On a trip to Lusaka, Zambia, last year, I kept chasing an energetic and jittery Chinese man, the only staff member of a Chinese mining company willing to talk to me after his firm had been involved in several scandals in which both Chinese and Zambian employees were either killed or injured on the job. Zambia, with its abundant copper ore deposits, is one of the most important investment destinations for China. His English was excellent, and he liked to talk — and talk. After telling me about how much he loved the country and its people, he sometimes went into a rant about how Zambian miners liked drinking and money too much, and did not like to work hard. It was that mentality, he continued, that had caused his company all its troubles (not the workplace-safety and low-pay grievances of which it was accused). But even though the Zambian government had repossessed his company’s mines, this man wasn’t leaving. He was now working as an interpreter for the government.

I wondered about his family back home, and what they thought of this young man forging his life thousands of miles away. In his extraordinary new book “China’s Second Continent,” Howard W. French delves into the lives of some of the one million-plus Chinese migrants he says are now building careers in Africa. For all the debate about China’s intentions (imperialist or not?) and business practices (corrupt or not?) on the continent, the key piece of the discussion, French argues, has been ignored: the actual lives of those Chinese who have uprooted themselves to settle and work in Africa. Even as China has become the world’s fastest-growing large economy, 10 of the 20 fastest-growing economies between 2013 and 2017 are projected to be in Africa. As French writes, “Bit by bit, these facts have become closely intertwined.” The recent Chinese immigrants are the glue holding them together. And the stories French tells are fascinating.

French’s characters range from the mundane to the outrageous. In Mozambique he spends time with Hao Shengli, a brash agricultural entrepreneur from Henan province whom he calls the Chinese version of the “ugly American.” French, a former New York Times foreign chief in Africa and China, speaks Chinese, pleasantly surprising his subjects with his fluency, and they often allowed him into their homes, businesses and even wedding celebrations. Hao, for instance, is startlingly blunt. The skin of the Mozambicans was so “black” that it made him uncomfortable at first. He tells French: “I didn’t think they were so clever, not so intelligent, and I was looking for an opportunity based on my own capabilities. Can you imagine if I had gone to America or Germany first? The people in those . . . places are too smart.” He went on, “So we had to find backward countries, poor countries that we can lead, places where we can do business, where we can manage things successfully.”

Still, Hao is not a stand-in for his countrymen across the continent; his story is unique. He distrusts other Chinese businessmen in Mozambique, and so he camped out alone in the countryside, where he bought a swath of land from a local government (angering native residents) to grow lucrative crops, and schemed to hold on to his budding wealth. Hao’s grand plan is to marry off his sons to local women and then put his land in the women’s names for safekeeping from government seizure, creating a miniature Chinese-Mozambican economic dynasty. He moved his two sons from China, and the older one has acquired a live-in girlfriend who cooks and cleans for the men. Hao is one of a number of Chinese farmers targeting empty expanses on the continent; Africa may hold up to 60 percent of the world’s uncultivated arable land.