| Sumario: | The many tasks associated with special envoys include engaging with those of their country's foes and competitors. However, such envoy engagement with counterparts, especially that of China's envoys, has received little scholarly attention. This gap is especially evident with regard to Africa, with Chinese and western envoys engaging closely in private and in public before 2016, when there began a sharp decline in their engagement. This raises a central question: why did Sino-western envoy engagement in Africa shift from harmonious interaction to diminishing contact to today's nadir? While system-level explanations are important, they do not fully account for this deterioration. Drawing on interviews with current and former Chinese and western diplomats for Africa, this article highlights the importance of unit-level factors—the institutional maturation of the role of China's envoys, diminishing information asymmetry between them and their western counterparts, their increasingly diversified portfolios and China's more restrictive domestic political climate—in explaining the shift since 2016 and the forces driving it. This article thus contributes to a better understanding of China's special envoy system as well as connecting the evolving dynamics of China's foreign policy bureaucrats to broader debates on its shifting role in the international order.
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