese industrial ventures.

But if Zambia is a leading edge in any meaningful sense, the implications of last week's elections there may go beyond issues like these, however important, raising broader questions about the entire Chinese approach to the continent. As a strategy for building business for Chinese firms and for strengthening ties with incumbent leaders, it is an undoubted success. But judged according to the Dale Carnegie standard of how to win friends and influence people, the Chinese razzle-dazzle of big, symbolic, high profile projects, from stadiums to central hospitals, to new state houses and foreign ministries, to airports, all often pegged nowadays to electoral timetables, is proving to have sharply limited returns.

In the end, Ambassador Zhou's own formula isn't a bad one. How does one make a lasting difference, touch people and serve society? In Zambia and perhaps elsewhere in Africa, China may have to rethink questions like these.

